55. Toilet breaks

Mile 52 – Familiar profile: mostly downhill with a steep bit near the end.

There may be toilets by the side of the marathon route but you have to decide whether to queue, with the risk of cooling down, or to hold on until the finish line.

This week I took a trip to the local GP for the nurse to remove the staples where the surgeons accessed my broken bone. After some discussion about the staple removal tool, which the hospital apparently should have given me, she found one in the surgery. I imagined the normal office staple remover but this one bent the staples in the middle so they would come out easily. It hurt less than I had expected and it is all healing nicely. When I take up that swimsuit modelling job, the photos might have to be taken from my left.

I’m glad to report that my chemotherapy began again at the hospital on Wednesday: cycle two of my consolidation treatment and hopefully heading towards the end.

The blood test on the day showed my haemoglobin was still very low (88 g/L rather than 135 g/L), which I’m told is to be expected after a fracture and surgery, with the related blood loss. I can try some over the counter iron and eating more liver, bacon and green vegetables, but if it doesn’t improve, they may give me an iron infusion on a future visit.

It was the usual treatment with the full set of Daratumumab and Bortezomib injections along with Dexamethasone tablets. For a while, there was an interesting battle between the Dex, which gave me the usual abnormally high energy levels on Thursday and Friday, and the low haemoglobin, which was doing the opposite. The Dex won on Thursday, it was a draw on Friday and by Saturday I was exhausted.

We had a long wait to see the consultant, but it was worth it as he had a lot to tell us.

The fracture has drawn attention to the state of my bones. The MRI scan a year ago showed no critical lesions in the bone. If it had, they might have inserted a pin as a preventative measure. The consultant said that the Multi-Disciplinary Team that meets each week will discuss my case and re-examine that scan. I can’t have another MRI scan just yet as it will be hard to interpret the state of things at the fracture site, but I’ll have one in a couple of months’ time. If there are still signs of cancer in the bones, I may require radiotherapy, but we will have to wait and see what happens.

Looking at my bloods from the previous cycle, he was confident about my going into remission and on to maintenance drugs when this cycle is over, and also mentioned that we will retry Lenalidomide, despite the rashes that seemed to occur during earlier treatment. It is the best drug for maintenance, so in future I’ll have that, Zoledronic Acid and supporting meds.

I’ll be going ahead with some dental work, just fillings and finishing off some implant work, then starting the Zoledronic Acid (which strengthens the bones but makes them too brittle for further dental implants), probably in June.

We should be okay to travel abroad later this year and I should be okay to do the Myeloma UK charity London to Paris bike ride, but I must admit to having lost my confidence for that now.

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We had plenty of time to kill at the hospital while waiting for the consultant and Sue tried out her birthday ear buds, connected to her phone by Bluetooth. I helped swap them over to the iPad and she enjoyed watching some TV shows before she tried swapping back to her phone. I spotted something was up when Bob Marley was blaring out and she was tapping away, saying “it won’t stop”. All the other patients must have gone home with a reggae vibe that they couldn’t explain.

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I am much more agile now and I’m hopping around the house and up and down the stairs independently with just one crutch. It does mean I can no longer use my joke though: when waiting for Sue to follow me up the stairs I had been able to say, “Get thee behind me, Susan”! – which I thought was appropriate for Lent.  If I carry on at this rate, I’ll soon be able to ditch the other crutch.

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We went out to see friends on Thursday, for a lovely paella and games afternoon, which really cheered us up.

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Back to this week’s tenuous analogy: thanks, Chris, for replacing the toilet seat that I managed to break last week. While recovering from a broken leg, standing up from a seated position requires great care. The bad leg won’t bend so you have to carefully lift yourself from a chair with both hands to put your weight on the good leg. My mistake was to push with one hand on the toilet seat and the other on the wash hand basin, the uneven distribution causing the hinge to snap. All fixed now, though.

Thanks for reading and take care.