My Bad Boob

Chemo number two went without a hitch. I sneaked a peak at my blood test results and swelled with pride at the sturdiness of my little red and white soldiers. My liver is happy and my kidneys are coping well. The bad news is they decided to reduce my dose. My little holiday in Emergency Admissions suggested to my team that my chemo dose was too high, and my sore spleen finally convinced them to spare me the Neulasta injection this time (spleen rupture is one of the rare side effects). So they took a cautious approach and only prescribed me 80% of my previous dose of FEC 100. I'm not happy about this. Other than the neutropenia, I coped well with my first chemo dose. I was certain that most of my discomfort was down to the injection and the cold I was fighting rather than the chemo itself. This cycle - I'm currently on day 6 - has been embarrassingly easy. Some very minor digestive niggles (enough to notice but nothing that would interrupt normal service), a touch of mil...

I've just come home from a three-day stay in hospital. The sore throat, cough, and general achy malaise caught up with me on Day 10. I had been wrestling with a headache, too, from around Day 8. It was there when I woke up in the morning - something akin to a hangover headache - so I took a paracetamol. Just one. I was keen to get off all meds, to give my poor body a break, so I only took one. It seemed to work. But the headache was back that evening. And it was there on Day 9, morning an evening. Meanwhile, the sore throat was getting more unbearable and on Day 9, Friday, I noticed some tiny white patches on the back of my tongue - almost certainly the beginnings of oral thrush, a common chemo side effect. For that, I phoned my GP and requested a prescription for Nystatin oral anti-fungal drops and some anti-bacterial mouthwash. No problem. Picked it up on my way home from the school run. Friday was another in a string of beautiful days, and when I arrived at school to pick ...