Recovery and operation update

Hi everyone,

Things continue to go well with my recovery, we have now been up at Robyn’s Mum’s place for just on a week now, and if I compare how I was a week ago with how I am now I can easily say that I feel much more ‘normal’. My head is clearer, I am less tired and I no longer need to hand the jam jar to Robyn to open! Superman, eat your heart out. It is nice and quiet here, so I am getting plenty of good rest. There are also more opportunities for light exercise here than what there was back at the apartment, add in good food, good books, good films and good company and it has turned out to be exactly what I need right now. Many thanks to Robyn’s Mum for having us (Robyn and her Mum are busy preparing what promises to be another delicious dinner as I write… it’s a hard life).

 It is bloody cold here in the mornings though! It was -2 on Wednesday morning, we woke up to -4 yesterday and today greeted us with a very crisp -5, it was so crisp you could almost bite off a piece of the morning air and chew it. I know some of those hardy souls reading this from colder climes will be laughing into their cornflakes at my suggestion that -5 is cold, so I probably need to  harden the $%^^ up, but that can generally be said for the entire human race. I was lying in bed this morning watching tiny little fairy wrens and other birds go about their business in the chilly morning air and thought that we upright, hairless apes are pretty soft (including those who have an excess of body hair… eww).

On the other hand, birds are crazy. Anyone who has seen the otherworldly courtship behaviour of the superb bird of paradise, watched pink flamingos dance, looked in bewilderment at the antics of a cockatoo, or simply looked into the alternately witless then wicked eye of an emu knows this to be true. But then, try finding me any animal that isn’t at least a little bit nuts. I’m not saying that people are not nuts, clearly they are, especially the ones that choose to live in colder climes than this…

It appears that I am getting side tracked again, I should be telling you that all my post chemo appointments with the haematologist, oncologist and dietician went well last Friday, which they did. I should also be telling you that my hair is growing back, which it isn’t… the upside of that is that I have not had to shave for over four months now! And I should tell you that my tumour markers continue to behave themselves, there was a slight jump in one of the secondary markers (alpha fetoprotein, or afp), but that has now returned to normal. The relation between afp and active tumour growth is not as definite as is the case with my primary marker as afp can be elevated due to other factors, so it was never a major worry. In my case it was probably due to a slightly overworked liver, but it is all good now.

The only other thing that is new is that my skin is quite itchy. I have learnt that itchy skin is a fairly common late side effect of high dose chemo, and it will resolve itself as my body continues to rebuild itself and my presently sensitive skin toughens up a bit. I have also learnt that there are lots of these minor side effects that the docs never get around to telling patients about until they happen. Not a big deal.

In other news, we had to go back to Melbourne today to have my pre-op check up and fill in the pre-op paperwork as my operation has been rescheduled from the 15th of July to the 1st of July. This suits me fine as I feel I will be ready to cope with the operation by then, and it means that we should be able to get home a couple of weeks earlier. I believe that the 1st had originally been doctors preferred date, but it was unavailable until a cancellation occurred only yesterday, so things have worked out ok. We will return to Melbourne on Thursday afternoon so that I can have a CT scan on Friday morning, then I will be admitted to St Vincents on Sunday

Cheers, Pete.