Cancer Treatment

I am not all that keen to post this, and not everyone will want to read it, but if it helps anyone then it’s worthwhile. These things need to be talked about. We can find interest and enrichment in the most unlikely situations. 

Until this year I thought I was a healthy and active seventy-something year-old enjoying jobs around the home, gardening, walking, music, and so on. Here I am along one of our local lanes. As you can see, we are not serious cyclists. 

Old git with bike (or git with old bike)

Then J found me unconscious and having a fit. I eventually recovered enough to walk out to the emergency ambulance and two nights in hospital. The only warning was swirling black and white patterns in my upper right visual field. An MRI scan found a small tumour in the occipital lobe at the back of my brain. This was causing swelling which led to the seizure. The occipital handles some aspects of vision and reading, hence the odd errors I’ve been making.

The tumour was successfully treated by ‘gamma knife’ radiotherapy in a single hour-long session. This focuses two-hundred low-intensity X-ray beams upon precise high-intensity spots. It involves the discomfort of having an aluminium frame screwed (literally) to your skull to keep your head still in the treatment chamber, and to plot the 3D coordinates for the treatment sequence. Otherwise it is entirely painless. It can treat objects as small as two millimeters across.

Unfortunately, the brain tumour was a ‘met’ (a secondary) from a small lung tumour. This gave me no symptoms. Without the seizure I would have had no idea that anything was wrong. Last autumn, we were walking up mountains in North Wales.   

Things looked bleak. At one point the word “palliative” was spoken. However, a positron (PET) scan revealed no other unusual activity except in the brain and lung. Some patients light up all over like a Christmas tree. Things began to look more hopeful.

I went through three months of chemotherapy. It was awful. Some days I was so sick as to wonder whether it was worth it. At one point I ended up back in hospital for two nights on a drip.

Then I had a month’s lung radiotherapy (although side-effects last longer). It was considered preferable to surgery in my case.

For me, radiotherapy was far more tolerable than chemo; just tiredness and mild discomfort. This was fortunate as some find it too painful to swallow without anaesthetic suspensions, and can even have to have feeding tubes taped up their noses. They put the fear of God into you in warning what could go wrong.

The worst part was having to travel Monday to Friday to Leeds and back every day for four weeks, where, with twelve linear accelerators, St. James’s Hospital zap around 450 patients a day. Their record is 750. People travel from all over Yorkshire.

As I was not allowed to drive, I was eligible for free Patient Transport. If you asked for early appointments, you usually get a private taxi. The return journey could be taxi, volunteer driver or a small ambulance, sometimes shared. With travel time, the 10-minute treatment including its 25 seconds of irradiation took at least three hours. Most days it was more: nearly six on the worst occasion. With Patient Transport you have to be patient.

Some drivers became regulars. I spent over ten hours sitting with one friendly chap in the Leeds traffic, talking about all kinds of things and learning Urdu phrases. He came from Kashmir in the nineteen-eighties without a word of English and is proud that his children have had the education he never had.    

I have clearly had several tens of thousands of pounds worth of NHS treatment and may well need more. I could say so much more about it: the endless appointments and tests, the CT-guided lung biopsy which gave me a pneumothorax air pocket and another night in hospital, the radioactive dye squirted into my bloodstream from a lead canister by a nurse in an anti-radiation suit, the wholesale consumption of pills, how the challenge is as much psychological as physical, and the effects upon family, but I’ll leave things there.

I’m well again now. I have even been out on my bike. It is now a matter of monitoring scans. How long can any of us say we have: 2023? 2027? 2032? I might be lucky, but no delusions.

These things happen. As my Yorkshire grandparents would have said: “It’s a bugger in’t it!”