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Category Archives: hospitals

brave new me

06 Friday Aug 2010

Posted by azahar in cancer, change, chemo, friends, hospitals

≈ 16 Comments

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hospitals

It started with solo trips to the hospital for my monthly chemo port cleaning – I realised that if I went in the evening it was less busy and I could be in & out in about ten minutes. The first time I taxied there and back and the whole thing took less than an hour, which I thought was pretty good. It also felt good not to have to ask someone to come with me – thought it best to save that favour for scarier appointments like seeing the oncologist and going for PET scans. And so I started planning the port cleaning trips for evenings that Nog had a class nearby – we’d meet up after we’d both finished, go for a tapa and then walk home together (same price as taxi fare, but much more pleasant!). From there I started getting braver and braver…
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my gym

04 Wednesday Aug 2010

Posted by azahar in fitness, gym, health & happiness, hospitals

≈ 8 Comments

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gym


I am well into my second full gym-rat mode week, which comprises some yoga/pilates, the recumbent bike and the machine routine upstairs, and – as long as my back holds out – I am totally loving this. I’m even a bit bummed about having to spend a week in Málaga this month (more on that later) because I’ll lose a week of gym time. Amazing how easy it is to get hooked. But it is also a time-eater as it takes about two hours of my morning including 20 minutes “there and back” time, though that isn’t really an issue this month…

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there and back again…

22 Thursday Jul 2010

Posted by azahar in cancer, food & drink, friends, health & happiness, hospitals

≈ 11 Comments

Tags

cancer, hospitals

Pilar & Isabel
2/3 of my fabulous nuclear medicine team

Made personal history yesterday by going to The Hospital for an oncology appointment … ALL BY MYSELF. I’d called all my usual hospital buddies and they were either away on holiday or, like Nog,  not able to get away from work because of the very inconvenient appointment time – 1.45. This also meant that I would be at the tail end of the typical morning’s backup and could expect an extra long wait. You can probably imagine how much I was dreading this. But in the end I decided to take the bull with the corns (a wonderful malapropism from an old student of mine) and do something about this instead of feeling scared and helpless. And so…

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wonder twins

13 Tuesday Jul 2010

Posted by azahar in cancer, change, chemo, death & dying, friends, hope, hospitals

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

cancer, friends


Sometimes I think about the things that have happened over the past two years,which never would have happened if I hadn’t got cancer. And amongst all the nightmarish crap there is actually quite a lot of good stuff too. One of the best things has been meeting and getting to know my friends Gaelen and Jed, both of whom I met on the Colon Club forum. There are a lot of very good people on that forum, but somehow I’ve always felt especially connected to these two guys in a way that’s difficult to explain. I’ve also had many parallel experiences with both, and most recently with Jed…

You probably remember the seriously bad scanxiety I had before my last PET scan a couple of weeks ago, feeling almost certain that the other shoe was about to drop and I was going to end up back on chemo this summer. Or worse – that they would find more tumours and chemo would no longer be an option. Well, at that same time Jed was very seriously looking at that latter situation after having had a scary PET scan result a few months earlier. His follow-up PET was scheduled for a few days after mine but he then had to wait another ten days to get his results. Which was yesterday.

Jed’s been in Taiwan with his family this past year, teaching and writing, which means we are in way different time zones. And so when I woke up yesterday morning I knew that he would have already seen his doctor. First thing I did was grab the iPhone and check my emails, and there it was. A quick report from Jed saying those magic words – nothing visible on the scan – and I almost cried from relief and happiness, also knowing how relieved and happy he must be feeling. As he said, “we have both had our doctors convinced we were beyond hope before climbing back from the brink”, and I think it was over on the forum that he first made the remark about us activating our wonder twin powers, which made me laugh. But hey – it worked!

So, well done my wonder twin.
Together we are invincible!

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potassium

09 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by azahar in cancer, friends, health & happiness, hospitals

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

health, heart, potassium

It seems that I have an unusually high level of potassium in my system. That was the weird thing the emergency doctor noticed on Monday, and the reason he ordered a second blood test. Which (I found out today) came back the same. Because it’s an isolated thing Ricardo says it’s hard to determine the cause; it’s not part of a pattern of symptoms or test results. He said it was also possible that the next blood test will come back normal, but he suggested that when I see Dr Ana on the 17th that I mention this and have her set up an appointment with a cardiologist. Because too much potassium can cause a heart attack! Sheesh. It’s always something…

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