Into a New Phase

After the melodrama of Wednesday it has just been a case of settling into a new phase.

At the beginning of this blog I talked about not seeing this journey as  a "battle against cancer" rather as the cancer being an intrinsic element of me that must be overcome.

In my very first post I talked about the journey being one of finding some emotional silence.  By this I mean smoothing out some of the rough edges of myself to find more peace and calmness in my life.   I will never be completely even-tempered, or "Mr Chill Pill" because that is not my nature and it never is my business to try and change my nature.  So, in many ways, Wednesday personified a reversion to type against a backdrop of proactive measures that I have tried to instill to make the journey smoother.

Of course, I have always considered there to be battles to be fought along the path, but rather than seeing them as battles with the disease I see them as battles with myself.  It is no different to if you are trying to hit a major deadline at work or whether you are trying to get your children to school on time.  In any such scenario there are events that can conspire to work against you and which you must overcome to assert your will.

In my mind that was what Wednesday was about.  All roads leading to the next phase of combined chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment but "no free entry by the gatekeeper".

Some of the circumstances would have seemed innocuous given the fact that I had previously strolled through much worse.  For example,  I teetered through a reduced chemotherapy session (one that was one and a half hours rather than the initial nine and a half hours) but the difficulties I experienced were a combination of a number of different factors.

The point of all this is that it is good for the psyche to come through a rough day but with everything on track.

Some of the decisions I made, such as not going ahead with the blood transfusion with a borderline haemoglobin reading, may prove not to have been in my favour but  can be redressed as early as next week if needs be.

There are battles to be fought but there isn't a war. 

What I have tried to do all of the way through the process is to try and get one step ahead of the game whilst acknowledging that the cancer was already several steps ahead of me upon diagnosis.

It is clear that my case is considered to the negative side of borderline.  That is easily deduced from the fact that when my operation was "deferred" in July the surgeon asked for me to be considered as a locally advanced case.  In a nutshell, that means that the results from the initial treatment were not good enough and the nodal infection (i.e. outside the oesophageal wall - e..g between the lungs) was not brought under control enough.

That said, I have always felt very positive about the introduction of radiotherapy treatment.  It is a targeted treatment that whilst not effective on its own with oesophageal cancer may prove to be exactly what I need in taking the initial treatment further down the road.

The initial treatment may not have achieved the desired targets but it did create improvement in my condition and the macro trend is heading in the right direction.