Tuesday 28 February 2017

The aftermath

We are now into a regular monthly routine with my cancer treatments. Near the end of each month, I go for blood tests whereby the primary goal is to evaluate my PSA level, followed a few days later by an appointment with my Urologist to go over the blood test results. If the results are OK, I continue with my monthly Firmagon injections into my stomach (which hurts like hell for the first week and beyond!). My PSA was 1,060 back in November, but went down to 41.1 in December, 1.0 in January, and now, down to 0.95 in February. It needs to be 1.0 or lower so this is great news. As I mentioned before, this treatment is not a long-term solution, so the hope is to have it work for as long as possible before "Plan B" is put into action - but so far, so good. Also my back pain has been much better lately as I've been put on a different pain medication.

I feel like the month of February represents the aftermath of a hurricane - when the smoke and dust settles and you see clearly the result of the devastation.

Ever since this ordeal began in October, things happened quickly and we were busy with appointments, the holidays, visits, our trip to Europe - and believe it or not there didn't seem to be a lot of time to really sit back and reflect. In the month of February, I kept a relatively low profile, getting back into work as best I could, but also made lots of time to myself to think and evaluate the "aftermath".

Remember back in my very first blog, I wrote about how I refuse to ask “why me?” - refuse to feel sorry for myself - refuse to ask “why this again?” - well, lately I’ve been doing a lot of “asking” and feeling sorry for myself. Not sure if it’s the weather, lack of sunlight, or perhaps some kind of inevitable delayed reaction. I imagine that a lot of this has to do with the drugs. The Dexamethasone I was on back then gave me bouts of euphoria (sometimes followed closely by bouts of depression), and it seems that my current box of drugs does not seem to have as much of a positive effect, but more of a "downer".

One of the things that makes this tough is the fact that I can’t do everything that I was able to do before. I can’t drive. I can’t run my kids’ hockey team practice (can’t even get on skates). I can’t lift things, can’t do basic things around the house that I used to do. It makes you feel rather useless most of the time which is not a good feeling.

I feel this overwhelming desire to do "something". Back in October of 2014 I went to Lesotho, Africa with an amazing group of people through the organization Bracelet of Hope, and found it to be an extremely rewarding experience. I'm in the process of speaking to a few people to see if a return trip to Lesotho is feasible and worthwhile. I've already put the bug in Kathryn's ear . . .

I've been thinking a lot lately about what to say to my kids. Right now, they know daddy has been sick and is now recovering, but in case things start to go the other way, I feel the need to be prepared on how to explain things to them in the best possible way. This is the main thing that's been on my mind lately, and something that's been bothering me quite a bit. I saw a therapist a couple of weeks ago that was available through the Grand River Cancer Centre, and this was the first step in learning and figuring a few of these things out.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to some sunshine in March, the March break vacation with Kat and the kids, and hopefully being able to do more such as taking the kids to school and activities.

February was good, March is going to be even better!