Confusion, Non-Stop Sickness and 20 Hours a Day Sleep then more sickness
Sorry for the lateness in this posting, not that I am sure anyone is reading them, but if are I have not had a great week, in fact it’s defiantly getting worse every day, the lateness has been down to the complete laziness that I am suffering now, I really could do with a month of sleeping.
The main reason for all of this has been the load off phlegm, the never-ending load of phlegm, resting in the darkness of the bedroom is the best of things, but apparently it only lasts an hour or so before coughing up the phlegm (yeh right).
hen you do wake you are always chocking, cannot catch a breathe and basically dying at this point, IF I am lucky and can find the kitchen bowel fast enough I can hopefully time this so that I can throw up with the last of the contractions, this is so far from nice in any way, but I try to hope that at the least I can got to the toilet at the same time. It is not very good for the partner though, she is usually shocked awaked by a mix of coughing and trying to breathe, the phlegm ends up covering the windpipe in my throat, and they cannot really do too much for it, I have tablets to take that will thin the liquid a little so that in theory I can throw it up easier.
The problem is that it has not been instant, it’s very slow, and the throwing up certainly gives me a lot of pain, my throat was raw from being sick, now it’s getting a second hit of the stuff and feeling very painfully again, this means that I now try to stop actually being sick and kind of time it right to spit it out which does kind of work, but its not nice still, the mucus is solid and large, usually about 8” long and a good 1”across, certainly more than you think it would house, certainly not on the friendly side when your trying to throw it up, and then when you have this phlegm hanging from your mouth, you start to be fill sick again, I’m skipping ahead a little not but I was constantly sick tonight, from about 2am onwards, not getting a break makes the pain worse, but it does not take long before I’m too knackered that I can’t even get rid of the phlegm, when this point is reached you just try to stop everything, the being sick doesn’t happen and in-between this you get the odd lump of phlegm floating on top of the sick, which of course turns the stomach over, I hate this all, I hate feeling like this, I feel for Elaine who has to put a brave face on it all, and I know I do not have the strength to continue if I was left alone, then feeling the way I do now I would have returned home and just given up.
Over the last week the biggest change has been my sleep cycle, I’m basically sleeping about 20 hours of the day, and the rest is spent at the computer reading e-mails, this helps me a little, it takes my mind of being sick at least, in that I only have about 4 hours to worry about it, and still no food or drinks, any sleep with ‘sleep’ is a good thing for me, the feelings that I get is very asleep to upright coughing, spitting out flehm, cleaning my mouth wait a minute to relax a little and then head down for about 20-30minutes and repeat, I don’t even get to dream of any beautiful women laying sexily of Ham Radio gear like you get in Good Hard Core Motorcycle Magazines, but I suppose that would be termed as sexist nowadays. What I would give for a good night’s sleep, no pain, some nice videos to watch (and no I do not porn, although if it is Icom 7610) for then maybe in my case it can be classed as Porn, hi hi. And to wake up around midday feeling totally relaxed and refreshed would just be wonderful, presently I don’t have a refresh or relaxed state, just a in pain and need sleep state, its like I mam typing this out here maybe wondering if anyone bothers to read dribble.
The daily routine does become one, wake, get dressed, food and medicines into peg and the wait till the next one, I’ve even lost count on how many times a day I get food and medicines pushed in via the peg. Apparently, it works out to 33 syringes for each, i.e., Medicines, Food Supplement and of course the bloody Diabetic Meds as well, so that’s 99 syringes for food that I must be poked for, or moved so that someone can access the feeding tube, and then it depends a lot on what’s going in, sometimes a feel it in my throat which again is very weird as all I can normally taste down the tube if phlegm or the dryness of the throat. What I have been trying to get to is that if I taste any of the food supplement in my mouth I can’t help but throw up, but as I sleep, she tried to be sneaky, waiting till I have just entered deep sleep or at the most waiting until I am very distracted enough so that I do not notice what she is pitting in to me, my stomach is very small, I am not eating anything by mouth, for nearly two months, now, and at least I’ve not been drinking anything for maybe 5-6 weeks. So, my little stomach is shrinking a lot at the moment. So with that and about 3 litres of flushing every 24 hours, and maybe about 1 litre for the meds it is still a great deal to worry about.
The lack of concentration at the moment is just terrible, I can type out what I think I have typed, then go back to read it through as though I never remembered say this or wanting this.
It is so strange when you think that you are typing something, but when you read it back it just does not make any sense at all, the other thing that I see is when I have typed a few sentence’s, and look up to check then, I am back to where I was when I started as though I am travelling back in time, I often look away and look back and then look at the screen again, and I can be at either end of the scale, this gets really annoying when you type it out again and you then suddenly see two copies of the files that you reading here. This has made me typing anything out now a really slow process
So I’m not having a good time, the throwing up is the worst, it’s mainly caused by the phlegm, I often fund its easier to remove the Phlegm in-between the coughing bits, the soft stuff is easy, or at the least a littler easier to handle, still very disgusting, It needs to be cleaned up quicker else I puke, and both puking and coughing makes the throat raw with like and like a big target get all ready to be thrown a large bucket of acid onto.
So something that normally would take an hour or so has taken me weeks to finish, I miss the last weeks update and I’m basically heading now into the third weekends, and I think I have missed lots, I am so pissed off with feeling sick and of course the being sick as well, The Radiotherapy treatment has been getting easier in one way thanks to taking Diazepam and Oralmorph before, I never fully really relax but it a kind of love hate relationship that we have with each other, thankfully the nurses and technicians do a fantastic job of trying to help you though this,
I woke up one day with a really high temperature, now elaine knows the rules that I set, I am not ever going back into the Royals A&E Department, this time thankfully she had got me into the CDU department in Clatterbridge, and boy what a much better experience I had in that horrible A&E Department in the Royal, at least in Clatterbridge they understood what cancer patients need, or more to the point at least Clatterbridge CDU understand what caring for a patient is. Thankfully this time things improved fast, They took an X-Ray of my chest to see if the phlegm was up this far and sure enough there was a small amount found in the lungs but thankfully nothing that they were too worried about, a good batch of antibiotics should sort that out.
A couple of days on from that day I am now feeling a lot better, although a tad drugged up and wobbly, I have the concentration of a gnat, and really cannot focus on anything, the only thing that I concentrate on in my breathing trying to keep the phlegm under control and trying not to be sick
One decision has been made though, I have had enough, the pain is relentless, the cost of it all has been relentless. So next weekend I am coming home, ferry has been booked, and I only have one more week of radiotherapy left to endure, or not whatever I feel, I am suffering lots and just need a breach from all this shit to recover at my own pace.
As sad as it sounds, I miss my cats, I miss the radios that I do own and miss looking at the ones that I will never be able to afford but still am after, I even miss CW and trying to send it again, I was getting up to 20wpm, but gave up again for some reason, my best key, an Old Proffi MK II was purchased of this person for was too much of course but I have never regretted buying it, even my second best Key was a very expensive recommendation by him for a certain Belgai key, I am so out of this world now and miss it so much, I think whatever time I have left I need to spend it on the radio, I have enjoyed this hobby lots and it means so much more to me than life itself, I has brought me friends and over the years sadly some have become Silent Keys, but never ever forgotten. There is much more to life then being sick all the time and throwing up because of radiotherapy.