Life is not fair

I told my three kids about my prognosis today. A very unpleasant and difficult thing to do. Robert, the oldest, started crying and hasn’t stopped. Alex, the middle, cried hard, then some time later asked if I could buy him a game before I died (thanks, Alex). And the youngest, Harry, said ‘you’re not dead now?’, so I assured him I wasn’t.

Life with cancer sucks.

Cancer and hair loss go together like rain and holidays in Wales. Hair loss often comes from systemic chemotherapy (explanation here), but radiation to the head can also cause hair loss.

Now, when I previously saw people with cancer-related baldness, without really thinking about it, I assumed that their hair just fell out one day in big clumps, and as most cancer patients I’d seen seemed to have the Yul Brynner shine, I assumed it ALL came out.

This turns out not to be the case. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t been on a holiday in the UK for about fourteen years. Some holidays in Thailand–not many, as money was often tight and hotels are expensive–but nowt in the UK since a couple of years before I left to make my fortune overseas. (Didn’t end up making my fortune in the end, or if I did, it wasn’t a financial fortune.) Read the rest of this entry »

Well, actually he was quite a pleasant and likeable chap, but I just thought that title sounded neat. Anyway, I went into the Marsden yesterday for the melanoma clinic, armed with a list of questions I wanted to ask. In summary, my prognosis is as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Well, actually the title is not strictly accurate. It should be something like ‘hair five years ago, gone today’, but that just doesn’t scan.

Yes, my hair has started falling out from the radiation. It’s not coming out in great chunks like it does in the movies; it’s more like a slow continuous fall of individual hairs. Whenever I scratch my scalp (which feels itchy from the radiation), a few hairs come away under my nails or attached to my fingers. Read the rest of this entry »