Where are we now....?

 Well it's been a few weeks since my last blog post so it's probably a bit overdue for a proper update.....

 The palliative care team have now adjusted my morphine doseage in an attempt to get my pain under control. To a large extent it appears to have worked but the downside to this is that I spend a lot of the time asleep and also have problems in turn with constipation for which I then have more drugs to try and control that. 

The pain comes from lesions on my bones which can cause growths on my skeletal system to both break and distort the bones themselves. Surpressing the pain with morphine doesn't stop the continuing damage to my bones which is the cause of the pain in the first place but it does make it a bit easier to deal with. 

One thing that I find difficult to take on board is the fact that apart from visits to the hospital and the occasional socially distanced bike ride and a few other odd occasions I have effectively been locked away for almost two years.

 Because of my completely useless immune system I have to keep away from other people as much as possible so I have hardly left the confines of the caravan for those two years. Obviously if the weather is good I can sit outside but to all intents and purposes I have been effectively a prisoner for the entire time with almost no contact with others...... There are lots of crimes that I could have committed that would have given me a shorter sentence........

The latest easing of the 'rules' does not improve things for me and if anything increases the risk..... For people like me we will still have to remain locked away. The hospital constantly reminds me of the risks and to be honest at the moment I can see no way out of the situation...... Christmas and New year was just like every other day almost a case of Groundhog Day.........

 I have had one complete cycle of chemotherapy since Christmas and am currently on a two week break following an infusion of a bone strengthener.....  The week before last I had an X-ray...  an MRI scan and a CT scan all within the same week... For some people a scan is a major event but for me it is a regular occurrence. 

I hear a lot on the news about people's mental health suffering because of the restrictions that COVID has made on their lives..... To be honest I don't feel that my mental health has suffered by being locked away... It's just something that you have to deal with. I have to admit that having a terminal cancer would be bad enough on its own but having it during a major pandemic has not made it any easier to deal with..... 

On top of all this there is also my heart condition to be dealt with which makes the control of the cancer all the more difficult because the treatment for that is in lots of ways the opposite to that required for the cancer..... 

On Monday I have a meeting with the consultant in charge of haematology to discuss my ongoing treatment.... It seems likely that I will have one more complete chemotherapy cycle and then hopefully I will manage some level of remission.. How that will tie in with me having to remain locked away I don't know but I will deal with that at the time one way or another.....

 I don't know how I will do it at the moment but my main concentration of goals is to achieve some level of endurance ride on my bike this year..... With this in mind most of my upcoming blog posts will be about my thoughts on bike riding....  I know that if I concentrate on this it will help me to achieve some level of bike riding success....... 

And now to answer the question that you are all asking .... What is the photo about at the top of this post.... Well I had to have some sort of anti pneumonia vaccine this week and I was made to sit in a waiting room with this huge plant that I had not fully looked at before..... It dominated the room a bit like my cancers seem to be trying to  dominate me........... It seemed to be a good idea to kick off this post with that image.......