Next steps

It's been a while since my last post, and that's mainly because I've not had much to report. November went well, and I managed to string out my birthday for at least three weeks, so that was good too. Stephen made my actual birthday a day of glorious treats, starting with breakfast in bed, then a tasting menu at a top restaurant in the peaks for lunch (and I could eat and enjoy it all! Woohoo!), then a walk round Chatsworth, then a cosy fire and a film. Lovely! He also surprised me with a set of Uilleann pipes - Irish bagpipes - which are amazing (not sure what the neighbours think)! I also went to the ballet with my mum, afternoon tea with my friends, a gig with Stephen, and in general managed to have a full-on birthday festival! Hurray!

To make it even better, it turned out that my appointment back at the Christie to start my next stage of treatment was not, after all, on my actual birthday (as previously reported in the blog post of doom a few weeks ago), but the day after. So I donned my wellies, turned on my tunes, and stomped on in. I saw my lovely doctor, told him how good I was feeling ("That's because you're tough", he beamed at me! He's so lovely!), and picked up my prescription of 5 days of tablets (remember we don't call it chemo - just like taking a paracetemol etc), plus all the other tablets that go along with the tablets (e.g. anti-sickness, anti-biotics, blah blah blah). The drill now is that I do 5 days of tablets per month, for 6 months. I'll be having another head scan some time in the new year, then surveillence scans every so often for a bit

So the 5 tablet days were absolutely fine, except for the seventh day when I woke up in a panic that I hadn't taken my tablets the day before (how quickly we form habits). But apart from that, I felt fine. My appetite was a little bit low on days 4 and 5, and I had Heinz tomato soup one day for lunch (recall that this was about the only thing I could manage when I was doing the 6 weeks of treatment), but I soon recovered to full strength chocolate cravings. So it looks like the new regime will be entirely manageable. And I've got my progress chart on the go again, with a sixth of it ticked off already.

The final thing I'd like to report concerns my hair. My amazing hairdresser has sorted me out with a set of wefts. For the uninitiated (I was one of you until a couple of weeks ago), a weft is a type of hair extension - a piece of hair that can be stuck to the skin or to other hair. My brother amused himself for a while by sticking one onto his chin so it looked like he had a Chinese-style beard, and if you leave them lying around, out of the corner of your eye they can look like some sort of weird animal, but that's another story. Anyway, my wefts are the most marvellous invention, and totally cover all my bald patches, so I can go about the place without fear of comb-over-slippage, and without having to wear a hat at all times. Also, Stephen has discovered new talents - he cut them for me so that they matched my own hair (some were too long and looked funny).

And that's it. I'm feeling thoroughly excellent, I've got some lovely new stick-on hair, the new tablet routine seems fine, and in 6 weeks I'll be going back to work. (I can't wait. There's only so much Come Dine With Me a person can watch.)

All that remains is for me to wish everyone a very merry Christmas and a joyful new year, and I'll post again in 2013.

xxxxx