Into The Unknown

The fourth instalment of an occasional blog on my cancer trip just to annoy the hell out of those pesky cancer cells.

I feel as though I’m in no-man’s land. I’m between two borders. I’m leaving the comfort and certainty of my own home and walking to a border crossing a few hundred metres ahead of me.

As I get closer to the wooded clearing that is the border post I get increasingly nervous as to what I will find. The border guards seem friendly enough. They are smiling. But what’s behind their smiles? What am I going to find beyond the trees?

I’m describing the uncertain steps of going into the unknown having been given the devastating and numbing confirmation that I have stage 4 cancer for which there is no cure and no salvation.?It’s terminal. It just feels so very strange.

A week last Friday I was in the Richardson Suite at Airedale Hospital where it was confirmed by my oncologist that I have advanced (metastatic) prostate cancer that has spread from my prostate to my hips, spine, bones, chest cavity and lymph nodes.

The Suite is crammed with the very young and the old, male and female. It’s then that when it hits me that cancer is a disease that affects the many – three million in the UK. Indeed, one in two people will develop some form of cancer in their lifetime.

Yesterday I found myself stepping into a gleaming white monster of a truck called ‘Christine’. She’s a state of the art mobile cancer care unit run in partnership with the charity Hope for Tomorrow. https://hopefortomorrow.org.uk/

I was carefully being run though the treatment, appointment dates, side effects, of which there are many, by a highly experienced cancer nurse.

It’s when I came to sign the consent form that it hits me that the treatment I am about to receive is not a cure.

I stared at the words on the page that say this is palliative care. It’s only then that I fully realise that I am agreeing with the fact that the cancer tumour could return after the chemotherapy has finished. I’m basically fcuked.

For one fleeting second I wondered if the chemotherapy coupled with a new wonder hormone treatment and additional hormone injections are really worth it.

Then I realise I’m married to the love of my life Caroline who has been my rock and ?my soulmate and my love for nearly 38 years and I have two lovely grown-up sons, Jasper and Fabian. It would be mean, selfish and irresponsible not to give them the extra life that the treatment offers me – six years more or less.

And I thought I’d live long enough to get a 100-year old birthday card from the King!

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