I'm back off the wagon!

That's right, without so much as a whimper I'm back on the hard stuff again. Get it in me man, I live for these cell killing, mood tampering, fatigue inducing drugs they call CHEMOTHERAPY. "Did you enjoy your lumbar puncture?" How about I puncture your lumbar you sick FREAK.

It's been a month to the day when I had that last dose of cytarabine and left Sheffield never to return there for treatment. Since then things have been a little awkward, you might say, culminating in today's events when we FINALLY got underway with the third phase of my treatment at my new home, the Radcliffe hospital in Oxford. Well, technically it's the Churchill, but they have so many damn 'centres of excellence' or whatever the hell that means that I can't distinguish between any of the individual wings of this clusterfuck of a network, so for now we'll just stick with the Radcliffe yeah? And as you can probably tell my first impressions of the place haven't been too glowing.

OH WHERE TO BEGIN. I might like to throw in an apology at this point for not posting in nearly a month but for all of you this is free so WHY SHOULD I? But in seriousness, the last few weeks have been a right bloody struggle and I'm trying not to go on a massive spiel so I don't completely undermine my last blog entry. I did make a chronological list earlier of what to say, crudely handwritten on the back of a tescos receipt, but that's somehow disappeared in the vortex of my own wallet so I'm gonna have to rely on my anything-but-flawless memory for this one. Here goes.

First, my induction goes absolutely tits up and I end up spending nearly two weeks in hospital for reasons that could have been easily avoided. Am I bitter? Gosh no, don't be silly. But what kind of place takes your blood, discovers the Hb is meandering around 6.9 and elects not to tell you? This follows with me nearly collapsing at home, having to rush in, being kept in overnight for a bag or two of blood, then picking up two infections of the bacterial and fungal variety and being remanded as hospital bound indefinitely. LAME.

To be fair, my family and Ellise did a great job in keeping my spirits up, and the nurses were rather sound (the more jaunty the character the better the nurse, I tend to find). And two weeks is nothing compared to say, I don't know, five weeks. But it properly puts a damper on the attitude, you know?

I get released at last and the following week I go in for my bone marrow (which actually turned out to be a SURPRISE bone marrow I was in no way prepared for, leaving me slightly disturbed mentally). Horrific pain aside, this goes rather smoothly. That is until the registrar hits us with a bit of a bombshell that my treatment is being changed, from what is called Regimen B to Regimen C, a much more savage and stronger course of treatment that might as well be described as intensive. The main issue with this was that they couldn't explain to us WHY they had decided to do this; the trials nurse had trotted off home by this point and my consultant was off in clinics so couldn't go through any of it with me. Cue a weekend of me and the family shitting it a bit until TODAY we find out we're going BACK to Regimen B because there was a BIT of a COCK UP with the communication between doctors. No big deal really, happens all the time. Made the heart skip a beat or two though! At least we get a happy ending... for now.

So there it is. A rather difficult period that I believe has come to an end. From here I'm hoping to properly regroup and get back to roughing up Luke if he things he's gonna be bringing the ruckus. I promise I'll update on a more regular basis, though I'll have to find more things to write about as it'll be kinda quiet on the chemo front. My own actual life? God forbid.

Now I'm off to watch the Game of Thrones pilot episode. I'm a bit wet for fantasy drama. Sometimes I think to myself that the LOTR trilogy is better than Star Wars. Then I promptly punch myself in the balls for even entertaining such an idea.

Big love.

Ryan.