A walk, a scan and a reflection

A walk

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who sponsored my five mile walk for Pancreatic Cancer UK! 

I set myself what I thought was a reasonable fundraising target of £250 - but then you guys got involved. Once the total had shot through £250 and was heading upwards fast, I reset my target to £2000. By the time I did the walk, it was more than £3000 and at the time of writing stands at over £3600. As I've said several time, I am just overwhelmed by everyone's generosity.

If by any remote chance you haven't sponsored me yet and would like to, you can still do so up to 16 August. Here's the link to my fundraising page:

https://www.thebigstepforward.org.uk/fundraisers/marymilne

I'm beginning to wonder about the title of my recent blog So you do fundraising then? No... Perhaps a career in fundraising beckons after all.

The walk itself was fun, stretching but not overwhelming. My older son came along, plus the dog of course, and we left at 8.30am so we could walk before it got too hot. The fields around us are just beginning to turn golden, and it was cool and lovely under the trees. Here we are having a rest at the halfway mark. All in all, a good thing to have done.

A scan

I mentioned in my last blog that I was waiting for a scan and on Monday we had a meeting with my consultant to discuss the results. The good news is that the main tumour in my pancreas is 'stable' - in other words it hasn't grown since my last scan at the end of March. 

However they aren't sure what is happening with the secondaries in my liver so I'm going to need another MRI scan to give more information on these. To be honest I'm not sure what they are looking for and I didn't ask the right question in the meeting. I'll ask at the next meeting.

I was hoping that there might be some clinical trials which would be suitable for my situation, but apparently there aren't any recruiting at the moment. I felt quite disappointed by that. The only treatment option at the moment is a different type of chemo. Something to consider.

A reflection

Despite the fact that the results of the scan are mostly good news, I came out of the meeting feeling pretty down. 

I've spent the last month getting back to work, meeting up with friends, walking more and generally doing all the things which make my life normal. I even sang in the church choir on Sunday for the first time since December. It has been very easy to kid myself that everything is back to normal, when of course it isn't.

Every time I go to the hospital I'm reminded that I still have cancer.

One of the unexpected benefits of the Pancreatic Cancer UK walk was joining a Facebook group of other people doing the event - all of whom, of course, had some connection to the disease. It was lovely - and they are a super supportive community - but of course that was also another reality bump. 

So many people were walking in memory of loved ones - some of them younger than me, some of them had lived only a few months or even weeks after diagnosis. Other people, like me, are living with the disease. And one or two have been able to have the operation and be cured.

Bump, bump, bump back to reality. This is a terminal illness. My cancer is not operable. At some point in the not too distant future, it's going to make me very sick and then I'm going to die.

Quite a few years ago when the boys were younger, we went to Legoland, and went on a rollercoaster. (NB I am NOT a rollercoaster fan, but I can just about manage the one at Legoland, which is quite tame.) You sit in a little car and crawl through a tunnel with various Lego models, then you got through some doors, up a slope and... my son says: 'We aren't going very faaaast.... oh, we are now!'

I feel that my life at the moment is crawling up that slope. Sometime soon, we're going to be on the rollercoaster. I want to enjoy things now, while I can, but I'm scared of what is to come.

That's how I was feeling on Monday. Now it's Thursday and I have a more positive head on. We're about to have a barbecue. I'm off to a pub garden to meet my book group later. Tomorrow I'm going to visit one of my oldest friends and another friend is joining us on Saturday. We've got lots of nice things planned for the summer. It's going to be good. Take it one day at a time, and enjoy the moments.

This blog is dedicated to everyone living with uncertainty. Carpe diem!