Cancer 237
Posted on February 27, 2026 1 Comment
Well, it is an, exciting life having terminal cancer. Up to this morning I was thinking I was running into my last weeks. I have now been to see the consultant. It turns out that because the tumour growth was under 20% (I don’t know whether that means 5% or 19%, but it feels more like the latter) I can continue with the same treatment. I was given options. First, continue as it is, second reduce the dosage to reduce side effects, third, stop treatment because my quality of life is poor.
What I have learned from the last week or so is that I don’t want to die. I am not ready to die. Despite having many days of awful side effects, I still have some days where I feel reasonably well (ignore the abdominal pain or drink morphine; ignore the falling asleep in my chair), so I want to live. I want to carry on getting about, reading books, writing my thesis, and so on. That excludes option three. Reducing the dosage might reduce the side effects, but it may also reduce the efficacy of the treatment, so that is option two out. I am continuing with the treatment as before, so it is time to man up, somehow make the days of the side effects more tolerable, and get on with it.
So, happy birthday to me, that was a pretty good present. Thanks to everyone who has been so supportive over the last week or two. As I have said before, it really does help.
To the future then. There has been discussion of a second living wake. You know, a bite to eat, a glass of milk. If you would like to attend such a thing, please contact me and I will sort something out. I wonder how many living wakes I can attend before I miss the final one?
Cancer 236
Posted on February 26, 2026 Leave a Comment
I am writing this deliberately before I see the consultant tomorrow, when I expet to find out the awful truth. So Long folks, and thanks for not giving me the fish.
It feels like I am dying now. I know I have been on this track for a long time (not long enough), but this feels different. The tumours in my abdomen feel like they are growing by the day. At the start of all this we were told it was an aggressive cancer. Up until recently it has been a bit of a wuss. It now feels like lumps in my abdomen, lumps that stop me eating properly – there is a tumour in my stomach – that stop me breathing properly; it feels like the tumours are pushing against my abdomen. It makes it difficult to walk any distance. I often have to stop halfway up the stairs, or go very slowly. The shed at the top of the garden is miles away.
I am taking increasing amounts of morphine between my regular morning and evening doses, not more than I have been prescribed, not yet anyway (though I did swig it today instead of measuring it. There wasn’t much in the bottle). I hope I don’t get addicted! Fortunately I am still only on morphine and paracetamol. I have mentioned before about how much I hate painkillers, but I am going to have to talk to someone about getting this changed.
I am also falling asleep too easily. Being someone who has always hated sleep, and I have spent most of this illness being awake for much of the night, dropping off to sleep at all hours of the day and night is horrible. Last night I came downstairs around midnight. I started reading, and then I looked at the time it was 0330. I had slept on and off all that time. I still struggled to wake up. I had to go for a blood test at 0710 so I didn’t bother going back to bed.
I was alone today, looking forward to a few hours concentrating on my MA thesis. It didn’t work. I have done perhaps one hour’s work, and then I was getting sleepy. At one point I rested my head on the desk. Never been known before. For the last few days/weeks I have been dropping off sitting in my chair. This is what dying people do.
Given the rapid change it feels like I have weeks rather than months left. IT is making us a bit miserable, but I suppose that is understandable; but I don’t want to spend the next weeks sitting in my chair sleeping. I have things to do!
OK, that is how I feel before the consultant meeting tomorrow. Tomorrow I suspect I will be off cancer treatment and on palliative care. I might be wrong, and I have no problem with being wrong, but at the moment I don’t feel like I am wrong.
Cancer 235
Posted on February 24, 2026 1 Comment
I have felt ghastly these last few days. I am not impressed by the side effects of chemo. I was very lucky for the first couple of years in that most of the time I had few such effects. Now they are, I won’t say unbearable, because humans can put up with anything if they have to, but they are very unpleasant. It is difficult to describe the feelings. There is a sickness throughout my torso, no doubt as a direct result of poisoning, but it is a feeling I have never had before chemo. It is not like any other illness. I feel sick yet I still want to eat – or I don’t want to eat. My balance is affected, it is hard to get up from my chair. The tiredness is overwhelming. I hate the nights now. Up until recently I would get up in the middle of the night, spend a few hours awake, then go back to bed. Now that doesn’t work too well (though I am doing it tonight). I try to sleep through the night but I need to urinate every 10-20 minutes. I have taken to going into the spare room and having a bottle to piss in, with the idea that I then won’t wake up properly so I will go back to sleep. But it is so uncomfortable. I have difficulty lying down because – presumably – of the pressure of the tumours on my diaphragm. I am breathless in bed. I sit up and I am OK, and I can gradually move to the lying down position, but if I get up I have to start the process again. If I lie straight down I can’t breathe.
I have a stereotype of someone who is dying. They sit in their chair and keep nodding off. That is what I am doing now. I sit in my chair; I go to sleep, sometimes a deep sleep, sometimes just a nodding off. Whether I get slleep or not I am still always tired. I was on the previous treatment, but it was manageable. I was just tired. Now it affects my whole life. My chemo brain is also getting worse. Perhaps the biggest part is forgetting words, but earlier tonight I woke up in bed and I could not work out where I was. I know we all do that occasionalky on waking up, but I could see what I thought was a window or door, and I could see the position of the bed in the room. It was almost an intellectual exercise to work out where I was. I was in my normal bed in my normal bedroom, where we have slept since movig into the house nearly 14 years ago. At one level I knew that I was having a problem, that I couldn’t work out wherer the door was, or where the bedroom was in relation to the rest of the house – I couldnt even work out which house I was in – but it took me several minutes to resolve it. I was actively trying to remember where the door was and I couldn’t remember. I was actively trying to remember where the house was and I couldn’t remember. It was a little odd.
At the moment I am still able to work on my history thesis. I can still write. I can still hold 90% of a conversation, but who knows what the future holds? Oh yes, I do know, don’t I?
If the last few rounds mean anything then hopefully I will feel a little better tomorrow (today), and for the rst of the week until, and if, my treatment starts again. I hope so, as it is my birthday on Friday. I am reaching 63, the age my sister was when she died of cancer just after I had my operation. If you dont have my address to send me the huge parcels that contain my birthday presents then I can send it to you. Though what does a dying person need for his birthday? I cannot resist books, though the pile by the side of my chair is too big for me to get through. I don’t really need anything else. What can a person like me want for a birthday present, apart from a new clean abdomen and a promise from a non-existent god that my cancer is cured? OK , forget it. I don’t need any presents.
Except people. I still want people. I still need you lot, so don’t go away just yet.
And now I will just have a little nap.
Cancer 234
Posted on February 21, 2026 2 Comments
I was surprised the other day. We intended to celebrate my reaching 50 rounds of chemotherapy with 5-6 people at the pub, having a glass of milk and a light bite, but 26 people turned up! Thank you everyone, it means a lot to me, especially as what was meant to be just a recognition of the chemotherapy but, it turned out, I had my news tha the treatment had failed and my tumours had grown significantly, before the meal. So it turned into my first pre-death wake, though a little less raucuss than I expect the real thing to be. Perhaps it was the milk.
I did think of making a short speech, but time passed and I didn’t, so perhaps I can make it here. First of all, lock the doors. We don’t want people getting away before it is finished. I do want to emphasise how I felt that so many people turned up. It really does make a difference. I roam around trying to be positive, trying not to get depresse, trying to tough it out, but it is not enough. People matter a lot. The social support is a crucial part of dealing with cancer and I am priviliged that I have a lot of such support, from a wide range of people. Obviously, at the top of the list is the wife, but I am not allowed to talk about her. Those who know me know about her though
Support isn;’t all about doing things, though that is very helpful. It is certainly not all abut being nice to me, though that helps sometimes. Mostly it is about getting on with normal life, saying and doing normal things. Yes, we mention the cancer or no we don;t mention the cancer. Yes, I get my normal abuse from most people I know – that will never change, It has been suggested I invite it through my behavious so I had better not do too much analysing.
I realise that many people with cancer have problems with support. They say their friends don’t know what to say or do, they avoid the topic or avoid the person with cancer. I have probably experienced a little of this, but I tend not to notice. There are one or two people I haven’t seen, but then there were always one or two people I havent seen – not everything is to be assessed by the existence of cancer.
It is down to relationships and the responses from both sides. If the person with cancer creates difficulties by lacking strength or a get on with it attitude then I think it makes it more difficult for their friends to know what to do. I knw this might go against the usual way of thinking, but if the person with cancer is depressed, confused, not knowing how to deal with theoir experiences, then this is going to make it doubly difficult for friends, who may not know how to respond. This isn’t to say the person with cancer is responsible for their social support, but it does work two ways.
Nevertheless, the people around person with cancer matter. You should send a message, ask about going out for a nice glass of milk, just ask how things are – though I think this last can be difficult because sometimes I dont respond in tthe English manner of, ‘Not bad, thanks’, or ‘fair to middling. You know how it is.’ I sometimes respond with the details that are going on, whether it is problems with a grotty stoma, my aches and pains, lack of sleep, or dietary problems. Boring things that no-one really wants to hear, but tough, I have the cancer ticket so I can say what I like.
Usually though, life carries on as normally as possible. We go out, we stay in, we get on with work, we watch telly. Having cancer is not like having the plague. It is not transmissible. You won’t catch it off me. Thankfully I don’t have the experience of absent friends.
Anyone for a second pre-death wake? This time we can invite all those others who weren’t there at the first one. I quite like the idea of a series of wakes before my death. Why should it just be you lot who get the pleasure?
Glass of milk anyone? Open those doors, they didn’t need locking after all.
Cancer 233
Posted on February 17, 2026 1 Comment
It is a few days since I found out that I am headed for the endgame. I am not happy about it. It hasn’t become all right. It is still all wrong. But when I look back, we can split life into three stages, childhood, adulthood, and retirement. The first two have been excellent, but I am not getting the chance to have a good retirement. We were looking forward to a retirement of travel, doing new things, doing old things, just doing things, without the pressures of work.
I am lucky to have had such good versions of two of the three stages of life. In childhood I had woods, a quarry, lawn for football/cricket, a field, some big trees for tree houses, forts, fires, dens, tunnels – all that and more was in my garden (if that is the right word). We fought battles with stones and mud, we fought Germans in WWII. We played football in the winter and cricket in the summer. We cycled for miles. We had a rusting crane yard (thanks Bowmer and Kirkland), ruined houses and factories, everything a normal boy could want from childhood – no internet, no screens, and not too many TV channels.
For most of my adulthood I didn’t have a proper job. I know what a proper job is. I was a bricklayer and a lorry driver. They are proper jobs. Being a university lecturer? That is not a proper job, no matter what some people might argue (usually thosae who had gone straight through school and university into academia). I was largely autonomous. The only real time constraints were turning up to lectures at the right time, standing up for one or two hours in front of young people and talking about subjects you enjoy, perhaps interspersing it with political or other opinions because I felt like it. I had years of being able to influence young people. That is not work.
Research. You choose your own topics for research and get other people (students) to do the work. Not real work. Students came from all over the world. Outside of ‘work’ we had regular walksin the Peak District, and regular monthly lunches. Other staff didn’t do this. I don’t know why, Many didn’t seem interested in the people they were teaching and supervising.
Writing. That is what I always wanted to do, so having written ten books and numerous journal articles I have done what I wanted to do!
Outside of work are the people, the friends and family that have played a huge part in my life. I have been lucky to have a lot of people who care for me and I care for them. It makes a big difference to life.
So what have I to complain about, ‘save the undone years, the hopelessness.’ (come on, work it out. Where did that quotation come from? ). I had such a good childhood and adulthood that I hoped for a good retirement too. Perhaps that is selfish. For me, it is another example of why I don’t want to die.
‘Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage aagainst the dying of the night.’
Dr Nigel Hunt 