Dr Nigel Hunt

Cancer 172

Posted on February 3, 2025     Leave a Comment

I am continuously conscious of my limitations in life, my inability to do things I used to find easy, my slowness, my lack of energy, my failure to get up and do, how I look at a job that needs doing and don’t do it, how my lethargy ensures a lack of action. It is not just the physical work that needs doing, it is the mental work, in my case it is often writing, though it can even be a lack of motivation to read.

This does include what I mentioned just a short while ago, that I can’t walk as far as I could just a few months ago. It is an effort to get up and walk, and difficult once I am up to walk more than a few hundred metres. Everything begins to ache, to hurt. I become breathless – not in the normal sense (there is little normality any more), just a difficulty in breathing.

Even the little jobs at home don’t get done. I have been putting a door catch on my wardrobe for months. It is held shut by a scrap of paper, and the components to do the job are sitting on top of the wardrobe.

I can’t do anything outside. Partly because it is cold and I should not expose myself to the elements – good old dysfunctional immune system – and partly because I am not able to be bothered.

I think my body’s main effort now is in sitting and fighting the cancer. This means it is difficult to get any energy to do the everyday things in life. I just sit unless I make a real effort to do something. When I makethe effort I tire very quickly and need to sit down again.

It sounds pathetic – at least to me – and lazy, but honestly I am not being lazy, though I may look it. I sit in my comfy chair surrounded by necessary junk (books, computers, notebooks, pens, books, etc). If something falls on the floor it is an effort to pick it up. I have always been messy but this is silly. I am writing this in the middle of the night while changing my stoma. I can’t even be bothered to pick up my computer to write so I am doing this on my phone.

I fight it, naturally. I get up and do things. I go about my business and I think to people I am getting on with things. We go on holiday. We go out. We see people. I help make marmalade.

But underneath this exterior, this physical adonis, this mighty Hercules,  doing the slightest thing is often an effort.

I can’t be bothered to write any more.

Cancer 171

Posted on January 29, 2025     Leave a Comment

As I blindly live my life, trying to be oblivious to what is going on inside my body, because I could not cope with reality, I sometimes see through the curtains to the real world and realise there are a lot fo changes occuring in my body, and they are not good ones. While away on holiday I wanted to take a short walk, a walk which a few months ago I could have done easily, if a little slowly. I managed to get a couple of hundred metres, perhaps a little more, and had to turn back, so I walked around half a kilometre. When this started I could walk 2-3 miles (yes, I have always mixed metric and imperial, it relates to the time I was brought up. We learned both). While that is not very far, it is good enough in most circumstances.

Today I walked around an abbey, a very nice abbey, Rievaulx, near Helmsley. Unfortunately I struggled to even walk around the site. I managed, after a fashion, but it seems not long ago that if I visited a ruin I would scramble everywhere, through every tunnel, up every step, around every corner. But not today. I did a sedate stroll up around and back.

I am deteriorating.

Also, as I have mentioned before, my abdomen area is a mess. Forget the stoma, it is the shape and size of the area. OK, I eat a little too much and – as demonstrated – I don’t get enough exercise, but prodding and poking can be quite painful, and a coughing fit (of which I have plenty as I am usually ill in some way – buggered immune system) causes quite a lot of problems, not least the feeling that I am going to explode. So far my skin is holding out, but at some point the walls are going to be covered with bits of me – at least that is what it feels like. And it is slowly (not slowly enough) getting worse.

I am even starting to think I should take painkillers regularly. After I mentioned painkillers before I was advised (if that is the right word) that I should be taking them regularly anwyay, in order that they can have maximum effect. I don’t like taking painkillers. I don’t like what they might be hiding.

I do understand that the continual drip of deterioration ends in a bad way, but I think now that I have mentioned it I will close the curtains and go and eat a special sausage roll, while watching The Searchers. We are going to have a phase of watching good films about 19th Century USA and its expansion. Any suggestions welcome.

Cancer 168

Posted on January 9, 2025     Leave a Comment

The first overseas trip of the year – well, to The Netherlands. It does involve what is, to me, an epic trip across the North Sea, 6 hours of seaborne hell, with 10 metre waves and the constant threat of being thrown overboard and eaten by sea monsters. Ok, I may exaggerate. I have taken my Kwells and should be able to cope with what other people say is a flat sea.

We are just leaving Harwich, on the Saxon shore, with a view across to Felixstowe, in Anglia, and all its containers from around the world, well China anyway.

We are away for 13 days so my large medical bag is packed full of goodies, from the supply of antibiotics that I self prescribe, through anti-sickness, anti-diarrhoea, and anti-gout tablets, all the various items for my stoma (bags, bags for waste, anti-glue spray, wipes, honey rings to ease the pain) and for my Hickman line (needles, syringes, flushing liquids, bits and pieces), tape for sticking my line to my chest, and spare hernia belts. I have brought lots of extras in case we get stuck in the Netherlands or something doesn’t work. 

Oh yes, I brought some clothes and remembered my passport.