This is one of my irregular health updates, for anybody who is interested.

Chemotherapy has finished now, which is a huge relief. I was getting very bored with dissolving all those tablets and injecting them down my jejunal feeding tube. I was also a bit bored with having a permanent cold, feeling tired & dizzy all the time, and having no immune system to speak of.

After leaving enough time for the drugs to get out of my system I started going back into work regularly instead of just working from home and going in for team meetings. It has been great to have all that human contact again. After a week of that I got to talk to occupational health who reckon I should be aiming for 4 to 6 hours a day. Oops.

Still feeling a bit wobbly, but hoping I will feel up to going to the gym soon. Got to justify the cost of the membership.

I did have a chat with the specialist nurse at the hospital and apparently we were not really understanding the timescales properly. We were expecting the big tumour-removing operation 4 to 6 weeks after the end of chemotherapy. It turns out that they usually give 6 to 8 weeks to get over it and the 4-week point is when they do the keyhole surgery for re-staging, so it will be nearer the end of April for the big op. Having missed out on Christmas lunch it looks like I won’t be fit for Easter eggs, but I’m sure they will keep.

There were also some bits of good and bad news. The good news is that I will not need to have another endoscopy. Of all the general nastiness about this cancer I think the endoscopies have been the worst part. The bad news is that after having another sleep test to measure my apnoea I may need to have a tracheotomy when they do the big op. I am hoping it will not be necessary and might try talking them out of it. As it is I will already have over a dozen tubes coming out of me when I get out of surgery. I don’t fancy another one, and don’t fancy a hole in my throat.

Otherwise, all is looking good I think. I did some physio tests and actually performed better than the test I did before chemotherapy started, despite still having some of it in my system – apparently I was greatly underestimating how long it takes to get over it! I hope I left enough in reserve to do even better on the final physio tests in a month’s time. Yet another reason to get down the gym I suppose.