Day 27 - Relief

My day started like the others. I woke at 6.30 after a reasonable night's sleep with a mouth locked together with blood and muck. I cleaned it up and freed up my mouth so at least I could talk, although my voice had changed to almost a whisper. This is another side-effect, one I think, that Vic was probably grateful for.

The big difference was how I felt. Apart form the muck in my mouth, I felt fantastic. The morphine patch had clearly worked. Once I had clearned my mouth, I was ready to ride to the hospital again for the day, which being Wednesday, was my long day out there.

Vic convinced me that it probably wasn't a good idea given how little I'd eaten and drunk over the last 5 days. I had to agree. While I felt great from a pain perspective, the reality is that I would have hardly any energy to utilise in riding 60kms.

My chemo session was now at 10.30, so we didn't have to leave until later and this gave me some time to try some different foods. I had a Resource and a little spearment milk.

Then I did my normal M&T routine and caked Sobolene on the affected areas of my neck. Then I went in to the study and did some work.

I couldn't believe how well I felt again. Vic was like "na, na, na, na, na - I told you so". But I guess she had every right to be given she'd been on at me to be more descriptive about the pain I was feeling when describing it to the doctors since it started about a week ago.

Her next concern was my lack of eating, but more and more so, my inability to go to the toilet. It had now been 6 days since I'd eaten anything substantial, although this morning's Resource drink is a good start. The problem was that it was about the same period of time since my "bowels had opened", which is the hospitals nice way of saying doing number "2s".

Being an Endoscopy Nurse, this was causing her a lot of anxiety because she knew what the outcome could be if the body doesn't expel waste as it should. I had no idea, but I was about to find out.

My day went by pretty uneventful, with me feeling pretty good for most of the day. The morphine patch seemed to be doing a good job of regulating the pain, and I was taking a 2ml top up of morphine elixir every few hours. With this, I started to use less of the Lignocaine and Cocaine mouthwashes, which I felt was a good thing.

I didn't have a great deal to eat that day, but I did try a few solids that Vic had cooked for the rest of the family that night. I still couldn't eat them. But I was able to drink and keep down a Sustagen mix, and some flavoured milk.

The only thing of note was the emergence of little paper-like cuts on my fingers. They were small, but very painful, and hurt like heck whenever I touched something that aggravated them.

I went to bed that night pretty content given I'd had a pretty much pain free day. Vicki remained concerned about my constipation and had begun a chart that sat alongside my medicines chart, to record how often I ate and drank, and how often I went to the toilet and for what,

I was still experimenting with my medicines and mouth washes to manage the dry mouth I always woke with, and tonight I tried doing my normal M&T Routine, followed by a cocaine mouth wash. Then I'd put Vaseline Jelly on my lips. We'll see how that goes.