Fourth Chemo session. Talked to Christopher

Apologies to Katy for not keeping up the postings, your coffee breaks must be a bit boring. As you know we're away at the weekend (as long as I feel okay). So probably nothing else until Sunday at the soonest.

News of the chemo today. Appointment was 10:30 so I could take the boys to school, always good fun. I went in with Sam to see the doctor. Weighed in again at 76.9kg, stable from last time. This time it was another new doctor - Dr Lim, quite young Chinese. She was very pleasant. She said my blood results are good - my red and white counts are getting back to normal, so I'm coping fine with the treatment. But that's not a sign that the treatment is not working. I made sure that I got stocked up with all my needed medication as well.

Sam went back home after we saw the doctor. I hung around as the chemo was scheduled for 12:30. I had lunch at the hospital. But when I went back up they were still a bit behind. I didn't go through until 1:30 and the treatment didn't start until 2:00. It was Rhodora who was treating me again. She said, although there weren't so many patients as last time, there were a lot of injected treatments which takes up the nurses' time. My treatment was going fine until the Doxorubicin when Rhodora noticed that I had a white patch on my skin a bit downstream of the canular site. It was a bit like when you press your skin, but it wasn't turning back to pink. My skin seemed to be cold, so she put on a heat pad. That seemed to help, my skin went a bit red, but then it started to come up in a bump like a heat rash. Rhodora decided that was not good and she should give me some hydrocortisone and move the canular. The hydrocortisone did the trick, the bump went down. But she had a problem getting a new canular in, she first tried further up the same arm, but that failed, so she had to put it in the other arm. So I ended up with plasters all over my arms.

This is now 4 treatments completed. It seems like I'm really getting through it now, possibly only 2 more to go. I can't say I'm dreading these, but I'd rather not be doing it. It's probably what might happen in the next few days that's more worrying. Even today's needles excitement wasn't a problem.

Christopher had a school book yesterday that was about how life was children in Victorian times. It talked about how children who swept chimneys sometimes got cancer. It was an opportunity to talk to him about it. So I explained how cancer is a large range of diseases and Hodgkin's is a type of cancer. But the doctors know how to treat it and they should be able to cure me, I told him the treatment is called chemotherapy. I didn't go into too much detail, he hadn't really heard of cancer before, and I didn't talk about dying. We're not ready to say anything to Matthew.