Do you get hiccups? I get them sometimes, not very often, but when I do they stick around for ages. The only thing that seems to work for me is holding my breath for as long as possible before gently and slowly letting a breath out and then back in again. There then follows an awful wait while you try to breathe normally, go about your business and hope that you don’t unleash an almighty gulpy hiccup on the world. That waiting bit is hugely insignificant in the grand scheme of life and unless anything hilarious or tragic happens, you don’t remember your hiccups, do you? The only set of hiccups I can remember happened in a garden in Shepherds Bush one New Year’s Eve when I was too drunk to remember to hold my breath after starting each time. I hiccupped right through the ‘bongs’ (not that kind) and generally ruined my own night while dressed as a Belisha Beacon. Typical.
In life, those little moments don’t come around as frequently as hiccups but they do come around and, for me, it happened just before Christmas but this will need a little context. For the last few years, one of the singular silver linings to this whole cancer affair was that I no longer needed to worry about growing old. All thoughts of things like dementia, incontinence, having to live in (or even afford) a nursing home and getting progressively more right wing whether I like it or not, had drifted away from my consciousness to be replaced by thoughts of ‘living in the present’ and ‘enjoying the moment’. This sort of suited some part of me because when I was a teenager in a band, I always I assumed I would burn brightly and then fade out fast to join the 27 club but instead I ended up working in Business Change and have started to really appreciate warm socks.
Then, just before Christmas, I was enjoying some time in the garden (yeah, I do that too) and a tiny little thought crept into my head – what if my pension isn’t enough? Just a few weeks ago I was living under the assumption that I wouldn’t even live long enough to collect my pension so it was just bonus money for my wife to build a shrine to me with. Following a pretty good year, however, I had relaxed, started to breathe normally again, and this had lulled my mental diaphragm (is that a stretch of the analogy? Not sure) into a false sense of security. And so, I breathed. All through Christmas I breathed. I saw friends and family, I breathed. I built Lego with my son, and I breathed. I breathed all through New Year’s Eve and arrived in 2024 without a hangover and still breathing. Result.
On 2nd January I took a deep breath and returned to work for a new year but at around 10.00am the phone rang for a scheduled pre-Treatment call with the Oncology department. We exchanged the usual post-Christmas pleasantries and just when I thought the call would be wrapped up there was another breath but this time it wasn’t mine. On the other end of the line there was a deep, audible breath followed by the words “I have your scan results in front me”. Never a good sign but I kept on breathing until the words ‘liver’, ‘lesion’ and ‘MRI’ followed in the next sentence. HIIIIIICCCCCCCCUUUUUUUPPPPP. Bugger.
At the time of initially writing this, I didn’t even know if this lesion was cancerous or just a funny lump (the liver is prone to funny lumps and my family genes make me prone to all sorts of lumpiness) so I was just plodding on and trying to navigate through January like everyone else. I felt like I’d landed on a snake square without knowing if it’s a long snake that takes me all the way back to the start or a short one that I can get past if I roll a six. On the plus side, I wasn’t worrying about pensions or retirement plans and I sought out joy in a way that seemed almost unheard of in January (hint: I did not queue up at a gym to feel sweaty and defeated in front of beautiful strangers).
As a side note to the liver lesions, I’m having a hell of a time with my ears. Long time readers will remember that I started getting incredibly itchy inner ears around the time I started my immunotherapy which, more recently, was diagnosed as eczema. After applying drops I started to get a sound in my ears which can only be described as the dawn chorus if it was piped in to my ears down a long metal tube. Now, you might thing bird song is not the worst thing to have playing constantly in your ear (just my left ear, for some reason) but when it’s the middle of the night and your brain thinks that the sound in your ear means it is time to get up it is, well, unsettling.
I have since learned that this sound is potentially a form of tinnitus which is, again potentially, caused by a problem in my ear that is, once more potentially, a fungal infection. So, just in case the constant flatulence, regular trips to the toilet, massive scars and bruising from insulin injections doesn’t make me irresistible enough, I now have mushrooms growing in my ears that make my brain think I’m locked in an aviary 24/7. Oh, and just in case you haven’t been paying attention, I have a mild phobia of birds so, yeah, there’s that. If the fungal infection clears up (more drops) then there is a chance that the birds will fly away but there’s about as much chance that the tinnitus is here to stay – no more than I deserve after years of punishing my ear drums at brilliantly loud gigs (je ne regret rien).
Now, after the MRI scan and then the PET-CT scan that was ordered as a follow up, the various experts have crowded around my records like comedy doctors with CDs strapped to their foreheads and come up with a couple of nuggets for me. The lesion on my liver has set up a second base camp on my bowel like a tiny little explorer with a backpack full of flags which means something is rotten in the state of my abdomen. In terms of next steps, there are a series of options which, in order of preference, goes a little something like this;
- C-Kit Testing – this involves taking a sample from an old tumour of mine that they have in storage (who knew? Not me) and seeing if it responds well to a new type of treatment so that, if it does, I can be moved across to this from my current immunotherapy treatment.
- Clinical Trials – Take a look to see if I’m eligible for any clinical trials of new medications currently running, something I was denied in 2020 as everyone turned their attention to curing COVID.
- Surgery – if the above don’t work then we will see if the hepatobiliary team in Plymouth will have a go at hacking me open to remove the offending areas.
- Surgery in London – if the Plymouth team can’t hack it then I can be referred to the team that sorted me out at King’s College Hospital or even the Royal Marsden (la-de-dah).
- Chemo – the last resort and it would really be a hit and hope because chemotherapy doesn’t really work particularly well with melanoma I’m told.
Options, then. I have options and while I hope number 1 comes up trumps, at least I’m not putting all my money on one horse and sweating on the result. So, here we are 2024 – mushrooms and birds in my ears, ‘something’ on my liver and bowel, and hiccups all over the place. Add to that a drain blocked at the back of my house with the ‘waste’ of humans that don’t live in my house, being hit in the head twice by my wife in one day (one hoover and one fridge door) and a full tub of double cream jumping out off the top shelf of the fridge and, well, exploding, and it’s been a turbulent start to the year. But we’re still laughing, still looking forward to fun things (Denmark and Sweden already done this year with Fatboy Slim and France still to come) and being grateful for the things we have like logs to put on the fire, food for our bellies and jobs that pay the bills. I’m just wondering when my ear is going to fly South for the winter….
Oh, and you may be wondering why it’s taken me, the arch over-sharer, an age to write any of this down and let you know. Well, I thought I’d try keeping it to myself so that every conversation didn’t revolve around the question “how are you?” and the head tilts were kept to a minimum – it felt like a New Year’s resolution that I could stick to. The thing is, I’m not particularly good at pretending to be one thing on the outside and actually being something else on the inside so it was becoming pretty exhausting which is, needless to say, no good for the old immune system. Do less, rest more, live in the present, live for the moment, smell the daisies, take your time, hurry up. That’s where I’m at. I think. I’ll let you know next time. And there will be a next time.
Roland Monger 