It's all a bit real now

This week I’ve been getting ready for my next surgery and visited The Yorkshire Cancer Centre, where I’ll be having my radio-iodine treatment. Up until now I think I’d managed ok with the diagnosis. I still hadn’t managed to watch the DVD that my Cancer Nurse had given me. It’s not that I didn’t want to, believe me I do, I think it will help but I’m a little bit afraid. As soon as I read something or watch something related to my illness it makes it real. Keeping busy, distracting myself helped to make everything feel normal...like it wasn’t really happening. Yes, I’ve been writing the blog but that’s another thing...I offload everything onto here and then I forget about it.  I still get those waves of anxiety but I have found techniques that help with that too.  

So whilst I haven’t yet watched the DVD because I’ve been a little afraid to, I also had another, perfectly reasonable excuse...I had become addicted to Line of Duty. After all the hype we decided to give in and watch it and oh my god, why am I only watching this now. Most nights we watch an episode and for most of it I sit with my mouth hanging open, the other night my dinner actually fell out of my mouth!! When Kate from the Butterfly Thyroid Cancer Trust emailed me to see if I’d watched it, I was completely honest with her...I’ve become addicted to Line of Duty and I cannot stop watching it! I don’t think she was impressed with me at all.

On Wednesday I visited The Yorkshire Cancer Centre. This is where I’ll have my radio-iodine treatment. We live almost an hour away from the centre so I drove us there. I actually think I was more nervous about driving there than the appointment itself. I’m not great at navigating the city and if you ever see a car crossing several lanes of a roundabout and cutting the traffic up, well then that would be me. We're lucky we made it in one piece to be honest.

The Yorkshire Cancer Centre is amazing. It’s like walking into an art gallery. It’s modern, bright and has cool art all over the walls and hanging from the ceiling. There are shops and most importantly...there’s coffee!  What made it real was the people. Everyone there was there for a purpose, to fight and beat this horrible disease. There were people who looked like they were fighting hard and some that appeared to be at the beginning of their journey and looked absolutely terrified. Everywhere I looked there were leaflets, posters and reminders of why I was there. The appointment was long, first they weigh you...I’ll just add here that their scales were very wrong! Then they take your bloods and then you go and meet your consultant and allocated cancer nurse. It’s a lot to take in, we talked about the results of my first operation and the radio-iodine treatment. 

Radio-iodine is a radioactive pill that I simply take with water. All sounds straight forward apart from I will then become radioactive and have to stay in hospital until my radioactivity is at a safe level to go home. About 3-4 days. The radio-iodine kills any remaining cells and ensures all the cancer has gone. The side effects might be a sore throat and tiredness but I should be OK, just bored! What makes it tricky is you cannot be around children or pregnant women after. This for us was going to be a logistical nightmare and I felt really stressed. There had been so much information to take in and now I was faced with having to be away from Lily for 2 weeks...and where would I go to keep her safe? The team were fantastic and I felt confident that I was getting the best care. But I couldn’t help but now feel overwhelmed, I needed coffee and on a day like today that would most definitely have to include cake! 

It had been a crazy day. We went back to the car and so began our journey back home of cutting people up on the roundabout and shouting some choice words at a guy in a Range Rover...I’ll point out that he was in the wrong “I have Cancer you know...I’m extremely vulnerable and fragile!!” I didn’t shout this at all...I felt it better to communicate with sign language instead!