March 4th 2008:Cycle 1, day 1

I had day one of my new 2008 chemo regime yesterday, March 4th, and if each session is like this one, they can shove it up their arse.

Why do hospitals insist on making an already stressful time of your life increasingly difficult? As I understand it, the Labour Government have pumped billions into the nhs to make the patient-treatment experience altogether better. Terms like 'seemless delivery' and 'patient focussed' seem to spring to mind as the new watchwords of our nhs. I also understand that cancer services are allegedly second to none. Well, if that's the case, none must have come a pretty poor first.

I had an appointment for 1:15pm yesterday for my chemo. After enduring the beaureaucracy inherent in the nhs system, I got to my chemo ward at 4:30pm to be told that my chemo would not be there for at least another hour. Never mind, go have a cup of tea luv. So I did and I had another, and another. I returned to ward 5 at 5:45pm just as my bags of chemo rolled up.

I left the hospital at 9:30pm. 8 hours spent at a hospital dedicated to cancer services for 21/2 hours of chemotherapy. If you include travel time I was out of the house for over 11 hours.

What a joke.

Anyway, the chemo adminstered was gemcitibane and oxalyplatin. This is third line treatment for teratoma and has a 20% chance of putting me in remission. In my case it is actually fourth line treatment, but I am not quibbling and I still seem to have the same 20% chance of going into remission. I have to say that this combination of drugs do hit hard and do hit fast. This is my fourth go around with chemo and I have never felt this ill, this quickly after any standard chemo cycle. Even the high-dose chemo in 2000 took about 24 hours to hit, this treatment was having its effects felt some 30 minutes into the infusion.

I feel rough. My bones ache, my knees feel too big for my legs and someone seems to have coated my tongue in aluminium. That's what it tastes like anyway. I've got another 11 of these infusions over the next eighteen or so weeks and I am not sure the flesh will be strong enough, no matter how willing the spirit.

How far should we push ourselves to stay alive? Is any price worth the chance, even a 20% chance, of gaining another year on earth?

I have to say yes. I don't care the price, the pain, the vomiting cost I am required to pay to get one more year with my kids and my wonderful wife because I will gladly do it ten times over to get another decade. I was told I was dead 13 years ago and I defied the odds to relapse again and again and I continue to defy the odds to this date. Chemo has kept me one step ahead of my disease and my death, I am the Dead Man, a Dead Man talking.