Just a little update to let you know Rich is ok but still in hospital. The first half of the week (post op) was really good and we thought he'd be home quite quickly. He then went downhill on Thursday night, it seems that waking up a bowel that's been snoozing for nearly a year can be quite a painful experience. He was put back on the drip on Friday as he was getting dehydrated. He's exhausted from not sleeping more than a few hours at a time so snoozing whenever he can betwe

Bonjour. A little update, as things have progressed very quickly this week. It would appear that I shall be having the liver tumour (along with about 30% of my liver) removed on Monday. As in, the day after tomorrow. Yikes. The sentence was handed down earlier this week when Bekky and I went to see the liver surgeon in London. The MRI and CT scans I had undergone the previous week showed a very modest reduction in the size of the liver tumour, no current sign of cancer in the

My last proper blog update was in early November, a week or so before bowel surgery, but that’s not to say there hasn’t been plenty going on since. That said, the plenty in question has, as you can imagine, been almost entirely cancer-oriented. Recovery, hospitals, scans, chemo, meetings, community nurse visits, pills and potions, minor surgery and many, many, many hours spent sitting in assorted hospital waiting rooms. However, in between waiting rooms, Bekky, myself and the

I finally escaped the clutches of The Conquest Hospital last Wednesday evening (thanks, in no small part, to my friend Simon Aylett who provided me with an excellent escape kit in a small box marked "Top Secret" containing, among other things, a very convincing disguise, a roll of fake bank notes, some balloons of various shapes and sizes, a polystyrene Spitfire and a small pot of goo which makes an amusing fart noise when you prod it – all invaluable). I was kept in for 15 d

So here we are! Finally, for the first time since being admitted to hospital nearly 2 weeks ago, I feel well enough to pen a bit of an update. In a nutshell, the chemo tablets gave me a severe and potentially life-threatening side-effect called Chemotherapy-Induced Colitis. This is not to be recommended. My understanding is that my guts basically just gave up, which led to monumental, torrential, unending diarrhoea and a fair bit of vomiting too. Not to mention pain. And

When chemo goes wrong