Pancreatic Cancer

So, the radiotherapy went on for nearly six weeks, and certainly in, during the initial phases I was sort of, “Oh this is, this is nothing.” People warning me about how tough it was, and oh it didn’t seem to be affecting me at all, and, “Aren’t I, aren’t I clever and aren’t I good”. And low and behold of course after a few weeks it began to get quite tough.

 

I was getting nausea, I was getting very tired. And I ended up, by the time it was finished I was really very, very exhausted. I was, and it took a couple of weeks for me to recover my energy. And probably a bit longer than that for me to get my appetite back. And indeed, I’ve now, it’s now about eight weeks since the treatment finished and I’ve still got a few side effects in terms of pains in my tummy, particularly at night, and so radiotherapy is quite a tough option.

 

And, but the first sort of three weeks or so I was absolutely fine. I was running round all over the place, going to watch my son play cricket and, and doing normal stuff and thinking, “Oh, this isn’t too bad.” And then all of a sudden it, it hit me. And the extreme tiredness was just, just amazing. And by the end of it I was really dragging myself in. In fact I wasn’t driving myself in any more.

 

 

That was six weeks.

 

 

One, no, that was every day.

 

 

Except for weekends. I got weekends off.

 

 

I did. I had, it happened later on, but I actually got gastritis because of the area that they were focusing the beam on. So it’s like an ulceration in the oesophagus. So it was actually causing pain on eating and I had to have drugs to, to combat that…

 

I was given a drug to take which I think provides a coating, and that eased the, the pain. So I had pain on eating. So I had actually continued to lose weight through the chemotherapy treatments and I really didn’t want to lose any more weight. So not being able to eat again was, was something I wanted to avoid. So, but it was cleared up pretty quickly. My consultant got on the case soon enough and that was cleared. And I have, sometimes that flares up again. If I’ve eaten something spicy it aggravates it. So, but I know what to do. So I just dose myself up with the drug again and, and in a couple of days I’m fine.