Monday, its Santa run day, which means toast, coffee and car juggling on the drive. This time it also means checking to see if my missing blood results are in. They are not. It pisses me off but it is what it is, time to go to London to do the Santa drop to my sister. I drive off with my eldest daughter beside me into the still murky dark morning. Its a route I ‘ve done many times before, M1, M25, M4 and jiggly bit at the end and there I am. About two hours give or take depending on how many miles of road works there are and restricted speed limits.
The journey goes okay, and we arrive about 10:45. We sit in and chat for a while. I have a look at the landline phone as it appears not to be working but cannot see anything obviously wrong apart from the lack of a dialling tone, one of the more crucial elements of a working phone. I contact the BT help bot and get it to test the landline. Within 15 minutes it comes back saying it has tested the line and found a fault so it wants to send an engineer. I reply indicating “soon as” and in thirty minutes it it comes back with an appointment time for the next morning. I rely the information to my sister so she can be in just in case they need to come onto the property. I ring her mobile and find it is not charged and goes straight to voice mail so we put it on charge, set the time and date display and then everything is hunky dory. So with luck by Tuesday afternoon everything will be sorted and my sister can give us a ring on the landline. We stay till early afternoon, exchange presents and then head back to the motorway.
The drive back goes better than the drive down and even with a quick comfort break we arrive back just as it is getting dark. A cup of coffee and I settle into the evening, doing a crossword, putting the decoration storage boxes back in the loft and stringing the Christmas cards in the lounge. I watch a film and write the blog and what I am really doing is passing time to midnight. Its the last time that my missing bloods can turn up. Tomorrows oncology review is going to be a farce without the PSA result so if its not available I foresee weeks of pissing around ahead. Still perhaps there will be a midnight miracle or the oncologist will have the results.
STOP PRESS 12:30 THE RESULTS ARE IN:
Creatine, Alb and Potassium have all slipped out of the normal range this time, Urea has slipped further out of range in an upward direction, eGFR (kidney function) has slipped a bit more below 60, the norm. The biggest issue is the 0.9 rise in my PSA level. That’s almost double the rise in the same length of time from last time. So that’s an increasing rate. My guess is that on this alone they will give me more scans and if they are the same suggest I start new chemo. It is what I expected. Hoped for better but the logic in the biochemistry is relentless and undeniable. So review with the oncologist tomorrow and then Christmas, after that a new year and new challenges. I’m off to bed, perchance to dream.
