MCL and Me

A non-medical post, which must be a good sign. However for those who hang on my every word of my medical condition: This week I came off the gabapentine nerve pain killers completely and have had no twinges from my shingles which themselves are fading fast and barely visible as light blemishes around my middle. Back to School Some of you may know that I did a degree with the Open University in the late 1990s in maths and computing subjects. Well I am now back with my old Alma Mater but this time doing my first course where the code for it begins with an A indicating it is in the Arts faculty. Specifically I am embarking upon A215 Creative Writing . This is a second level course but it does not need any pre-requisites as long as people are used to or can cope with studying on their own. Having done a lot of self-study not only with the OU I should be able to cope with the demands in terms of managing my time. After completing NaNoWriMo to write Reunion last year (did I mention I wrote...

Today is the second anniversary of my Bone Marrow Transplant. Or if you prefer it is my immune system's second birthday. Two years on and things are going really rather well. Apart from the little hiccough with shingles last month, since the beginning of this year there has been a steady reduction in medication and a steady return to normal life. Looking back to this time last year things were a bit rough as the steroid withdrawal was causing a problem and I had the beginning of my under active thyroid taking effect. Even so over two years I've only been back in hospital twice ( by a strange coincidence both in August almost exactly a year apart. Trust me I do not use the Queen Elizabeth hospital for my Summer holidays. ) I also passed another small milestone along the way. The 12th September was 900 days since I first started chemo in preparation for the transplant that was to follow a few months later. By this time next year I really should be back to being as normal as I am ...

Welcome to Wales The end of my convalescence was spent with a relaxing weekend in Wales. By happenstance Gareth and I had already decided we were going to go away for a short break somewhere over the August Bank Holiday and it coincided nicely with the end of the sick note for my shingles. We stayed at the Plas Morfa Hotel in Llanon , Ceredigion overlooking Cardigan Bay. As you will see from the pictures the sea was literally a stone's throw from our hotel room. We arrived on the Saturday and just walked along the local beach and had a very nice meal in the hotel on the evening. On the Sunday we did a four mile coastal path walk into the small town of Aberaeron which according to the sign was just four miles away. It was quite a hilly path and I thought I coped pretty well really. It took us 90 minutes to do the walk but later that day we got the bus back and it took 9 minutes. ( Though the view wasn't that good). We had a fish and chip lunch on the front at Aberaeron and afte...

Just a quick shingles situation report. I went to the clinic on Wednesday 18th August and saw the registrar. He had a quick look at the shingles and confirmed the outbreak appears to be over as the lesions have crusted over and started to fade in places. He told me to keep taking the gabapentine for four weeks for the nerve pain. He also reduced my ciclosporin to 10mg twice a day. Assuming we continue the taper as it has been at 10mg per visit then when I next attend clinic on 6th October I should be stopping ciclosporin altogether. ( I hope we don't go down to 5mg not least because that will be really fiddly to measure the liquid in my syringe. ) I was signed off work until 30th August ( though it will be 31st when I can actually go back to work as Monday 30th is a Bank Holiday). The pain from the shingles has been quite intense at times over the last week and I've had to take some co-codamol painkillers between gabapentine doses to help relieve it. Over the last couple of day...

.....is not bold? Ok not a great tag line but my internal sub-editor couldn't resist the alliteration. Oh I should say that this post is rated Potentially Gruesome for pictures of shingles. This time last week I was blogging about my admittance to hospital with shingles. Well for those of you who have not heard by other means such as Twitter, Facebook or the Intermom (that special network of mothers that disseminates information between sons, daughters and the friends thereof far faster then the World Wide Web) I was released from hospital on Monday 9th August which was ahead of the schedule I had initially been told. The reasoning was that we had caught the outbreak early I had had seventy-two hours of intravenous aciclovir and no new lesions had appeared anywhere for forty-eight hours. I was sent home around 14:00 with some gabapentine nerve pain tablets and a ten day course of valaciclovir tablets, which are a form of aciclovir that produce higher levels of the drug in the bloo...

The answer is when it is shingles. I'm writing this blog post from Ward West 5 of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital having been admitted yesterday. It started on Wednesday afternoon, 4th August when I felt an ache in my upper back just below the shoulder blade. Having just worked two eighteen hour days doing a disaster recovery for work, I put it down to having spent too much time sitting in front of a computer screen with my far from perfect posture. The pain persisted throughout Wednesday and Thursday but co-codamol pain killers kept it at bay and I was able to work in the office as normal. I logged on from home on Friday morning as per my usual routine. I started to get a tender sort of burning sensation under the skin in a band around my abdomen and back on the right hand side but it wasn't until there were some spot/lesions on the side of my abdomen where the tenderness and burning was that I made the connection and realised it could be shingles. I tried ringing my GP for an a...

I was at the clinic today , well actually a double clinic as it was haematology and then endocrinology. The visit the phlebotomist to take my blood samples was pretty straight forward and she found a good vein, which is just as well as in total I had 14 phials of blood drawn. Six of these were for a research programme I am participating in where they take samples of blood every few months. I was a bit more apprehensive about this visit than usual because over the last two or three weeks I have had a tenderness and slight swelling on the right side of my chest. Well ok let's not beat about the bush here, my right man boob or moob has been tender and slightly larger than the one on the left. Then I noticed what appeared to be a little lump or to give it the technical name the endocrinologist used a "nubbin". As you might imagine I was not exactly thrilled to make this discovery but I tried to be rational about it and since I had no other problems I decided to wait the coupl...