Goodbye Taxotere and Carboplatin

Chemotherapy is over!

It has me looking forward.

I know I still have a lot to go through - but I’m in recovery mode now. I’ll start feeling better, not worse (well, until I have reconstructive surgery, but I’m not in an enormous hurry for that).

It is spring. I love spring. I love the feeling of renewal, the longer days, the smell of the rain and the warming earth, the colour green and flowers. I’ve been showered in congratulatory flowers. I have flowers surrounding me both inside and outside the house. It is wonderful. Thank you everyone for the flowers and the beautiful, kind messages.

I am ecstatic that taxotere and carboplatin have exited my life. I hope I never have to face them again. After each round of chemo you never quite get back to where you were and my bone marrow took a beating in round 5. I felt quite sick and tired post round 6 but I took comfort from knowing I would start moving uphill and this time I’d keep going!

While I was in the steroid induced “wakeful at night and fatigued in the day phase” I filled my time listening to audiobooks and the radio. I love listening to Kim Hill on RNZ and spent the Saturday morning post chemo in bed listening to her show. The week prior and week after chemo she substituted for Susie on Morning Report, so I felt like I’d had a bit of a treat. She’s so bloody badass. Clever, articulate, well read and relentless. Kim Hill is my spirit animal.

I have always been someone who looks forward, sets goals and achieves them. It often prevents me from living in the moment. I think the most wonderful thing about travelling and going to the gym is that you get to live very much in the moment. This illness has forced me to stop and observe on the days I have been most sick. I have been feeding the birds and am currently watching them have a riotous eating frenzy through the french doors. I’ve learnt a lot helping Eva with a school project about refugees from Venezuela crossing into Columbia. I enjoy taking note of weird facts from things I hear or read for the weekly quizzes I have been making for my workmates for Friday night Zoom drinks. I am loving caring for my planters of flowers and herbs and this week I was well enough to plant out my new raised garden - inspired by the amazing raised French gardens of David Heaney at his Matakana house.

At the end of February BD (before diagnosis) my business partner and I joined my friend Mike (a commercial property expert and a fellow trustee of the Dust Palace Charitable Trust) to look at a number of potential commercial premises. The lease on our current law firm premises is due to expire next month.

In 2015 the two senior partners of our law firm both retired at the same time. To help extract them from the lease of the extravagant and too large premises the firm was in at the time, my business partner and I agreed to take on the last remaining space in the same building and fit it out. Let’s just say there was a reason why it was the last remaining space in the building. It was some 13 floors below our old premises and without the beautiful harbour views we’d come to take for granted. Instead we have had a view of the Viaduct with the Downtown Carpark Building looming large in the foreground. Since 2015 we’ve wanted the harbour view back.

It has not been easy for my business partner and me since we became partners. We have had some really tough times - with the sudden losses of our practice manager, Kathie and then a few years later on the same day, David Heaney QC - being the most traumatic. We’ve also had to fix a number of problems we inherited with the firm.

Before I was diagnosed with cancer we had fixed all the historic inherited issues and had a close, functional and supportive team. We were very much looking forward to the future. We found a premises with the harbour view we missed so much and COVID had us negotiating a new lease in a tenant’s market. I am grateful that I was largely at peace with the firm when I was diagnosed and felt relaxed about handing over my work to my team. I could trust that they had my back.

So looking forward - we have an office move at the end of next month. It has been delayed by COVID-19 but since we moved to alert level 3, work on the office fit-out has recommenced and seems to be going well. This is the view from my new office.

I’m looking forward to getting out of lockdown, returning to work, going out to find new work and having a party to celebrate our new office opening.

I hope I get to go on holiday. I have two planned. One in December and one in January. I have no idea whether we’ll be set free by then.

I also want to have a party mid 2022 to celebrate the end of my treatment and the removal of my porta-cath. Hopefully 90% of Aucklanders are double vaxed by then!

I had my first COVID-19 jab 3 weeks ago (the weekend before my last round of chemo). I was expecting to feel like crap because my flu shot post surgery made me feel pretty yucky. Nothing happened, not even a sore arm. My second jab is booked for 14 November. It looks like I am eligible for a third shot 8 weeks after my second (due to my immunocompromised state). I shall find out about that this week when I see my oncologist.

I started a new hobby of trolling vaccine deniers on LinkedIn, which amused me, but have decided to retire because the people I was engaging with were selfish and irrational and for want of a better word, mean. I have quite firm views on vaccination. There are a number of things you should willingly do to be part of society -according to the rules of Frana you should pay tax, be vaccinated and abide by the laws of the land.

This long Labour weekend I have been troubled by an “ailment of the day” (on Saturday and Sunday) which has caused me to call my oncologist. Hopefully they don’t come in threes as I’m a bit over it. On Saturday by left foot blew up. On Sunday I developed a lump in my left arm. I have to have a scan tomorrow (Tuesday) to rule out blood clots. I don’t think it is clotting. I have no pain or redness. I think my body is just having trouble expelling the large amount of excess fluid that is a side effect of chemotherapy.

I start radiation treatment this week. Treatment is every weekday for 15 days starting on 28 October. I’ll be finished in mid November. After that I‘ll have nine 3 weekly immunotherapy rounds of treatment left (but they won’t make me sick) and at some stage soon I’ll start hormone treatment (as my cancer was oestrogen and progesterone positive as well as HER+).

I’ll be able to start work again next year once I have regained some of the strength chemotherapy has stripped from me. Speaking of strength I started daily walks again on Wednesday but stopped when my foot swelled up. I plan to start weight training again soon. I have felt a definite increase in my energy levels this past week. I made sponge cake and cooked a nice beef casserole yesterday.

Yes there are lots of things to look forward to but until then I shall continue to try and live in the moment and take joy from the ducks that come to visit every evening when we sit down for dinner, my gardens, cooking, Kim Hill, my limpet like cat, my family being safe together in lockdown, spring flowers, books and magazines, friends on the phone and via Zoom, meetings with my workmates via Ipad, walks in the sun, hair growing back, being alive and feeling better every day. Good bye Taxotere and Carboplatin. Thank you for helping save my life and please don’t be offended when I say “I hope you never pass through my veins again!”

Here are some photos of the flowers I received after finishing chemotherapy, the bread recipe I have spent time perfecting, my constant cat companion, our visiting ducks, the pear and ginger upside down cake I made, one of my magnolia trees and some of my potted herbs and tulips.

Thanks for your support, it means a lot to me. Onwards and upwards! X