Fighting Cancer with my Family and Friends at Relay For Life 17

Greetings friends. This is a special weekend where we remember those people we have lost to cancer over the years and encourage and embrace those of us who are still fighting this horrible disease.

As you can see on the photo, the team that my daughters created is called Early Birds. That’s because those who get tested and find out early that they have cancer are much more likely to survive and have a good outcome than those who don’t. I am so proud to say that due to my pushing over the last year and a bit, 17 people have had PSA tests and as well as knowing they do not have prostate cancer and in one case no breast cancer, they now have a baseline to allow them to catch it early if they do get prostate cancer like me and their survival rate will go up dramatically if they get a little blood test every year.

You will see the number 17 on the back and my daughter’s name on the bottom of the shirt, which was designed and made by her company Empire Promo. The 17 is made up of the names of the people I mentioned above, family and friends that our team is going to spend today honouring, all night and into the morning walking around a track at Millennium Institute on Auckland’s North Shore. You can see there are a lot of names and with a few late additions to the team there would be more if there had been time.

So today and tomorrow we will be walking to honour our people, to help fund research for accessible cures that save lives and don’t require that people sell their homes to pay for treatment, have somewhere to stay if they are coming to Auckland from out of town, like some of the great people I met when I was having radiation treatment at Mercy Hospital, and to thank those of you who donated to our cause, for your generosity. Whilst we do enjoy the event, the camaraderie and activities, we are here for only one reason, which is to save lives.

If you are one of the many people who donated to my account I want to thank you sincerely for your contribution. This is my 4th Relay and my second as a cancer patient. I am 25% short on my target of $1,000. If you would still like to donate, it isn’t too late and you can do so on my Relay For Life page here. I suspect most of you donated either for me (which is very humbling) and/or because of challenges you and people you care about have faced with cancer. I will dedicate laps to each of you and yours and especially to some very good friends who are still fighting the fight and aren’t in a condition to make it today. You know who you are.

I am planning to post a Facebook Live video at some stage so those of you who are friends with me on Facebook will be able to see a little of the event. For the rest, I will put something on YouTube after the event so you can see it too.

I won’t go on. You can follow me on Twitter under the handle of BluesBro, there will be some photos and tweets there as the weekend goes on. If you see them, please let me know. It would be great to share the event with you.

I do also want to send out a special thanks to my friends and colleagues at the New Zealand Transport Agency and Auckland Transport who have supported me in so many ways to date including donations, but much more than that. It hasn’t been the easiest of years and with awesome people giving me encouragement and helping me out during the tougher times, it has given me strength and Hope. 

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Day One External Beam Radiation for Prostate Cancer

I was all geared up to start on Monday 7 December, but it turned out that they had several people starting with both chemo and radiation, whereas I’m just doing radiation, so they changed it to Thursday 3rd December. Minor problem, I was going to be in Christchurch so we met in the middle and yesterday morning I was up at 05:30 and on my way to Mercy Hospital joining the early morning peak traffic hydrating from a bottle of water I had to finish by the time I was about half way there.

When you have radiation treatment you have to have exactly the right amount of fluid in your bladder and your bowel needs to be empty. The water helps push your organs out of the way and stops them getting hit by the radiation beams. If you don’t have that right, they’ll take you off the table to drink more or have a bowel movement (one way or another) and then you have to wait while someone else goes ahead of you as they are treating around 100 cancer patients a day!

They told me this happens to everyone around 6 times during their treatment and I didn’t want that being me. This involves changing your diet, for me it means drinking a lot more water than normal (apparently I’m in good company, in that most men live their lives in a state of dehydration) and avoiding any foods that can create wind, because gas also impacts on the shape of your bowel. If anyone wants details, I can share them but the list makes it very difficult to eat at restaurants as I found in Christchurch.

So it was with a sense of trepidation that a. I would arrive at Mercy Hospital in the right bodily state and b. that I would arrive there on time.

Once I got there I was sent downstairs where I was issued with my lava lava in a nice yellow tulip colored bag, got changed and escorted to the control panel outside the radiation room and then into the room where it all happens.

The 2 machines on the side make up the CT scanner. When I was prepped I had an MRI and a CT scan to measure the size, shape and volume of my prostate. The CT scanner in  this room is there to make sure that you are lying in exactly the same position as you were when they took the first image. That way they don’t kill healthy parts of your body. The part at the top is where the radiation beams from.

You lie on the table with your head on a little support and your knees on the blue half pipes. They prod you into place so that you line up as above and then leave the room. Like most scanning systems they have microphones and speakers so they can stay in touch with you while you are in the room.

Once they get started the CT scanner and the radiation head rotate around your body in one 360 degree circle. It felt like something out of a science fiction movie and just as I was settling in, thinking “this is interesting” it was all over, they came in and told me I was done and I could go. The whole treatment itself took about 1 1/2 minutes.

I got dressed, went to my car and drove to work for a $4 Subway breakfast sub and a coffee that I had been hanging out for (not from Subway).

Then something hit me like being knocked in the head by an out of control snowboarder in a white out. I felt overwhelmed for a couple of hours. I think it was all the underlying stress that I had been ignoring and the release that the first bout of radiation was completed, I had drunk enough, followed the diet strictly, hadn’t embarrassed myself by having to get  up off the table, all the time reading books and Doctor Google and thinking about side effects, planning for succession at work if I needed to call in sick, all the things I’m trying to get done at work before the Christmas break, a friend who had just passed away during the week, reassuring my family and more. I was in a funk.

I worked my way out of that and had a good day in the office (my colleagues have been awesome), went home and once again felt exhausted. I ended up crashing on the bed for a couple of hours after comfort eating some nuts and my mandatory Kiwi Crush (a pleasant part of my treatment diet).

Now a day later and I’m still feeling a bit tired, but much better knowing I am on my way to dealing with this cancer. I’m getting focused on the future. Things like adding to my bucket list (number one is of course beating the cancer) and looking forward to Relay for Life. My kids have started Team Early Birds. More on that later.