Grounds for optimism and a fantastic bike ride

Today I started my fourth 28-day cycle of treatment for the metastatic breast cancer with which I was diagnosed in April.

I appear to be responding well to the combination of drugs that I’m on. The blood test results I got yesterday in advance of treatment today were all encouraging. They showed that everything that needs to be down is down – including the all-important breast cancer tumour marker – and everything that needs to be up – including my haemoglobin level and white blood cell count – is up. Also, I continue to be totally pain free.

I no longer take anything for granted. I know things can change quickly in this game but there are grounds to believe that this treatment might keep the cancer in check for a good while. The awful thing about the beast that is advanced breast cancer is that you can never tell how long “a good while” might be. That said, there’s no doubting that we’re in as good a place as we could optimistically expect to be at this particular point.

The breast cancer I was treated for in 2015/16 has spread to my bones and bone marrow.

The implication on the haemoglobin and neutrophil front from these latest blood test results is that my bone marrow is under less stress due to the action of the drugs on the cancer. The debilitating pain I had in my right hip vanished long ago and may not even have been cancer. On top of all that, there is now the possibility that what we thought was cancer in a lower vertebra and was causing intense pain initially may also not have been. So the focus is on my bone marrow and on two vertebrae in my upper spine.

All things going well, as with the last cycle I won’t see the consultant for the whole of this cycle. And I’m down from two to one mid-cycle injections of filgrastim, the white blood cell booster. Also, with advanced breast cancer you have periodic PET-CT scans to determine whether the cancer has spread. Given the blood test results and the fact that I’m in no pain means we’re delaying my first repeat scan by a couple of months.

It’s been a great four weeks. We’ve had a lovely holiday in Spain*. Our two boys got their first-choice accommodation at the universities they’ll be heading off to in September. I’ve taken unpaid leave from work to allow me to make the most of the summer; work has been incredibly supportive in light of my diagnosis.  I’m continuing to do early-morning swims with friends at Tooting Lido, one of the country’s largest outdoor swimming pools which happens to be a 15-minute walk from where I live in south-west London (see photo from this morning – the water was cold despite the sun). Also, I’m planning a trip to the US in September to visit two aunts, one of whom is also my godmother.

The highlight, however, has been cycling the Prudential Ride London – Surrey 100-mile bike ride at the beginning of August. Given the circumstances, I couldn’t be happier.

Ride London was meant to be the icing on the cake of a summer of cycling. However, I had to pull out of the two big events I had planned to do in June and July and Ride London turned out to be a big event in itself.

When I got my diagnosis in April, my head was not in a good space. I also had anaemia which meant I very easily got tired. At best, come August, I thought I might be in a position to try the shorter, 46-mile version of the route. In the end, I got my head in gear. In addition, a blood transfusion gave me an energy boost and the confidence to get out and start training again.

I was delighted I was able to do this ride – as you can tell by photo of me at the finish line at Buckingham Palace. It’s on closed roads, some 32,000 cyclists take part and while it’s a bit chaotic, it’s a great event. This is the third consecutive year I’ve done it.

It’s quite hard to get your head round the fact that you can comfortably cycle some 100 miles while having advanced breast cancer. I guess I have to thank modern medicine; a consultant oncologist who clearly thinks that if you think you can do something you should give it a go; incredible support from friends and cycling buddies who took me out on training rides, encouraged me, and had more confidence in me than I had in myself; and, I have to concede, curiousity (can I do this?) and extreme bloody-mindedness (I can do this. I will do this.) on my part.

Sometimes you feel like you’re two different people living two different lives running in parallel. One’s busy training for and doing 100-mile bike rides and the other is undergoing treatment for and living with an ultimately incurable disease. But of course it’s all just you.

There was no guarantee whatsoever I’d be in this position at this stage. It’s early days and, as with anything in life, nothing lasts forever. We just have to embrace the good times while we can.

*I had to self-inject filgrastim on Aug 6th and 20th and I didn’t want to traipse through cauldron-like Europe with injections that needed to be kept refrigerated. So we left the second injection in the fridge at home and went on a ten-day road trip in central and southern Spain from Aug 9th to 20th, during which we spent lots of time with various sets of good friends Andy and I first met when we both lived in Spain in the mid 1980s. We couldn’t have had a nicer time.