Blog

#30 Chemo & Covid

Considering we’ve been in isolation, time has flown since my last blog. I can’t believe I’ve been NED – no evidence of disease – for 7 weeks now. I’m still on a high! Or maybe that’s because it was just 4/20 day 🤷‍♀️😂

So life goes on… Chemo continues “forever” according to doctors. But they also told me I had incurable cancer, so I’m hoping to prove them wrong once again. I’ve now completed 27 rounds of chemo in nearly 16 months. And luckily, we’ve sorted out the issue causing my low platelets and delayed chemo. As of last week they were back up over 100 for the first time in about 5 months, which means I’ll be consistently having chemo every fortnight again. I’m really lucky that my only side effect at the moment is a yuk taste in my mouth. And even then, it’s only for about 48 hours once I’m disconnected from Baxter – so usually on a Wed/Thurs.

Some of you may have seen my article on the Bowel Cancer Australia website or social media page last month. I’d written it late last year and actually forgot all about it until they contacted me a few days prior to let me know they were highlighting my story on their Instagram page. I’m really glad I did it, but it definitely brought back some memories for me. And not good ones. You can read my story through the link below.

https://www.bowelcanceraustralia.org/kick-ass/keely-m

One thing we had been thinking about recently (even before my great results!) was trying to work out our options for having kids. At this stage, the most logical and safest option might be surrogacy. But it’s not an easy process and without knowing anyone personally who has done it, it makes it even harder to know if it’s the right thing for us to do. But I know one thing for sure, the best time to look into this is probably NOT in the middle of a worldwide pandemic!

Speaking of Covid-19… I can’t say how many times I’ve read on cancer patient’s social media accounts, “I haven’t come this far, only to be beaten by a virus.” And I 100% agree. I should be out celebrating being cancer free right now, after 14 months of dealing with it. Instead, I am currently staying home all day everyday and have been since my last social outing on the 14th of March (except for hospital visits obviously). It’s been a very strange time for the world but one thing that cancer has done for me, is give me a leg-up on everyone else about how to self isolate! I was wearing a face mask before 90% of the population was! (Hence why mine is pretty 😍) But one extra annoying thing about coronavirus is that I spent my birthday in isolation. It couldn’t have been more different from my birthday last year – where I spent the entire day socialising. Out for breakfast, lunch and dinner with my closest family and friends! Anthony did his absolute best to make it a fun birthday for me and a 3 hour zoom date with my besties definitely helped too! As did the virtual chat with all our friends singing me happy birthday, while I cut into the love heart cake Anthony made for me ❤ It wasn’t a traditional birthday, but it’s definitely one I’ll remember for a long time, and I’m so grateful to be able to see another birthday! We are really lucky that Anthony’s birthday fell just before all this happened and just after my great results. So we still got to have one hell of a celebration back in early March! That celebration included cakes for me from Anthony that read: 4 days cancer free! It was a wonderful weekend with family and our close friends and makes up for me missing out on my surprise birthday party that Anthony had planned for me. Since that couldn’t be refunded, at least we have something to look forward to once this is all over!

Another thing we have to look forward to is our overseas holidays to Thailand, Vietnam and Key West. We should currently be in Vietnam 😭 Crazy to think that only 6 weeks ago we were still planning holidays and then suddenly the world basically went into lockdown. Since most of the airlines and hotels are only doing credits/vouchers, we will need to reschedule for next year sometime. Hopefully by 2021, life might return to some kind of normality. Whatever that means.

Overall, self isolation has been pretty good for me – apart from really missing my family and close friends. Alternating between days where I feel like I accomplish a lot, to days where I sit on the couch all day watching Netflix! On nice days I’ve been getting out to exercise – mostly walking around the footy oval or walking to the beach. Other days I stay inside and do virtual pilates classes with Elyse (Studio 3 Australia – give it a go! hehe) and even challenged myself to do a Ubound class the other day. And I did it without stopping – YAY! Considering I used to teach it years ago, I thought for sure I’d struggle getting through it. Same with dancing. I’ve been doing some online ballet classes with the Australian Ballet too. See, there are some bonuses to being self-isolated after all and I’m slowly getting back to my pre-cancer self 🤩

• 

• 

•