Just a quick posting whilst I'm eagerly waiting for my flight home.

Feeling not only tired but pulled and pushed in every direction, it's bad enough on the tubes and at the stations, but it's been at the hospital too.

Mind you the highlight of the day was AB about to attempt to step on an escalator coming down when she wished to go up, I didn't tell her, thought it would be quite amusing to watch, I'm kind like that.

The hospital visit this afternoon was a little bit uncomfortable , it turns out the 'shield' is more of a face,neck and shoulder mask. I was told that the actual procedure of fitting it was uncomfortable but tolerable.

It's like a large piece of warm flexible plastic that they cover you with, squeeze it around you and then wait ten minutes for it to tighten and dry.

Your eyes are shut, you do have a hole just big enough for your nose and one for your mouth. It is not nice, there is quite a lot of pressure , it feels claustrophobic and ten minutes seems a long time.

I then went into the ct planning room, where the new mask ( this time with eyeholes cut out) was once agin fitted, fastened down tight and had another ten minutes in a scanner. Keeping calm, very still and trying not to panic when I realised that this would be the format every time I have radiotherapy.

Still , I'm sure others have had far worse. Oh, and had another tattoo.

Start date is 8th May, finish the beginning of June.

Roll on the Summer I say.







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Location:London City Airport

London Calling

An update over the last two days. The PET scan went OK yesterday , 'Katie' was a very lovely nurse and had a good chat with me beforehand. I wasn't a bit perturbed when she came to administer the radioactive dose ( carrying it I a lead box) and very quickly retreated to the safe distance of another room. 45 minutes later I had the scan, and whilst it's a bit uncomfortable and you have to remain absolutely still for 30 minutes ( I know ! Me ! Still ! ) it was ok.

Afterwards I rushed down to small cafe to eat lunch, having had to 'fast' for the previous 12 hours I was starving. The weather was cloudy but not too cold, so walked into the city to meet my bro , who treated me to an afternoon tea at Fortnum and Mason- and very nice it was too.

Today I started early to get to London Zoo when it opened at 10am, thought I would spend most of the day up there, and I'm glad I did, it was worth the visit and distracted me from the clinic appointment late afternoon.

Met a new registrar , who is also lovely , and in fact Dr AT came into see me as she wanted to say hello again😊. It seems as though the scan has showed up the tumour in my neck as a bright glow , in fact both ladies felt my neck and could feel it. We are going ahead with radiotherapy,although there was the beginning of a 'blush' of colour in a lymph node in my abdomen, they felt that they could deal with the neck tumour. They also said it was quite high up , but only a slight risk of damage to the top of one lung, my windpipe and the mass of nerves in my left shoulder.

I've another appointment tomorrow afternoon for a CT planning scan and also to be fitted with a 'shield' ( could also do with a sword and a horse but beggars can't be choosers. ) They need to find a way to keep the neck/ shoulder in exactly the same place every day, so by making a mould I wear at each treatment it makes the process easier.

Should take about a week to plan it all out, so in theory starting the treatment around 9th/10th May for about four weeks but nothing as yet confirmed.

Just looked at my health app on my phone and have done 19,972 steps today , that's a fair amount of walking, and not having slept very well at all last night ( a little anxious!) I'll be in bed early tonight!




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Saturday 22nd April 2017

Here is hoping you all had a good Easter break, I know I did. Lots of family time in our busy house and plenty of 'clearing', tidying up outside jobs as well as long dog walks, tennis matches and gardening works. :-) Plus many chunks of the day where I completely forgot I had cancer, now that's a real bonus.

I did receive a long letter in the post from Dr AG at the Marsden , basically going through exactly the conversation we had had a week or so before, but put in a very upbeat positive way.

Here is an extract...

'I explained that whilst we have seen that patients with BRCA mutations can be more sensitive to the myelosuppressive effects of chemotherapy, I have never seen anyone quite with the degree of myelopsuppression that you have had or has lasted so long. That raised the possibility that you could always have had counts that were below the normal range, even before starting treatment. This might explain why the count remains so suppressed. It is interesting to note that you have never had an admission to hospital with a neutropaenic infection; nor have you ever had any major problems with bruising or bleeding, despite the fact that you play a lot of contact sport.'

It goes on in more detail, but we all knew that nothing about me was ever 'normal' anyway.

Flying out on the 'red eye' on Monday morning, back around 8:30pm on Wednesday. My hope is that I can go ahead with radiotherapy but the PET scan will have the answers to that one.

Least I've managed to cajole my big brother to take me out for afternoon tea Monday and AB is escaping East Anglia (and her day of 'sport'- thats badminton and tennis, plus the odd digging session on the allotment and probably a swim....)to whizz down on the train for a day in the Big Smoke.

Lastly a big THANK YOU to those folks who sponsored the rowing team Seaford Scullers today, we finished our 30 kilometres in two hours four minutes. I was by far the slowest, therefore the others had to row twice as hard to cover for me, but it was a brilliant event. We raised £555.00 in total for Macmillan Jersey.

Oh, and happened to come second in the mixed teams... only beaten by a fitness club team!

Apparently in an earlier session (they run one at 9am and one at 1pm, about 25 teams in each) a team made up of OAPs rowed. All of them either had recovered from cancer or had it, the eldest member being 74, and they didnt come last!! #RESPECT

Wish I could post photos!!!

Happy Easter!

Another mad, muddled, crazy week has passed and thank you for those lovely blog comments, they really do help,  as do all the numerous little texts, emails and good wishes.

On Tuesday I took a call from a Dr AG at the Marsden to say that she had already spoken to AT and she was happy to go ahead and book me in for radiotherapy.

On Thursday I received another call from a different doctor to say they had a semblance of a plan and wanted to give me the heads up.

It goes something like this:-

Royal Marsden

Monday the 24th April , 10am PET scan

Tuesday 25th Clinic Appointment TBC

Wednesday 26th Tattoo/CT appointment TBC

Now even that is not completely plain sailing. If on the PET scan they find extra enlarged nodes( tumours) around the neck they won't go ahead with radiotherapy.

If there are a few other 'hotspot' areas in other places, providing they are small, they will still go ahead.

Obviously ideally I don't want any more nasty discoveries, but will just have to wait and see.

Now if they do give me radiotherapy, it could start as early as the second week of May ( possibly sooner) as the planning for the neck treatment is nowhere near as complicated as it was for my abdomen.

I do not know when it will begin , how long ( how many fractions ) I will have, this will depend on the size of the tumour and how much radiation they can carefully zap into me.

As and when it finishes I will start hormone replacement therapy.

IF, and of course that's a big IF, I cannot have radiotherapy they will start hormone replacement straight away, and fingers crossed it will halt the spread at least, it really would be asking too much for anything else.

I have a few minor issues to sort out, for instance Dr AS (Guy's Hospital)who I saw in London in the Autumn, is coming over to Jersey on the 24th for three days ... typical , I shall be in London! He discovered I had the BRCA 2 gene and I really need to meet up with him again.

The same thing happened in October, I had an appointment in Jersey when I was in London, but fortunately I was lucky enough to get a cancellation and see him at Guys, I'm hoping to do the same thing.

I  have flights booked to go to East Midlands the bank holiday weekend in May to see lots of my family at our yearly reunion in Derbyshire. So things to re arrange and sort out there, I'm certainly not going to miss that!

Although that said I can't sort anything out until my plans re radiotherapy are firmed up, and I wont know until after the PET scan.

Onto less sombre news!

Yikes, this time next week Seaford Scullers will have rowed the equivalent of Sark to Jersey, I do hope I don't end up letting the side down, or embarrassing myself or the team- thanks to everyone for their support I'm pleased to say we have reached our target and have sponsorship of nearly £400!

Don't Quit

When things go wrong as they sometimes will; when the road you're trudging seems all uphill; when the funds are low and the debts are high and you want to smile but you have to sigh; when care is pressing you down a bit, rest, if you must but don't you quit.
Life is strange with it's twists and turns, as everyone of us sometimes learns, and many a failure turns about when they might have won had they stuck it out.
Don't give up though the pace seems slow, and you may succeed with another blow.
Success is failure turned inside out, God's hidden gift in the clouds of doubt.
And you never can tell how close you are, it may be near when it seems so far.
So stick to the fight when you're hardest hit.
Its when things seem worse that you must not quit.

Homeward bound

Thought I would just try to put a few words down whilst it was all still fresh in my mind .
I actually feel far more positive about my CD that I have in a little while. I don't cope very well with the uncertainty of it all, and like a plan of action.

It seems as though after meeting the very lovely Dr AG ( head of oncology and genetics ) or as she said, "the poison and pills lady", that we have a formulation of a plan.

There are three courses of action, well four if you count radiotherapy. Firstly there is chemotherapy , but due to my low white cells this is not the best option for me at this present time.

There are PARP inhibitors ( similar to chemo that I mentioned earlier) , but this also I don't really stand a chance of getting on because of my suppressed immune system.

Plus the fact that there is a very real risk that with treatment my bone marrow cells do not recover at all, and could therefore lead to leukaemia , which really would put a very large spanner in the works.

Thirdly there is something called Hormone treatment, and it works well with certain tumours that are receptive to oestrogen. DR AG has already looked back at my old original tumour and tested it, finding that it was quite highly responsive. The hormone treatment stops the oestrogen and therefore the tumour feeding and growing. In some cases it halts it, in others it completely shrinks it.

You take the hormone treatment via tablets ( cue happy face) . Side effects are hot flushes, mood swings etc, ( well used to that already thank you) and sometimes joint pains.

Dr AG was very informative and explained a lot about the BRCA 2 gene, I said I was surprised and how recently they had discovered it ( 1992) I thought, but she said it was later '92 was BRCA 1 but '94 was the BRCA 2 .

And although it's a bit of a double edged sword in many ways having the gene means the cancer works in a slightly different way to ladies without the gene.

The tumours tend to be more localised and less scattered, so if at all possible can be treated with radiotherapy. Ladies with BRCA 2 are often very chemo sensitive so the drugs are usually very effective.

She suggested that I have a bone marrow test ( in Jersey) we really need to know whether I am making lots of baby bone marrow cells that maybe don't fully develop, or maybe I don't have many in the first place, or the ones I have are not high standard.

I could have just always had a low white cell count and not known.

Either way it's a good idea to see what's going on so we are better informed for further treatments.

With all this information we have the basis of a plan , firstly Dr AG ( and she's far from a drag!) is going to speak to Dr AT ( my radiotherapy doctor, and not as my mum used to say "drat"!) to see if it's feasible for me to have radiotherapy on the tumour in my neck.

If she says yes, then I would need a PET scan ( at the Marsden ) to see if that was the only tumour visible - if it is then she will draw me up a treatment plan for radiotherapy . If there are other tumours that show up on the scan then we will go straight onto hormone therapy.

I would meet with AG again for a six week prescription of a tablet to be taken every day . I can get the tablets in Jersey and even my doctor can prescribe them.
I would then have another scan to see if the tumour (s) have changed in any way. If they haven't there is another hormone drug to try, so all is not lost.

I think one of them is tamoxifen ( breast cancer people take) the other letrozole.

I could be on them for sometime, but if it's working all well and good.

There is one more subject we touched on, and its immunotherapy , there are some new drugs that have been used to treat melanoma, very successfully . Also used on cancer in the kidneys, and now ovarian, it's still early stages but as the doctor said in a couple of years time maybe that option will be available to me. It's only just come off trial and available now on the NHS.

I have to say that I was more than a little apprehensive going into the meeting and thought that I would be met with a certain degree of resignation and inevitability that the disease was too far spread and there was little more they could do, but we listened to lots of very positive points, and real hope that I still had options for further treatment.

Steve was his usual stoic self, and asked questions too, just as well as its rather intense one on one. The sun was shining and so far the flight and accommodation were all fine.

The love, support and prayers continue to sustain me, and I never feel as if I am alone in this particular challenging time in my life, there is always someone out there for me.

Thank you x






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Location:Gatwick Express ...

Hospital & Dogs.....& Boys?

I have heard from the Marsden this week, they called me yesterday and asked me to come in on Friday morning. I booked the flights straight away but because of the Easter holidays, and it being a Friday flights were either scarce, fully booked or horrendously expensive!

So we are flying out Thursday evening and coming back Friday evening, managed to get the last double room at Chelsea Cloisters where I stayed in the Autumn during radiotherapy.

We are seeing a doctor that deals with Oncology and Genetics, and hopefully get some good answers as to how we should move forward.

Now onto dogs, or one small dog in particular and the trials of gun dog training.

So there I was in a boggy field in Trinity on a sunny Sunday afternoon, listening avidly to what the 'instructor 'was telling me. Trying to appear cool, casual and in control, nonchalantly holding the dogs lead, whilst giving the impression that even if she ( the dog) did run off after those pheasants, my excellent recall whistle would bring her back. ( No hope).

The chap was busy explaining the general rules of 'quartering', where ideally your dog should run alongside you and mirror your movements (fat chance). He enquired as to how much I knew about this activity, and wanting to show that I had remembered last weeks lesson, I talked about how you take some grass and throw it up to see which way the wind was blowing - so the dog ( and you ) would head upwind.

In my haste to prove how competent I really was, I tugged up a handful of boggy grass and without thinking threw it up into the air, where it promptly flew right back at me......straight into  my face and hair.
He was obviously well brought up , either that or he covered his amusement very well, as i proceeded to stand there spitting out grass and surreptitiously picking out grass seeds from my tangled locks.

The rest of the lesson was relatively trouble free, thank goodness, and amazingly the dog didn't run off, but thats not to say next time she'd be so good!

A son, (who shall remain nameless) for reasons that will become clear had a small incident the other morning.
Don't get me wrong, our house is lovely, lots of light and a fair amount of space, but we do have odd little features here and there. We thought it was quite quaint to leave a few of the 'original' doors in place when we were renovating. One of the 'small' doors is a bathroom door. My husband (with no shoes on) skims under it ok, I don't have a problem and neither does our daughter.
However the boys being well over six foot arent as fortunate, as our son found out to his cost.

He had negotiated his entrance in through the "Alice" door ok, showered and as usual was running a bit late, so rushed to exit the bathroom and unfortunately whacked the top of his head very hard on the door plinth. Falling to the ground and somewhat dazed and disorientated he was simultaneously trying to cover up his nakedness and feel his bloodied head.

I believe his brother heard the commotion ( i didn't although I was in the house) and upon investigation calmly stepped over his writhing sibling uttered a disparaging remark and continued on his way ! Brothers.

He has actually got a two inch cut on the top of his head, and you should see the damage to the frame!!!

Life in the Luce household is never dull!

We have less than three weeks before the Macmillan Rowathon in which the Seaford Scullers are taking part, heaven help us! Steve and I, two boys, one girlfriend ( the other one has just pulled out as she realised shes now away!) and a friend. We have to do 5x1,000 metres... I think.

Don't worry it's all on dry land.

Just as well.

“All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.” 

Julian of Norwich Quotes (Author of Revelations of Divine Love)

Thank you. (No Jokes)

Reason, Season, or Lifetime

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime.
When you figure out which one it is,
you will know what to do for each person.

When someone is in your life for a REASON,
it is usually to meet a need you have expressed.
They have come to assist you through a difficulty;
to provide you with guidance and support;
to aid you physically, emotionally or spiritually.
They may seem like a godsend, and they are.
They are there for the reason you need them to be.

Then, without any wrongdoing on your part or at an inconvenient time,
this person will say or do something to bring the relationship to an end.
Sometimes they die. Sometimes they walk away.
Sometimes they act up and force you to take a stand.
What we must realize is that our need has been met, our desire fulfilled; their work is done.
The prayer you sent up has been answered and now it is time to move on.

Some people come into your life for a SEASON,
because your turn has come to share, grow or learn.
They bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh.
They may teach you something you have never done.
They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy.
Believe it. It is real. But only for a season.

LIFETIME relationships teach you lifetime lessons;
things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation.
Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person,
and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas of your life.
It is said that love is blind but friendship is clairvoyant.

— Unknown