Life's Not Fair

After my assiduous chronological documentation of what was going to happen after my last chemo, typically enough, none of what I had predicted actually occurred.

I didn’t get the “strong stuff” (irinotecan, not poitin) because my bloods were too low, so I didn’t have the same sequence of horrible side effects. 

Instead, this time I got a brand new batch from the Vectibix. 

I never knew how much I loved Epidermal Growth Factor until I started inhibiting it. 

Come back my little EGFs, all is forgiven!

My skin is disintegrating. I have pustules on my face, chest, legs, jacksy, and most tearingly itchingly painfully on my scalp. I spend most of my day picking scabs off my head. You know when your mother tells you to stop scratching, but you really just can’t? I try sitting on my hands but it's a bit tricky to examine patients or write notes while doing that. I can only imagine what patients are thinking when they see me with boils on my face, scratching my noggin like a particularly unhygienic chimpanzee. 

Oh well. 

My fingers are becoming useless again, can’t tie buttons or laces without wincing and griping. 

I found the world’s greatest plasters though - they survive OCD levels of handwashing and actually helped the cuts to heal - unheard of!

In the spirit of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to have a look at the lives of some other women born in the same year as me. As I have mentioned before, I am ferociously nosy. I have convinced myself that accessing the data available to me through our patient database is all in the name of research, but it is actually just satisfying my endless curiosity. 

So it turns out that there are 35 women on our books the same age as me. Surely none of them have it as hard I do? I've got to be the unluckiest nearly-40-year-old out of all of them.

This is a random list of the things these women are going through.

Well-educated immigrant, husband and herself unemployable here as qualifications not recognised. Child abuse, ongoing abusive relationships. Alcoholism. Cot death. Sarcoidosis. Depression. Emotional abuse. HIV. Anxiety. Bereavement. BMI 45. Son with autism. Kidney surgery. Pathological terror of intimacy, possible undisclosed childhood abuse. BMI 55. Infertility. Children left behind in home country. Headscarf attracting verbal abuse on a daily basis. Physical abuse. Incontinence. Bruises, post-traumatic stress. Job loss. Ex-husband jailed for white-collar crime. Painkiller addiction. Post-operative infection. Bipolar affective disorder. Diabetes. Ulcerative colitis. Domestic violence. Fibromyalgia. Panic disorder. 

Yeah. So my life is hard at the moment. 

But I don't think I'm the only one.

P.S. General practice at the Deep End is good for one's sense of perspective ;-)