Um, probably not cake then?

My bloated belly continues to give Cake vibes (if you haven't read the last post, none of this is going to make sense) but has failed to exhibit much more than a crumb of evidence of its genuine cake-ness.

Rather then flogging the analogy to death, here is what I know:

I have ongoing ascities - fluid filling up in my abdominal cavity and giving me a lovely rotund tummy (think Vector, from Despicable Me).

I drain the fluid off myself every other day by attaching a bag to a tube that is dug into my side. Around 2 litres of what's know as "straw-coloured fluid" (how many people these days have ever even seen straw?) comes out and I throw the bag in the bin. The tube is only about 15cm long and rolls up under a little dressing, so it is not very obvious.

I have been doing this now for 8 months. 

Everyone assumed the fluid was coming from cancer, but now it seems it might be a result of my liver packing it in after years of surgeries/radioactive attacks/chemotherapy and the odd bottle of cava. 

I had a liver biopsy which confirmed that I have portal hypertension and liver fibrosis, also known as the early stages of cirrhosis. 

I have some of the complications of cirrhosis already (besides the Vector-gut) - my protein levels are low (all right Instagram, yes, I should bave been listening to you all along) and I am losing muscle mass, so I am scrawny around my neck and my upper body. I get bad muscle cramps, in my feet, calves, thighs, fingers, which means that I am sometimes locked in painful twists that I cannot undo. I am breathless because some fluid has built up at the lower part of my lung, over my liver, so I wheeze and cough if I try to speak and go upstairs at the same time. 

My belly hurts if I stand up for too long, and my scar tissue gets stretched by the fluid, meaning I am generally clutching one bit of me or another to try to massage the pain away. 

I don't have to take chemotherapy any more for the moment, because no one can find any decent bit of cancer for it to zap.

I have started to take blood pressure tablets to see if the pressure in my liver will come down, but they don't seem to be making much difference so far. 

I have entered a new world of outpatients waiting rooms and multidisciplinary teams, which are focussed on dodgy livers rather than cancer, and I am interested to see how the vibe (and stigma) differs. 

There is an assumption that not having visible cancer is a good thing, so I will go along with that.  

Is It Cancer?

There is a show on Netflix called Is It Cake?

It is exceptionally irritating on many, many levels. The host shouts. The guest judges appear to have been drugged and kidnapped. The competitors give Nice But Dim vibes. 

The main premise is that you make a cake look like an everyday object, and put it on a stand next to said everyday object, and see if you can fool the judges into thinking that your cake is, in fact, an actual teapot/basketball/angle grinder. Shouty Host shouts "Is it cake?", and everyone is stunned when it turns out that yes it is. 

The only slight problem is the very loose, very American, use of the word "cake". Each one of them is a hideous melange of UPF ingredients, lit up in horrendous colours and slathered in corn-syrup matter described as "frosting". 

On this show, even the cake is not cake, not really. 

I am on more chemotherapy for cancer for the last four months or so. Except that no one is entirely certain that is definitely cancer. It looks very like it on the scans, but mostly because there are fuzzy spots in funny places in my peritoneum, and I have stage 4 cancer, so the fuzzy spots must be cancer, right? 

The Fuzzy Spot experts were pretty sure, when they had a look. 

The General Cancer in Sarah expert was fairly sure, but accepted that they could just be Fuzzy Spots of Unknown Origin (in medicine, we have a few conditions that we are totally content to entitle Of Unknown Origin, and pat ourselves on the back for our clever use of words). 

I have been very happy to go along with treating the Fuzzy Spots on the assumption they are cancer, because Safe/Sorry/Etc.

Except that, a bit like cake, if you leave it out in the world long enough, you can be pretty sure it would start to change. Soften. Crack. Get mouldy. Get maggoty. Stink. You get the picture.

My Fuzzy Spots look remarkably similar to what they looked like in August. And actually, if you squint a bit, they look quite like how they looked the previous August. 

Even the most additive-filled confectionary is bound to start looking a bit rough around the edges after 18 months. 

So while it looks like cancer and should be cancer, it is not behaving in a very cancery way. 

But if it is not cake - I mean cancer - what is it? 

And can someone please explain to me how I am supposed to get my head around living in a very very long episode of the most irritating show on Netfllix?