It has now been 7 weeks since my last immunotherapy treatment. I’ve been on a forced break due to a grade 3 severity side effect. It’s a really strange one to get your head around, as technically the side effect (in my case colitis – inflammation of the bowel) could be a positive sign of my immune system responding to the immunotherapy drugs. However, the team need to make sure any unwanted inflammation doesn’t kill me in the process. It’s therefore this endless balancing act of treating the cancer and pushing your body to its limits, whilst not going as far as to cause serious irreparable damage.

My oncology team work very closely with other specialties – something that has impressed me hugely. While my oncologist is an expert in treating cancer, he doesn’t pretend for a second to be an expert in gastroenterology, or ophthalmology, or fertility, or endocrinology, or radiology (all of these departments I have been referred to over the past couple of months). I ended up having a couple of gastro procedures last week – a flexi sigmoidoscopy and a colonoscopy – which diagnosed me with Ipilimumab induced colitis. I’ve been on high dose steroids since my hospital admission at the beginning of September, and as they don’t seem to be knocking the inflammation on the head quickly enough, I was given an infusion of another drug called infliximab at the beginning of this week. Infliximab is normally used to treat Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and touch wood is already working wonders for me and my poor inflamed bowel. I saw my oncologist yesterday who has said that, if everything carries on the way it is, I’ll be starting the single dose immunotherapy (Nivolumab) in 4 weeks time. I’ll then have this infusion once every 4 weeks – for anything up to 2 years. I’ll get scanned after 3/4 treatments, which in all honesty I’m actually really happy about. It means I get to live the rest of 2019, and enjoy Christmas and New Year, without having scan results, and the anxiety that comes with it, hanging over my head.

I also managed to get the OK from Dr F with regards to a trip to NYC at the beginning of December. I was told when I first started treatment back in July that I probably shouldn’t leave the UK for a little while – especially during the initial combination immunotherapy infusions. In hindsight, I’m very glad I didn’t go away at all over the summer, as it turned out I very much needed to be close to hospitals. However, I’ve travelled all my life and have spent significant amounts of time living abroad, and I’ve missed the freedom of being able to make up my own mind when it comes to where in the world I’m able to go and when. I’ve also had to bow out of 3 international work trips this autumn which, whilst also being something I probably wouldn’t have been able to physically tolerate at the moment, has been frustrating for me that I’ve had those decisions taken out of my hands.