Hi! I’m still alive! (Last time I was visiting my lovely nurse friends up at Medical Oncology — I’m not under their care anymore but I do still have to go up once a month to get my PortaCath looked after — and they asked me how I’ve been. “Still…

So, I realised I hadn’t ACTUALLY ever updated here with the significant update that followed my 40th birthday. If you’ve kept up to date with previous posts, it will not come as a surprise. After my birthday, I had a CT scan to officially check how the chemotherapy was working…

It’s a happy tale this time! (About bloody time). My 40th birthday fell on a day I had chemo clinic — chemo clinic is the fortnightly check up/ check in you have with your doctor to look at your blood tests and see how you are tracking, to talk about…

That last post was depressing, huh? I thought, after that admittedly downbeat update, it was probably a good idea to post again just to let y’all know what is happening now, and how one deals with kind of heavy news. First: you get therapy. At the same appointment when my…

It happened today. The worst appointment. The one that all the anxiety and all the dread and all the insomnia is for. The appointment with very bad news. Funnily enough, this is probably the first appointment I’ve walked into where my stomach hasn’t been in knots, my heart racing, my…

So, a quick recap of the last few months. A routine scan at the start of the year…ish… showed that the cancer was back and it was time — already — to go back on chemotherapy. Started chemo. A different drug (Iranotecan) to the last time (Oxaliplatin) because I’m still…

The thing I’ve struggled with, in writing these infrequent updates, is something I assume “real” writers have to get over pretty quick. The filter. How much to share, how truly vulnerable to be, and balancing that with how much it could hurt or affect the people I care about. That’s…

Ooh golly, it’s been a while since I updated this wee corner of the internet. We left off in October 2019 — shit, that’s 6 months ago! — when I was about halfway through chemotherapy. I guess we can attribute the lack of posts from then on to the sheer…

Oh hey internet friends! It’s been a while since my last update. Previously on Vanessa’s Chemo Diaries…I had JUST started chemotherapy, and was just a few days into the first cycle. (Before I started chemo, I was really confused by the way it’s referred to in cycles, so I’ll try…