The Clot Thickens

Hello All,

As always I hope this finds you well wherever you are.

In my last blog I had been moaning about trying to motivate myself to break through the misery caused by steady steroid reduction and the subsequent side effects.

Things got worse, reaching a stage where my face swelled up, my eyes were almost swollen shut and I was shedding skin on a daily basis to add to the itching. It was torture to be honest, with the constant itching being the worst thing as it is unrelenting. My wife won't let me put any pictures of myself on the blog out of the sense of preserving some kind of decency. I admit it wasn't pretty. I even scratched most of my eyebrows and some of my hair off. Basically I looked like a mangy cat that had gone 12 rounds and lost. Badly. Now it seems to come in stages.

Jay, practical as always, bought a hand held vacuum and I suffer the ignominy of being regularly hoovered to get rid of skin. The fun was exacerbated when I noticed my left thigh had swollen up, was really hot and felt hard. All the symptoms of Deep Vein Thrombosis. So off to Accident & Emergency for my regular visit, except this time they took blood and confirmed I had a blood clot and made me stay in the ward for the night, despite my most determined attempts to let me go home.

Oh well, the next day I had a scan that located a clot in my groin. Jay told me it looked like a little man crouching (not medically important according to the doctors) when the image came up on the screen during the Ultrasound. I now have to inject myself once a day with blood thinners for the next six months, and then take some kind of blood thinner for the rest of my life.

Thankfully I have had a blood clot before so we knew what to look out for as they can be fatal. And in the meantime the dermatologists finally agreed that I have some form of psoriasis which would account for the skin problems and what they think is psoriatic arthritis. I was given Chemotherapy tabs to take for the psoriasis but that was stopped after my blood results showed up some problems with my liver function that would only get worse if I took the chemo. So I am back to trying out new creams etc.

Otherwise my mother and sister are over from Australia so it has been great seeing them and catching up. We have had a few entertaining evenings and it is nice for Jay and myself to take our minds off everything once in a while. Because I am struggling a bit at the moment I haven't been out to do anything fun for quite a while but we are looking to get a Wheelchair Accessible car I can wheel into rather than have to transfer into, and hopefully we should have our little noddy car sooner rather later.

I have just come back from Stanmore and the results from the MRI I had last Thursday show no change in my tumour growth so that is good news.

Lots of love to all and keep well and hopefully the clot shall thicken no more...