Catch-Up TV

New to this? Check out the First Post

Hello again, nothing much happening at the moment except I'm feeling very pleased with myself today. I managed to have a bath and wash my hair - all by myself! Up 'til now I've needed help keeping dressings and wound dry, which involved some pretty interesting, chilly (naked) contortions. But now the wound is all healed and dry so I just went for it and soaked in the bath - full length. I admit that the dressing covering the huge drain hole got wet - but I had a spare one upstairs. Though when I took the old one off the hole had completely healed and somehow had shrunk to being quite small :-) So I've left it off. I will have to take a photo of it later and pop it on here for comparison. I'm sure it's starting to look a bit better. The bruising is turning from black to a nice shade of yellow with purple overtones.

I'll still let the nurse check it on Tuesday though.

So being stuck indoors in this icy weather means that I caught up on the entire series of Junior Doctors in a couple of days. I am glad I didn't watch it before I went for my op.Though  I have revised my opinion of my medical student as the ones on TV couldn't get blood out of a patient for love nor money! My guy did pretty well. I wish I'd said something to him to make him feel better. I felt so sorry for the ones on TV when they'd tried 6 times and had to give up because the patient was getting irate.

If you enjoyed Junior Doctors too here's the link to the kind of op that I had - on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uilaptogdU
It's not actually me - some old bloke I think - but isn't it good how when they make the first incisions there's no blood at all? Amazing.. They look like the scalpels are heated to instantly cauterised...

I was really pleased to find a support group online at: http://www.cupfoundjo.org/ They say:

"When a patient is diagnosed with cancer that has spread within the body (metastatic cancer), the primary site of the disease is not always obvious. Finding the origin of the cancer is important to define appropriate treatment.
When the origin of the cancer is not identified with confidence, through initial tests, this is described as Cancer of Unknown Primary site, or CUP.
Each year in the UK approximately 14,000 people are diagnosed with CUP"

That is quite a lot of us - they say we would fill 35 Jumbo jets (cool! where are we going??) -  yet each case seems so different. I haven't found anyone who has the exact same diagnosis as mine. Although a very nice lady called Teresa wrote to me to tell me about her Radical Neck Dissection and how well she felt 9 months on. It made me feel a LOT better, I can tell you.

Back soon with the latest photo....