My Cancer Journey -2020

Hi everyone, so before i begin my story on here i just wanted to write a bit about myself first. I think that as soon as your told you have cancer or any condition or disease it becomes easy to loose your identity to it and this is what scares me the most going forward.

So about me then, I am Chris Riley, 28 and from Yorkshire in England. I live with my amazing fiancee Elle and we’re lucky enough to have our amazing families living nearby to us. We both love to travel and explore new places we have a beautiful home together that we have built since 2016. I have a fantastic group of friends around me and my hobbies include Cycling (road, cyclocross and more recently mtb too), music, mainly pop punk/metal and recently country music on American radio stations (cancer will do weird things to you 😂). I also enjoy following football, i support Bradford City and i enjoy following all league football.

I am also a massive fan of food and eating out. I’ve always been proud of my ability to out eat my friends even if my friend Jonny will just deny it out of embarrassment 😆

I have an interest in UFO’s and anything mysterious i have a small collection of books that i enjoy reading on the subject and i’ve always enjoyed this subject to use as an escape into my imagination, i find a lot of enjoyment and comfort pondering what could be out there and what we may learn in our life time. As much as this has been a bad year for me it has been a good year in the ufo topic with lots of documents being declassified and released from the US government so i will be following that closely.

So thats just a short, brief bit about me i dont want to talk too much about me on here because i’d like the purpose of this blog to be used to give you an insight into whats happened to me over the last few months and what signs and symptoms i’ve had that have led me to where i am now.

So where am i now? Right now im sat out back of my house on a lovely comfy swing seat my mother and father in law bought us after my diagnosis to still get the most out of our garden. Im sat here two weeks after being told i have stage 4 stomach cancer. Stage 4 meaning that it is no longer contained to my stomach it has spread to my liver and lymph nodes. Prognosis isn’t great most people wont survive more than 2 years with treatment. Its an extremely rare illness especially for someone of my age and the doctors have been shocked by it as much as we have.

So below i will write my story so far from the last day i felt ‘normal’ to now, i hope if your reading this and can relate to anything i say it will help you get the help and support you need not only from a cancer point of view but also mental health and just the need to speak out if you dont feel right.

Currently its the 26/08/2020 and i want to back up to November/December 2019, this was the first time i stopped feeling ‘normal’. It was a busy time for us, Christmas was fast approaching and my brother and sister in law were about to marry on the 23rd of December so we had a lot going on. I’d been asked to play guitar as my sister in law walked down the isle. I was honoured and of course i agreed, i had played in bands over the years so i didn’t anticipate any issues with neves etc. However about 3 weeks before the wedding i started feeling really anxious and panicky. I also had a general feeling of unease and i couldn’t pinpoint what was the cause at all. I have always been a talker and not one to bottle up my feelings so i mentioned how i was feeling to Elle and we had a chat about what it could have been, could it have been the performance at the wedding?, work?, just general life? Who knows.

As December 2019 moved on i started feeling worse and worse by the week. Luckily i was in a good place for the wedding and we had an absolutely fantastic day! It was a great pleasure to play my guitar for Leah and Ben and optimistically in my mind i had hoped it was just background nerves that i was experiencing and after this i would feel normal again, sadly it was to get worse before it got better.

Christmas day/boxing day came and i started to feel horrendous. I have always loved Christmas my whole life, i love everything about it. The food, the films, the cold weather, family time, everything about it i love. So this was particularly strange for me. I was having panic attacks frequently which i’d never experienced before and i could barely leave my bed. I decided enough was enough pretty quickly and i decided to go to visit my GP. I explained everything that was going on and the doctor gave me some anti depressants (Sertraline) to take to see how i got on. We we’re due to fly to prague for the new year and i just hoped i could feel well over there.

On the 30th Dec we flew to Prague after an awful 3 or 4 days previously i actually felt ok, i decided that the change of scenery and keeping busy was just what i needed, i felt great until it was time to come home. On the last day i remember the anxiety creeping back in, could it have been the flight? Unlikely, but i have been afraid of flying before until i pulled myself out of that fear with youtube videos. Soon as i arrived back home i felt terrible and i began my anti depressants ( i had put off starting them before the trip due to the long list of side effects). I had a rough week or two but as time moved on i started to improve. My birthday came on Jan 25th and i remember feeling really bad with the sertraline side effects. We had a meal out at a local curry house and me and Elle went into Leeds that weekend for a Thai meal. Time moved on and the tablets kicked in, normality slowly returned.

As 2020 progressed into Feb/March i started to feel much more in control of my anxiety and a normal life seemed to return, i was glad the tablets were working but something in my mind knew there was something wrong still. I couldn’t pin point what it was but i had an overwhelming feeling of doom underneath my daily routine. Obviously in March 2020 the Covid lockdown happened and i began to wonder if i had a sense of unease as that approached? Maybe i could sense something negative on the way? Maybe i should try and become a psychic after all this?.

In March the barbershop i work in was ordered to close as part of the lockdown. This gave me 3 months at home to relax and unwind. We we’re very lucky that during the lockdown the weather was great so i was heading out on my bike a lot at the beginning. This was when more serious problems started to emerge. The first sign of something more serious being wrong was on my bike one morning riding up a hill, i started feeling tight chested and short of breath. I decided to ride home and see how i felt later. That afternoon i felt fine again and i put it down to a lockdown lifestyle of too much crisps and dip!!. The problem was that it kept happening after i cut the bad foods out. I have never been a big drinker but i even decided to stop the odd beer here and there as i thought that could have been causing my chest issues.

A couple of weeks went by and the chest pain whilst exercising got gradually worse so i decided to stop cycling until i could see what was happening . By this time i was starting to have difficulty chewing and swallowing my food. Foods that i have always loved suddenly started disagreeing with me. I rang my GP again as i began to think the Sertraline had given me a stomach Ulcer. I was put on some anti acid tables for a few weeks to see if it improved. It only got worse.

It has gotten to a point in late May early June 2020 where i was really struggling to eat anything at all. I went in to see my GP in July and she did some checks and upped my dose of anti acid tablets for 7 days to see if it would improve. It got worse again still so i was referred to the hospital for an Endoscopy. I was put on an urgent referral due to my increasing inability to eat and my date for the endoscopy came in for Aug 10th.

On the 31st July i had vomited blood up whilst eating my tea. This had happened before during the last few months but never with as much blood. I was told to go to A+E to see if there was any internal bleeding going on. I stayed down there for about 4 hours and had some blood tests and ECG which all came back as fine and i was sent home.

The day of my endoscopy finally came and i was really excited to have it to get to the bottom of my stomach issues, i presumed it would be an ulcer but maybe caused by bacteria such a H-Pylori which would require antibiotics to cure. I was fairly confident that this would be the case and within a week or two i would be back to normal. I entered the hospital and i was so excited to get to the bottom of my problem that i decided against having any sedation for the endoscopy in order to find out my results there and then straight after. That was a massive mistake, the endoscopy was horrendous and i just wretched and vomited for the full procedure. So if your ever told you need one i would highly recommend the sedation!!

The endoscopist moved to the computed to look closely at the results and i knew immediately there was something wrong. I was taken to a recovery area and told to ring my mum and ask her to come to the hospital. About 30 mins later me and my mum sat in a room with a nurse who went on to tell us that the endoscopy had shown some heavy ulceration and abnormalities in my stomach, i was told i would be staying in hospital that night and having a CT scan first thing in the morning. After a sleepless night on ward 2 at Airedale Hospital i went for my CT scan at 10am on the 11th August 2020. After the scan i was sent back to the ward for the doctor to come see me. About 1pm after my dinner in hospital a nurse came and asked if i’d like to have my mum or Elle present for when the doctor came to speak to me. Elle was on a hen do in York and yesterday my mum had come down for the brief chat only to be told she had to leave due to Covid guidelines straight after and since the nurse had said i’d be going home after the chat i decided to just crack on and get it done so i could go home.

At 2pm on the 11th August 2020 i was told i had cancer.

The scene from Breaking Bad where Walt is told he has cancer is the only way i could describe it. I sat in a room with a doctor and senior nurse opposite me and told i had stomach cancer that had also showed up on surrounding lymph nodes. I took the news surprising well i guess i’d not really looked into the diagnosis too much or how hard the journey was going to be. I got a little tearful as i sat on my hospital bed waiting to be discharged.

The next 24 hours were a whirlwind of emotions. Tears, worry, optimism and pessimism all came and went in cycles as i visited my family and told them the news. The strange thing is i’d start feeling ok again then i’d go visit another family member only to go through the whole emotionally roller coaster again.

We we’re all very positive that give my age and fitness level i’d beat it and make a full recovery, even as the phone call from the hospital the following day confirmed it was a stage 4 cancer which was in my stomach, liver and lymph nodes i still thought i could beat it.

Flash forward a week and i had a phone appointment with my oncologist who told me he expected it to be terminal and if i live for just over another year i will have done well. I couldn’t accept this news, i knew i would beat it and i began searching for treatment options.

During this time my family and friends had set up a go fund me page to raise money for my treatment and care. The response has been unbelievable with over £32,000 now raised! I cant begin to say how grateful i am to everyone who has donated! It is beyond kind! This will be a true lifeline in my battle that i cant win without so if anyone reading this has been kind enough to donate thank you so much!!.

So currently as i write this i have started chemo 2 days ago and i’m feeling awful. Its starting to feel more real now, because i’d felt relatively well before starting it. I am looking into treatment options abroad and elsewhere in the UK to give myself the best chance. I am determined to beat this and i will keep updating this blog with whats going on.

I hope anyone reading this that can relate to anything i have said may look into getting some help and check up, chances are it will be absolutely fine but it’s always worth a check.

I will update this with more info soon.