Everything is going well - now finished Cycle 3 (nine treatments altogether) and the only real problem is the fatigue that hits at the weekends. But I know it's coming so to some extent I can plan around it. But in the last couple of weeks it's been complicated by my GP surgery. I got a phone call saying they wanted to increase my statins from the very low dose 10mg daily that I've been on for years up to 20mg daily. No obvious reason, and my lipid numbers are all good so my guess is just that my age has put me into a different risk level. Needless to say the pharmacist who called couldn't give me any better explanation. So, reluctantly, I agreed. Don't want to get an "awkward patient" black mark from the doctors.
Within a few days of the increased dose the fatigue got worse. Longer, deeper, and clear muscle weakness. Walking distances I did easily a few weeks ago, like into town, round a few shops and back again (between 4,000 and 6,000 steps) started feeling like climbing mountains, like they did before I started losing the weight. Slow, terribly slow, and too much effort to keep putting one foot in front of the other, needing to sit down two or three times. My daily average dropped from 6,500 or so (and sometimes a lot more) to having trouble getting to 4,000 and sometimes settling for just 2,000. Couldn't motivate myself to do enough Nordic walking in the corridors to make much difference.
So yesterday I sent a message to the doctors (you have to do an online message form these days, I believe it's called progress) asking for the dose to go back down to 10. To my complete surprise a doctor (one I've had nothing to do with before) 'phoned a couple of hours later. He seemed to want to talk about amitriptyline and once I'd convinced him that the current dose is fine and doing its job and we played around with different doses years ago, we moved on to statins. I explained, and he agreed straightaway. So a 20mg pill on alternate days until the next prescription, and back to 10mg daily after that. Now, of course, the test will be whether that puts me back to where I was, or whether I've wrongly blamed the statins and it's all more to do with the chemo....
That's a bit of a mixed bag from the NHS. Some bits good, some less so. I still don't think they had an adequate reason to change the dose in the first place, but if the computer says to do it they don't seem to have the initiative to add a bit of human interpretation and avoid making a change which isn't justified by any more than another click of the calendar?
