15/004/2026 Cough cough cough...

I haven't written about this before, because it's not myeloma related. But maybe it is, in a rather indirect way. Read on...

Back in September 2025 or thereabouts, I developed a chesty cough. My wife thinks it came after a mild cold. It didn't go away. Towards the end of 2025 I reported it to the chemo nurses,they summoned a doctor from Haematology. He had a listen and ordered a chest X-Ray and some blood tests. As far as I know those all came back clear and normal. But the cough didn't go away.

Into the New Year and it still didn't go away. So I reported it to my GP. His first move was to recommend a steroid nasal spray (Beconase). That cost me £14 and did absolutely nothing. Next move was antibiotics (Doxycycline) which had the same result. No effect at all. So now I've told him my smoking history (clean for a bit more than thirty years now) and also mentioned that my sister has a persistent cough and is diagnosed with sarcoidosis. This, like myeloma (there you are!) isn't directly inherited but there is a genetic predisposition towards developing it and it does tend to appear in family clusters. So now (today) he's ordered another chest X-Ray ("it is quite a while since the last one") and if that comes up with nothing (which I suppose means no sign of developing lung cancer) he will move on to a CT scan looking for evidence of sarcoidosis. Well, from the smoking / lung cancer side, I suppose there may be a price to pay for all the pleasure I got from it. I hope not, but...

Anyway NHS admin excelled itself this time. Dr. Singh said I would be getting a letter about an X-Ray appointment. But just an hour later a text arrived with a link to a choice of three hospitals, all offering appointments within a week or so. He said it would be an "urgent" request, but we know what that usually means. I've booked a slot in Braintree on the 22nd, a week today. All credit to the NHS for once. Now we'll see how long the results take to come through...

And of course the cough still hasn't gone away.

13/03/2026 Prostate

I haven't written about this before mainly because it's not related to my myeloma, just general health. I've been developing signs of prostate trouble for some months now and finally decided to take it to my GP. His first action was to order some blood tests which all came back encouragingly normal, including the PSA. I had a face-to-face with him a couple of days ago and he did the infamous finger thing. Not as unpleasant an experience as one is led to believe, and all done very professionally. Anyway he immediately declared a benign enlarged prostate and put me on medication for it (the alpha-blocker Tamsulosin 400 micrograms daily, which I believe is the standard opening move). No side-effects yet, but only taken it for two days so far. So, there you go. Not unexpected at my age. Just hoping the Tamsulosin does help with the symptoms. Dr.Singh seems very enthusiastic about it, and he seems to be  avery good GP to me.

On the respiratory / CPAP side of things I contacted Bromfield a few days ago as requested to chase the referral and they said yes, you're definitely in the system, we'll get to you at some stage... Well, fortunately it's not life-threatening!

That's about it for this month. I'll be back when there's something new to write about.

Nearly forgot - the NHS super-efficient admin has now given me two separate appointments for my next face-to-face with my haematology consultant, within a few days of each other. So much of Monday will probably disappear down the phone trying to sort that out...

06/02/2026 ZZZzzzzz....

 Time for a medical update:

The good news from last week's face-to-face appointment with my haematology consultant, Dr. Elshazly, is that the blood numbers are still looking good on the four-weekly Dara instead of weekly as it used to be. So everything there is fine. We continue as it was.

We also talked about the problem of the fatigue, or tiredness, or sleepiness, or exhaustion, or whatever you call it, that is part and parcel of the package with many cancers, and certainly with myeloma. It does lead to me falling asleep too much during the daytime when I should be doing other things.

She raised the subject of the sleep apnoea and the CPAP machine. I said that while I have been aware for a while that it doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to, the numbers that come through from the machine aren't as good as they used to be, and that any effect on improving daytime sleepiness was never very great. It was never dramatic, but it was there in the early days and I don't think it is now at all. Something's not working right, whether it's the machine, the mask fit, something about the way I'm responding, I don't know. Quite often I wake up in the morning and find that sometime overnight I've actually taken the mask off or it's come off, come loose, or the push-fit joint that connects it up to the hose from the CPAP machine has come undone. So it's doing no good to me at all.

One way or another, I was getting close to the point of contacting the respiratory people at Broomfield anyway to ask them to review the situation with this. She independently said that that seemed like a good idea and said I should contact my GP to ask for a review. I said, "Well, wouldn't it be simpler if you just contacted my respiratory consultant and asked straight away?" She said, "No, got to be through your GP."

So I did that. I reported to the GP and the GP texted me to say he was passing me on to somebody at the new Beaulieu Health Center on the other side of Chelmsford in the big new housing estate over there.

So I was there this afternoon and saw another GP, told the whole story all over again, and she wrote a letter to the respiratory consultant requesting that they have me in for a review.

All very well, but it does seem a bit of a farce that this has involved the time and paperwork of two GPs, not to mention me driving about all over the town, all for something that could have been done by a quick internal email in Broomfield. But it's the system. I suppose we have to keep the GPs in the loop at every stage. It's the way it works. It's a small drop in the ocean of NHS waste and inefficiency, but it does seem to me to be an unnecessarily complicated way of doing things.

Anyhow, I now await a contact from Broomfield for them to call me in to have the whole thing reviewed by the people who know about these things. As to how long that will take, we wait and see.

And I think that's all for now.

N.B. This post was written with the assistance of the AI speech to text recognition app Letterly.