I know the hormone therapy is saving me but here’s the truth behind it.
I am having a bit of a crisis of confidence with all this at the moment, and I think part of the problem is that it is quite hard to explain properly to people who are not living it.
From the outside, hormone treatment can sound straightforward enough. It sounds like one of those things where you take the treatment, put up with a few side effects, and carry on more or less as normal. The reality, at least for me, feels very different.
The hot flushes are getting worse by the day. They are not just a moment of feeling a bit warm. They come over me suddenly and properly take hold. One minute I can be fine, the next I am burning up, sweating, throwing the covers off, and feeling deeply uncomfortable in my own skin. There is no dignity in it and no real control over it. It makes my body feel unfamiliar and unpredictable.
Alongside that, the muscle weakness is getting worse too. That is a quieter thing, but in some ways it is just as hard. It shows up in ordinary moments, in the little things you normally do without even thinking. You start to notice that you do not feel as strong, as steady, or as capable as you used to. It is not dramatic enough to make a big show of itself, but it chips away at you all the same. It starts to alter how you feel about yourself.
But worst of all is the lack of sleep.
I am having virtually no sleep now, and that is the bit that is really flooring me. It is not just being a bit tired the next day. It is layer upon layer of exhaustion building up night after night. You go to bed hoping for a bit of rest, but instead you lie there waiting for the next hot flush, the next broken spell, the next stretch of being awake when the rest of the world is asleep. By morning, you do not feel restored. You feel as though you have simply survived another night.
That level of exhaustion gets into everything. It affects your patience, your mood, your concentration, your resilience. It makes even small things feel heavier. It is hard to feel confident, strong, or even properly yourself when your body is fighting you day and night and you are running on empty.
I think that is where the crisis of confidence comes from. It is not just that I feel rough. It is that all of this combined starts to change how I see myself. When your body feels unreliable, when your strength feels reduced, and when you are getting almost no sleep, it is hard not to feel worn down by it. Hard not to feel less certain. Hard not to feel as though bits of the old you are being rubbed away.
I am still carrying on, because that is what you do. But I would be lying if I said this was not affecting me. This is not just about having cancer in some broad abstract sense. It is about living with the day-to-day impact of the treatment and the side effects, and the way they quietly but relentlessly wear you down.
So if I seem flatter, more tired, more withdrawn, or not quite myself, that is why. I am still here. I am still going. But at the moment I feel more worn down than I probably let on, and I think people sometimes need to understand that the hardest part is not always what they imagine. Sometimes it is the constant heat, the weakness, the broken nights, and the slow loss of confidence that comes with them.
