Recap V

So, one week down. I was stable, I had a full set of chemo in, I wasn't displaying any interesting side effects yet; everything was going just a little too well. Accordingly, my Hickman line picked Saturday night/Sunday morning to fall out. Just a little bit, enough to need the nurses to change my dressing and the domestics my bedding while the doctors made up their minds about what to do next; re-siting isn't an option, so it's either pull the whole thing out and put a new one in on my left side, or leave it in and hope really really hard that it doesn't take an infection. In the end, the latter was decided on; with luck and a bit of suture, the damaged line would hold for the remainder of this leg of the treatment.

With the doctors starting to feel comfortable taking more to the sidelines, I started to find myself meeting the rest of the healthcare and social work staff who'd be looking after me during my illness and recovery. I'd be speaking with a couple of nurse specialists, apparently, who would be largely responsible for making sure that I wouldn't go mad in isolation. The modern NHS is very thoughtful. The first of these, Carol, I'd already met during my initial weekend visits to the unit; we talked about how I was feeling, for a bit, and about what I was planning to do with the next couple of months. I think my ridiculously laid-back approach to having cancer threw her a little; her job would probably have been a bit easier if I'd cried a bit, or something.

Carol also introduced Michelle of CLIC Sargent, a charity interested in the care and well-being of young cancer patients. Michelle's first order of business was to extend me rather a generous grant towards my Amazon wish-list, before going on to explain the sorts of things which CLIC organise; conferences, 'special days', the usual meeting-with-fellow-patients stuff. Visits to the pub, while apparently frowned upon officially, were not entirely ruled out.

By the time I met Liz, Carol's opposite number specialising in pediatric and young adult cases, things were really starting to fall into routine. Apart from a chest x-ray and another tiny dislodge and re-suturing of my line, nothing was being done to me outside of the chemo and other treatments as per protocol; I got a headache from my intrathecal, but this hardly counted as the sort of cool side-effect or exciting medical emergency which had defined the week before. I was starting to feel a little bored, as expected, and I think Liz picked up on this; we mostly talked about what sorts of things I could look forwards to later on. One thing she did mention, which I found quite interesting, was that I might be invited to talk at a young-people-with-cancer type event some time down the road. September would be the next such opportunity, so I asked her to put me down as a 'maybe'; they'd look pretty silly if they booked me in and then I died during the summer, after all.

Medically, then, my second full week since diagnosis was pretty straightforward. My skin is a little dry and I'm a little tired, and I've started noticing just the tiniest increase in the amount of hair stuck in the plughole, but other than that I'm holding up fine. Recap concluded!