Notes from a Far Country

Two weeks ago I had my final taxotere. I can't say I was sorry to bid farewell to this particular drug. It's horrible stuff. Now I will continue on Avastin (the trial drug) and bisphosphonates (the bone strengtheners) every three weeks. The aim is to remain stable for as long as possible - although of course I still pray that they will tell me that I am NED (no evidence of disease).

When I got home from my chemo, and just before I went to bed, I spotted my chest was looking a bit red and there was a little bit of puss leaking from a tiny hole. So I rang the Marsden and they told me to come in. At 2.30am Tony and I arrived and I was promptly put onto an IV drip so that I could reecive antibiotics. By 4.30am I had the rigours - shaking so violently that I thought the bed was going to collapse.

It turns out that I had a really nasty bacterial infection and, because my blood count was so low after chemo, I had little by way of an immune system to fight it. So I was kept in for ten days, when I kept spiking temperatures and the doctors tried to get the infection under control. As well as being a painful time, it was mind numbingly boring, relieved only by occassional trips to outpatients to talk to the old ladies there and a plentiful supply of current buns in the PALS cafe.

I'm doing OK now, but it was scary stuff. Especially when they told me that they had suspected my infection might be MRSA!

Being in the Marsden got me thinking of other hospital stays. I remember being six or seven, and being taken into Hammersmith Hospital to have my adenoids out. My aunty Sally had noticed that I was quite deaf and I was always getting into trouble at school for not paying attention (I didn't get the nickname "Daydream" for nothing!). It turns out that my adenoids were so swollen that I had become as deaf as a post!

Oh, how scared and unhappy I was being in hospital. It was the first time I had been away from home for any significant amount of time and I screamed the place down when my mum left me to the care of the nurses. As her hounds tooth check coat disappeared down the corridor I had to be restrained by two burly orderlies. I fought them like a wild animal to run after her, but it was no use, I was abandoned. I can still recall the smell of that place, and the way I was terrified of the flat black lace up shoes they all wore. But my main memory is of my father's face materialising out of the darkness when I came round from the operation and the feeling that I was safe. He had such a calm and reassuring presence. How I wish he was still here now.

Then, when I was fifteen, I was back in hospital for an operation on my ears to rid me of a disease that had eaten away the bones in my ear and was attacking my skull. Things were different this time because I had a room of my own and all of my friends came to visit me. I was missing my GCSE mocks, so there were real advantages this time to being in hospital. There was also a boy in the next room of about the same age and we struck up a friendship. In fact, we briefly went out with each other for a while after we got out. He was in for an operation on his nose, so he had a tube sticking out of his nostril. I was shaved on one side of my head and bandaged like a mummy. We made a very strange looking pair and it didn't last long.

My room was on the ground floor near the main entrance so people coming to visit me would knock on the window and wave before coming in. Then one day there was a knock and the next thing I knew the family dog, Heidi, came flying through the open window. She sat happily on the bed for a couple of hours before being taken home. I am sure the nurses would have had a fit had they known.

Which brings me back to the nurses at the Marsden, who really are angels. Because the nurses there choose to work with cancer patients, they seem to stay longer than nurses in other hospitals. Going back into the Marsden ten weeks after my previous stay I found all the same staff, most of whom remembered me and all of whom nursed me with such care and dilligence. Their job cannot be easy, dealing with people who are sometimes so very ill. Thank you, all of you. And I promise I won't ever bring a dog onto a hospital ward ever again.