Home sweet home

Below: view of my room for the past nine nights on Ward C10 of Addenbrookes hospital. If you are a chemo patient, temperatures of 38 C and above are decidedly dodgy. This is particularly so if you are neutropenic (very low white blood cells - very low defense against infection). I hit 38.5 centigrade on sunday 14th and went to hospital immediately. In reality i had hit that on saturday but the thermometer I was given by the chemotherapy day unit was wrongly calibrated.....it is consistently 0.6 -0.7 under the correct temperature. Nice one, eh?





I was put on intravenous antibiotics within a couple of hours of reaching hospital. Now this IV stuff should really be given to neutropenic patients. By then they had not established whether i was neutropenic or not. I got plugged in to IV stuff just in case I was. It turned out several hours later that I was not neutropenic - thank goodness. By the way, did George and Tony stupidly take this prophylaxis idea and distort it to develop their paradigm of the moment: forget the evidence and think only of the possibility? ....Anyway, for the first week my temperature never went below 38 and was often as high as 39.6 C. More worryingly I became breathless. A simple act of picking up something from the floor was exhausting - so i never put on any socks. Taking a shower also left me breathless - no, I have to have a shower and did so on all but two days. I admit however i did not bend down to wash my feet. Walking even thirty steps let me gasping for breath. So I gave up walking for a few days.

There are some terrible battles going on in that ward. I was in a minor one compared to some of those there. There were some scarey moments though. The CT scan showed shadows on both lungs. These are indicative of infection or damage by Bleomycin - one of the chemo drugs. If the latter, they would have to change my entire regime.... There was talk of a lung biopsy and a bronchoscopy to establish this. Thankfully, I got better just in the nick of time and managed to avoid that stuff. So the bigwigs reckon it was some kind of pneumonia or viral infection - but we still dont have a culprit and the possibility of bleomycin caused fibrosis.... best not to think too much.

Next up - how to deal with nurses and doctors at the world famous Addenbrookes.