A mammoth undertaking

By Gillian

Today (or technically, I suppose, yesterday since it’s now gone midnight) was Easter Monday, a public holiday, so I had a day off work. We had talked about going out for the day, visiting a local place of interest or even just going for a walk on the Malvern Hills. However, Chris felt so grotty that was out of the question and he actually spent most of the day lying on the sofa. He’s not actually been sick, but he clearly was far from well and was fighting off some sort of infection.

We kept a close eye on his temperature, and when it hit 38 degrees at 6:45 this evening I phoned the Cheltenham Chemotherapy Helpline and they asked me to take him to the hospital. Once we got there, around 8pm, the nursing staff ran the usual tests, and found that his temperature had come down a bit (probably due to the paracetamol he had taken) and his blood pressure and heart rate were fine, though he was still feeling really grotty. They took some blood samples and we then had to wait an hour for the lab to analyse them. Fortunately I’ve learnt the hard way to keep a book in my handbag for all the waiting around!

The duty oncologist had a number of other patients to see in the assessment unit, one of whom was clearly in a much worse condition than Chris was, so we had to wait for the priority cases to be dealt with first. Then it was our turn. The good news is that his blood counts were fine, and in particular his white blood cell count was good, which means that his immune system should be capable of fighting off an infection. If he had been “neutropenic” (i.e. with low numbers of white blood cells) they would have admitted him immediately. The bad news is that it is probably a viral infection, so antibiotics wouldn’t help and might well make matters worse. The decision was taken to send him home to sleep it off in his own bed. We got home just after midnight (fortunately the roads had hardly any traffic, as I hate driving at night) and he went straight to bed. However, I’ve been asked to keep a close eye on him and to call the helpline again tomorrow if he gets any worse. The oncologist thinks that it would be a good idea if I can work from home tomorrow so that he’s not left on his own. I’ll have to see if I can rearrange any meetings so that I can do so.