On Tuesday this week Gillian had another birthday — tact prevents me from telling you which one — but we had a lovely lunch at a good local pub restaurant with some of her colleagues from work. It was a surprisingly jolly occasion, given all the stress at work recently. To celebrate in the evening […]
By Gillian So yesterday we handed back the Walkmed pump that Chris has been umbilically attached to since January. And now that it’s gone, it’s a huge relief to both of us. The pump was about half the size of a paperback book, and came in a black padded “bum bag” that Chris kept around […]
Got the results from the CT scan, and they agreed with the clinical evidence I was presenting, namely I was feeling a lot better, so it was decided that I would receive no more chemotherapy. Specifically, the CT scan showed that there have been minimal reductions in the size of my enlarged lymph glands, which […]
Once again no chemotherapy this week. Nevertheless it has been a fairly quiet week, where things of note included a CT scan, a trip to the theatre and another increase in the incidences of my back pain. The CT scan took place early in the morning, which meant that it was hard to get there […]
Last week it was decided that whether or not my chemotherapy continues would depend on the results of a third CT scan, which the consultant said he would organize. I still hadn’t heard about a date for it so when I spoke late last week on the phone to the Macmillan nurse (who has been […]
When I first started going to Worcester to get my bag changed, the chemotherapy patients had their own waiting room deep inside the suite that treats both haematology and chemotherapy patients. The two groups of patients both checked in with a single receptionist, and then the haematology patients waited in the main waiting room, whose […]
By Gillian Last week, our main goal of the weekly hospital consultation was to sort out a better pain management regime. In practice, that got usurped by Chris being neutropenic and hospitalised for four nights so we never got around to blogging about the original issue. We had emailed our key worker over the Bank […]
I went to Worcester for my bag change today, and to decide whether or not I was going to go in to Cheltenham for the sixth cycle. There was a long delay because only the registrar was there and the consultant was dealing with a problem elsewhere. We waited for nearly an hour on one […]
I’ve had two blood transfusions in the last two weeks, and I thought it might be interesting to describe them and their effects. On both occasions I was given two units of red blood cells to counteract a low blood count, whose effects were mostly that I had no energy at all and was constantly […]
This has been a rough week. I have felt unwell for most of it, with temperature fluctuations that left me alternately shivering and uncomfortably warm. On Wednesday the consultant decided that I had an infection, and that it needed hospital treatment, so Gillian took me down to Cheltenham. I had had a blood test in […]
