Saturday, April 04, 2009

Radio And Chemo

So the docs announce that to make you feel better, you are going to be nuked. For good measure they intend to fill you full of some seriously nasty chemicals which you are going to volunteer to carry around with you in a little bottle which will be attached to you via a tube. To make it easy they will put a plug in your chest with a tube which goes up to your head so the chemo can be with you 24/7. Oh and would you mind doing it for say, 5 months? It doesn't get much better than that.

Now here is where there's a real doozy of a question. Do you accept their very attractive offer or not. Hmm. Hair may fall out, bits may fall off, you'll be dead tired and sleep all the time plus you may get a bit ratty. But surely there must be a down side. Yep you'll probably lose a load of weight. No brainer!

Now wait for this. No bits fell off. Often felt pretty tired but not enough to stop me from going to my local bar/restaurant, using the internet and generally enjoying life. My "Borg implant" as my daughter calls it (the place where the chemo is delivered into my system) was no problem. Did my hair fall out? I started to go grey about 30 years ago but after 3 months my wife suddenly started laughing and eventually told me I looked like Mr Spock. My hair had gone thick and turned almost jet black! No doubt you will find it impossible to believe that someone with such a sunny disposition as mine, could become irritable. Strangely enough my wife disagreed. Perhaps just a couple of times I .........

Just remembered something really funny. Having had my chemo pump for a couple of days (most people don't have these apparently) I woke up to find that in my sleep I had caught the tube and it had become disconnected. Even my basic physics confirmed that it was likely that the red stuff on the sheets was the liquid that was supposed to stay inside my body and not come out throught the tube. I was a tad concerned at this because I know you only have a limited amount of this stuff and its quite important that you hang on to quite a lot of it.

The telephone advice from the hospital was to clean and reconnect it (implying, you dumbo - of course it's not normal). No panic, just pop in when you have a minute and we'll have a look. Moral of this little bit is to forget everything you have seen on TV. When you get used to all sorts of different bits of kit attached to your body they lose their mystique. I can't bleed my central heating boiler but I sure as hell know how to regulate a drip.

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