My Second Cycle Begins

So I have now begun my second cycle and I’m home again and feeling reasonable.

I wasn’t certain, of course, that my bloods would permit treatment this week & feared that I might be sent home again as I was last week but this time I just scraped through.

The whole process is more about queuing than following appointment times so I decided to try to get a head start on the process by ignoring my appointment time and calling a cab when I was ready. So I arrived at the Christie at about 9.25 a good half hour ahead of schedule and joind the queue to have a blood sample taken. I waited until about 9.45 and then moved to Dr. W’s clinic to wait for the lab results to come back. That took about an hour which is about average. Only when those results are available is a decision made of whether or not treatment can be administered safely. The minimum score for white cells is 1.5 & I just scraped in with 1.8.

Then it’s a matter of waiting until a bed is free and that can take hours. I sat around until about 4pm before mine was ready. It was worth the wait on this occasion, though, as they had decided to put me in a side ward by myself so that I could more easily get to the bathroom for my many visits during my stay. The woman patient who had been using that bed was ready for discharge but couldn’t go until a doctor actually signed her off and it took hours for that to happen.

I will remind those in the UK that this is “change over week” when all the new crop of junior doctors come into hospitals and place a huge training burden on the more experienced staff which can seriously impact on patient care.

Anyway I finally got started on my chemotherapy but it was obvious that I wasn’t going to escape as early this morning as I did during my first cycle.

But I did get home about 12.30 and this afternoon the district nurse turned up to administer an injection of something to boost my immune system against infection. I really do not need that to happen again!