Home again

Released into the custody of JP. These are my homecoming flowers. Thank you for all your messages of support.

The last 12 days has to be the most frightening episode of this cancer journey so far. I felt as though I'd been poisoned - like Litvinenko after the Polonium 2-10. And it went on and on and on until the eventual trip to hospital on Friday.

Saturday night on the cancer ward, I thought I'd died and gone to Purgatory. My drip machine was faulty, and every fifteen minutes or so would bleep, waking me and anyone else in the vicinity - like some kind of sleep deprivation torture. Added to that, the night was punctuated by groans, moans, sobs and the laboured rasping breathing of someone in the last stages of life. She died the next morning. Maureen RIP. 

Things got better from there on as I got to know some of the other patients. There were some very poorly people there; Maureen was not the only one to die over the weekend. But every single person I met was positive and resourceful. And the nurses, of course, were angels.

Opposite me was a 21-year-old girl with a rare cancer. Can't remember what she called it but there is only one other person in the UK with it. She was brave and bubbly. There was a young lad in one of the side rooms who just wanted to hear guitar playing - so they brought musicians in to play to him. 

My sore mouth struggled with the hospital food, so JP brought me runny porridge in the mornings, Rob came bearing jelly and Jules brought home made soup. As the effects of the poison and infection wore off  I started to feel better.They sent an excellent junior oncologist to see me - someone with people skills and empathy. We talked through my options. Nobody is going to force me to have another dose of Docetaxel if I don't want to. There are other drugs and reduced doses.  

Docetaxel, I've learnt, is derived from the Yew Tree. Should have listened to my mother when she said "Don't eat the berries - they're poisonous!"