Taking the piss at the hospital

Oh I apologise for the very obvious pun of the title, which will become clear as you proceed. And I want to emphasise that this little account of my day in hospital yesterday is not any kind of dig at anyone. It is if anything a dig at the god of fate that you had better not tempt by making assumptions about what will happen next. I will however mention that the container in the picture above is very germane to the burden of my tale.

Yesterday was my long-arranged monthly visit to the court of king Elranatamab in Addenbrokes hospital where I go every 28 days to have the chemo which seems to be doing very well at keeping my Myeloma at bay. But I did not arrive as my usual sprightly self however. I was limping.

I was limping because the cellulitis (an infection in the lower layers of the skin) which had dogged me earlier in the Autumn (see blog post from October: Well that was a bit of a surprise ) had suddenly returned on our last day in Malta. Angie had noticed the small red patch under my ankle on Saturday morning. By the time we got back to Heathrow on Saturday evening I could barely walk and had to order one of those buggies that make the "tshk tshk tshk.." noise when they are moving. The cellulitis certainly came back like a vengeful antagonist.

However the NHS came up very trumps again because by 9:00 the next morning, the very clear and meticulous doctor in the Urgent Treatment Centre had prescribed a strong antibiotic to stop the infection as quickly as possible. But there was a fly in my ointment. We had come back to Angie's in Cambridge, but we had to go back on Sunday to my house in Woodbridge because a large container had been posted to me to use for the 24-hour urine sample that was needed for Tuesday's visit to the court of King Elranatamab. I had never heard of such a test, but apparently after six rounds of treatment they do this to see how your kidneys and other organs are standing the treatment. So we went over to Woodbridge and the next morning I started to fill the container above. This is not a very dignified process and after half a day it starts to get quite unwieldy. And when I went up to stay with my sister on the Monday night there were plenty of opinions on where the vessel above should be stored, and on the horrors of cross-threading and such. 

By the morning of my treatment... well all I will say is that it was a damn close call and my rucksack was very heavy, which is not what you want with a gammy foot. But I got there via train and taxi and went in for my early morning blood tests, which I have each time. Usually they take about three samples - in those clear plastic tubes and containers of various sizes. But I had also been told that at the end of the six-month stage they have to do an additional set. So as the phlebotomist ticked the boxes on his computer screen he had to put no fewer than twelve containers into the tray with the form; plastic tubes of various sizes and colours.

He inserted the cannula to extract the blood and over the next five minutes filled the tubes. He did it very efficiently and removed the cannula. Then he said "Oh, I'm so sorry! One of the plastic tubes had rolled under the paper report sheet and remained unfilled. So inserting a new cannula further down the same vein, he made up the full set. 

I then went to see my excellent consultant and she looked at the red ankle, thought a bit, and said "I think it's best we postpone today's treatment for two weeks."

So because they now have to discard all today's samples, in two weeks time I will be back with a heavy rucksack again and will carefully count the twelve plastic tubes.

At least I shouldn't be limping by then.