Thursday, July 23, 2009

Your dinner is served


Another use for Barium

Ok so another treatment passes by but this time it was hard, really hard. For some reason I didn't sleep the night before, I was worried, why I don't know but I was. The morning of the treatment my hayfever was playing up so I took a Piriton tablet.

Once in the treatment chair, having had my nails done......as a moral booster the hospital are employing a beautician to offer treatments to patients to aid their care. It's this sort of thing that makes Western Park a community more than a hospital, and I suddenly remember what my first injection is. Piriton! I know how to get a reputation for causing trouble and upsetting the nurse putting the needle in is one of them. Nicole (my nurse for the most of the day) was great though and although I fell asleep from the combination of Piriton and lack of sleep it didn't put me at risk.

Having chemo therapy is not difficult, you sit there with a drip in your arm. People come and go around you, pretty much everyone is on a different regime and therefore will take a different amount of time for their treatments. I stay for an average of 6 hours, others are there for an hour or two. So for six hours I find stuff to do, they have free wireless for the geeks (me included), they have lunch (dry sandwiches and under-ripe fruit) and they have loads of people to talk to or listen to. New people worrying about their treatments, old timers giving their experiences and the staff who talk to pretty much anyone.

So there you go it's boring. Just get on with it, it's life saving treatment and all I have to do is sit there and watch the world go by.

The weekend Charlie and Veronica where home was amazing, emotional and fun and it felt like he'd never been away but more of that on another post. I did more than I'd done so soon after a session, it wore me out both physically and emotionally but it was brilliant.

Whether that over exuberance left me a little run down or what I'm not sure but I ended up with a urine infection. Not quite trying to pass a cactus but like the valving wasn't working properly. A quick trip to the hospital and a course of antibiotics later and all was well. Coming off the antibiotics was nice, especially as I was going to the hospital for another CT scan. For the Scan to work as well as possible it was on an empty stomach that I stepped off the bus and into the scan waiting area. Now the letter said there was a possibility of having a barium drink. The nurse shouting my name suggested it was more than a possibility. A container of white liquid awaited, the container had markings down the side, the nurse wanted me to drink it all unless I was going to bring it all back.......nice.

Now i'm sure that these barium drinks cost a great deal of money to produce and I'm sure that somewhere in some lab someone is producing these special dies. Well if that someone is reading this please please please stop making the stuff so flipping awful to drink. Imagine a really thick liquid with loads of flour, stacks of flour, a large helping of sickly glucose and a quick dash of orange. I wimped out at 800ml, it must be a bloke thing but I wanted to drink it all, as with all my treatments so far take it on the chin and accept it. I accepted defeat at 200ml to go, I thought it better that some of the die was in my system rather than being on the waiting room floor!

I kept it down and in all the way through the scan. Now we wait, we get the results next tuesday, these should show us in detail what the furball is doing. Fingers crossed then!

1 comment:

  1. Hi Nick, really sorry the last treatment was so difficult, glad your managing to keep that wonderful sense of humour of yours going! The moral boosters at the hospital sound like a lovely idea, how about Geoff & guitar doing a round of the wards to keep the patients going? or not!
    Mum use to simmer pearl barley in water for hours & hours to make barley water which was great for 'plumbing' problems/infections, it was probably almost as bad as the barium drink to get down though, especially when left to cool - it went all gloopy, lumpy & gelatinous - yuk, worked a treat though!!!
    Hope you manage a peaceful weekend, lots of love to you all - Sarah & Geoff xxx
    ps - just been looking at Anita's (The Hartie's) webpage on The Marie Curie site, three cheers for Anita! xxx

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