Living with cancer by David In Ireland (best books for 7th graders txt) 📖

feeling great, the pain in my leg is just pain, I do not feel sick, so I am fine. Paddy is eating a lot more, but still not enough to kick start his body back to full normality. I know he will be in here longer than me, he is doing great in his recovery, he just needs to eat a little more and he will get home soon.

The day finally came when they let me go home. I was asking every doctor that came to visit me “can I go home?” and each one in turn said “not yet”. I still had a drain in my leg, it was still draining a lot of yellow yucky stuff. They said I could go home when it stopped. But it did not stop. I agreed with them that if I could go home I would come back every 2 days to have my leg drained.

Home, home sweet home, home is where the heart is.

Waking on the 11th morning with cancer. Lying in my own bed again. My wife beside me, my children asleep in their bedrooms. The world is perfect. Even if it is just for today, I will have a lovely time. I have been told that my chemotherapy will begin on the second week of January, so I have about 5 weeks to get rest.

I have a very positive attitude right now, I hope it will last. I am being much more positive about the chemo therapy. I have fully decided to take it and also to take radiotherapy. Coming home made me realise why I needed to get chemo and radiation, I need every possible change to beat this thing. There are only two treatments available in the world recognised by medical professionals, chemo and radiation. There are lots of different little things that may or may not help cure cancer but none of them have ever been proven. If I am going to get cancer again in another part of my body I want to know that I did everything I could to stop it. My only reasons for doing this are my wife and my two girls. If I lived alone I think I would not do them.

I now know that I have to do the chemo and I have to be strong about it. I am not doing it for me, I am doing it for my wife and girls, so that makes it easier for me. I do not think I would have the motivation to do it for myself. I know they will visit me regularly in hospital, I will be able to take the strength I need from seeing their faces.

The last couple of days at home have been filled with pain. The swelling is getting pretty bad in my leg. The pain is growing by the day. The stitches look like they are about to rip open. I had a visit from the local health nurse. What a waste of time. I do not know why she insisted on calling on me, she did not have any of the right dressings so when she took off my old dressing she had nothing to re-cover it with. She ended up putting 6 different dressings on it, she even managed to get the sticky bit of the dressing to run over my stitches which caused a lot of pain when it was removed. I do not want her to visit me again, from now on, if I need help I will go back to the hospital. I can get from room to room, it is a lot of pain, but once I get lying down I get pretty comfortable. After an hour or so I get stiff, so I have to move around a bit, do my daily physiotherapy, make myself a cup of coffee. It is only a bit of pain once I am comfortable, so I am enjoying watching TV alone, all of the things that my girls think as ‘boring’, discovery, national geographic. .. .. The days are passing quickly, I am in and out of hospital regularly enough with my leg problems. It seems like I have an appointment every day or two, each one takes up to 2 or 4 hours. The painkillers are working well, I am very comfortable most of the time. .. .. These will be the most amazing 5 weeks as they fall during Christmas which every Irish person knows is that all of Ireland shuts down for days and days.

An exception family time for me. Every few days I seem to need to have my leg drained. It is not nice, the biggest syringe I have ever seen, with the largest needle I have ever seen is pushed directly through the area of the incision, on the line of the cut, it goes about 3 inches into my leg, the surgeon then draws the fluid out. He repeats this 4 or 5 times until the leg is less swollen, as he does it I can feel the pressure reduce on my leg. The pain goes away. The stitches look less likely to rip through with the reduced pressure. It is quite amazing, I limp into the hospital in pain and I walk out with almost no pain. My leg keeps draining into a dressing which needs to have a very thick pad on the outside as it drains for quite a while. Then back home for 2 or 3 more days and then into the hospital again for more draining. Each time I go in they drain a little less each time.

I am really looking forward to Christmas day. Obviously it is a special time for kids, but as a parent it is even more special watching their eyes light up with their ‘I always wanted this’ gifts. We probably spent a bit more on them this year, but they deserve it, they have had a rough couple of months.

Christmas and New Years. Five weeks have passed, I can’t believe how quickly the time has gone. My life seems to be infast forward right now. I want to take every aspect of this time into my headbut it is going by so quickly that I am not remembering anything. I seemed to blink and it was over. The time was special, I am sure it was, but Ican remember nothing. It was just a blur. My mind spent so much time in ‘cancerworld’ that I did not notice the time passing. The past few weeks have been a turmoil of thoughts about thechemo therapy. I am not looking forward to it for so many reasons. Every aspectof it is bad. There are so many aspects to it as well. It can cause so much damage to other organs. The nausea. The vomiting. The hair loss. Being weak. Staying away from home for so long. Coming home sick for 2 weeks and then having to go back. I am scared of it. I am scared of what it might do to me. I don’t want to go back into hospital. This is hurting much more than I thought it would. I thought when the time came I would be ready, but the time has gone, I have to face it, I have to be strong.

Tomorrow I am going in to have a Hickman Catheter fitted into my chest. I am not too sure what it is going to be like, something about putting a rubber tube into my chest which will stay there for the next few months. The oncology nurse said it would make the chemo treatments easier for me. I have to fast again for it, I am tired of the journey to the hospital early in the mornings with an empty stomach, I always feel sick.

Hickman Catheter. I arrive in the hospital, fasting, at 8am. Blood tests ordered. X-ray’s done. Then I am given a gown and asked to get into a bed. I am on an oncology day ward where there are 13 comfortable chairs and two beds. The beds are for patients who are getting a small procedure. It is a bit like being in a bed in the middle of a waiting room. Then I am brought off to the x-raydepartment where they put me on a bed with a very large xray machine attached to it. The room is busy with about 8 people moving around doing their thing. Various people introduce themselves to me, telling me what they do, then they give me an injection, wait a few minutes, and then begin the procedure of putting a tube from my chest to my neck and into a main vein into the heart.There were stabbing pains which made me say ‘oouuccchhhhh’ then another injection and I don’t remember anything after that. I woke up back on the dayward, in a bed in a waiting room. The nurses were chatting to me as I woke up, it was all very confusing, I appeared to have been having a chat with them when I woke up. I am holding a piece of toast and I have a cup of tea in front of me, but I thought I was asleep. It is like having a dream that you are awake,but then you wake up and you were asleep!

I was sore and stiff,but not too bad. My head felt strange, sort of a drunk feeling. My wife arrived to take me home and they said I would not be able to walk, I thought the were speaking of my leg, but they said my balance would not be right yet. So I tried to get out of bed and boy were they right, the world was like the sea, waves,the floor moved in waves. So I was put in a wheelchair and brought to my wife’scar. It was raining very heavily and Jill, the nursing assistant pushing the chair, began to move quicker and quicker. Waaahhhoooooo went my brain, it was like being on Thunder Mountain rollercoaster. My clothes felt strange, my hair was hard. I had blood all over me, dried blood congealed in my hair, my top was covered in blood. It was so confusing, was I in a fight? Had I been in an accident? Why was I in hospital again? There are three rubber tubes hanging out of my chest, each one with a different coloured plastic end with a cap on each one. I can see where the tube goes into my chest and I can follow the white line under my skin up to my neck were there are more stitches.

When I got home I lay down. Eat some dinner. Went to bed. It is nice to not fast, I like to have water to drink during the night. It’s the littlethings.

Day one on chemo. The day began, I sat in one of the 13 comfortable chairs,they did more blood tests. Then a nurse came over to me and said the words “we are ready to begin your treatment now”. She sat on a stool in front of me. She set up a stand beside me and hooked on the various bits, the pump, a clear bag of liquid, plugged it into my Hickman tube. Then she took out a large syringefilled with a red liquid, plugged it into another tube on my chest and slowly began to push the red liquid into me. I asked her various questions about what she was doing, how long it would take, stuff like that. After a few minutes I had asked all I needed to ask so we started chatting about any old thing. It took about 30 minutes for her to slowly inject the red