6691/19611
Up early for the drive to the Mount Vernon Cancer Centre - my father-in-law very kindly drove me there and waited and drove me back, in case I wasn't fit to drive. The whole chemo process was very quick indeed. I was a little early and went to the wrong building first of all, but the great thing with having a rare cancer that needs to be treated in a special place is that there aren't the usual queues and waiting times and they got me to my chair early.
A nurse had weighed me and measured my height first. I heard her saying I was 177cm which I was sure wasn't right. I thought I was about 168cm but then thought maybe nerves or tiredness had made me misremember. I say my height in feet and inches usually never quite getting into metrification - luckily given we Brexited - but I still questioned it. I mean what if they were working out some kind of dosage from it or just checking my BMI was OK. The extra inches would probably mean the nurse didn't think I was obese, which would be great obviously, but was I prepared to die for vanity.
She said the height might seem different because I was wearing shoes, but I don't think my trainers were giving me a three inch lift.
But so much do I trust the NHS that I went with her assessment. She knows what she's doing, right? And maybe having ball cancer had caused me to grow. Without the ball pulling me down to earth I had finally achieved an average height. The news gets better and better.
But then I googled 177cm in feet and inches and it was nearly 5 ft 10 and so I told her she'd made a mistake and though she was sure she hadn't, she measured me again and I was back down to my normal size. But what a three minutes that had been.
I doubt it would have made much difference to anything and we all make mistakes and I suspect that this lady was a lot more tired than I am. Also it annoys me how they weigh you with your shoes and clothes on so you always come out about 2kg heavier than you really are, so maybe she was being kind to me. In case anyone saw my BMI and wondered what kind of monster I am.
I was shown to chair 11, between a happy tattooed man (in a leather jacket which turned out to have Elvis and other 50s rock stars on the back) rocking out to music through his headphones and his mask only covering his mouth and a very quiet middle-aged lady who hadn't even brought a book. Once again I felt I looked younger and healthier than most of the other people (but my self-image still projects me as a 25 year old, so there's every chance I didn't) and felt like a cancer fraud with my easy, one-off chemo shot. I was nervous, but the staff were full of cheer and banter and inappropriate jokes, which is just what was needed. My nurse was looking at my arm saying she wanted to find a fresh bone. And I had so little clue about what chemo actually is that I wasn't even sure if she was joking.
As it turned out, chemo goes into your veins, but they had trouble finding one of mine. The first nurse gave up without even trying and then the second one had two goes, like pinning a tail on to a donkey - for the second one he said “I don't really like having to do this,†before going in via the back of my hand. I didn't know why that was worse than the arm, but in any case it didn't work. So he called for a third member of staff and the first nurse said, “They're calling for her. This must be serious.†It turned out that she was the best at pin the tail and she found a vein deeper in my arm and got the needle into it. These three attempts would be the only, very mildly painful, part of the procedure. Everything else passed without incident. There was a saline solution for 10 minutes, the chemo for maybe 35 and then they flushed my system for a little longer. The longest part was the wait was for my meds to arrive from the pharmacy. But there was no rush. I had some pills to counter nausea (that might or might not be a side effect) and some injections to shoot into my stomach next week to help with my white blood cell count. The chemo compromises the immune system, which is why I got my Covid jab very slightly early.
I didn't feel any different than before, which was annoying as I assumed the chemo would give me superpowers. Maybe I'd have all the super abilities of the needle that had bitten me, or of the bag that dripped the chemo into me. But apart from really busting for a wee, there was nothing. If that was the super power then I feel I have been badly served.
Though I apparently do have to be careful to wipe up any errant pee as the chemo stuff is coming out of me for the next fortnight or so in my urine, poo and semen. They haven't said what the spilled wee might be capable of, but I am trusting them on this. With great superpowers, come super responsibilities. So a fortnight of wiping up my sprinkles, before going back to leaving them all over the bathroom is a small price to pay.
I was home for lunch and I took it easy for the rest of the day, but there were no notable side effects yet. Which is a shame as I was hoping I could string out another week in bed from this.
I am going to take it easy for a couple of days and am aware that side effects are still possible. It's actually more worrying not to have any as it'd be nice to feel like it was working, but this is such a softie's chemo session that they did say there might be no noticeable effects.
I mentioned that all had gone well on Twitter and got so many lovely replies - I genuinely hadn't expected that, because even after all that has happened in the last month, I still feel like a fraud and that nothing much has changed.
Hopefully that's an end of it. I bid goodbye to the team and said I hoped I never saw them again and they agreed that they didn't want to see me again either. The old rocker rocked on his way just before I left, clearly an old hand, not on his final session. The quiet lady had more hours to put in today. I have been very lucky.
Very grateful to all the medical staff who've got me this far and I know that you'll be keeping an eye on me for the months and years to come. Which is actually a pretty cool service to have. Checked that you're well every three months or so. The NHS is so incredible and anyone who doesn't fight for its survival (and more than that) is a fucking idiot. Covid should have shown us all that even having private medical insurance will not protect you from something that hits the whole country. And I genuinely don't believe the speed or expertise of my treatment would have been any better had I gone private. I'd rather die than not wait my turn. Because even though I don't have a Union Jack flying behind me right now, I am a true Brit.
