Well, expelled, more like. Liz came by to pick me up at about 18:00 to take me home. She had to wait half an hour because the hospital hadn’t quite finished with me, but I soon put all of my things together, got dressed, and we were off.
Stopping off at the bank on the way back to start to build up a little war chest for the future, we were back at Liz and Terry’s for about 19:30. After a quick snack, because I wasn’t all that hungry, I wandered off to the bed that they had prepared for me, and that was that.
The plan now is that I’ll have a district nurse coming to see me twice a week to take a blood sample, and I’ll be summoned back to hospital in a week or so for a scan. Once they’ve assimilated all of the results, they’ll call me in again to discuss what they might be able to do for me.
But last night, with the difficulties that I’d had the previous evening, I was in bed by 20:00 and fell asleep while I was watching a film. As a result I was awake before the dawn chorus started. This morning’s blood sample was a farce – it took 5 goes and 2 nurses to find a vein that worked. I’m looking even more like a dartboard now.
This morning I was left pretty much to my own devices but it all kicked off this afternoon. They came to change my pochette of vitamins, only to discover that my right arm was incredibly swollen – no wonder it was hurting so much – and so they had to fit the drain in my left arm. And then I had another 2 pochettes of blood. I also had a biopsy, where they chipped a bit of bone off my pelvis to take away for examination and that’s the most painful thing that I have ever experienced.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. The young Eurasian student nurse came to take my blood pressure this afternoon and with the drain having been moved, she needed to reach my other arm. Her solution to this was to lean right across me, in her low-cut nurse’s uniform with no t-shirt on underneath.
“Ohh – your blood pressure is up, and your pulse is racing a little”
“Really?” I replied. “I can’t think why”
Clearly I’m not as ill as I think that I am.
