Peter’s Hospital Diary

Nearly a week passed already! Now 2 days to the transplant…

The morning so far has been typical, observations at 7, breakfast at 8:30 – but without a knife and fork, so by the time they arrived the beans were nicely congealed! After that came the drugs round with my favourite (not) – an anti-fungal called Itroconazole. I think it must have a pretty unpleasant base taste (it’s a syrup) which is unsuccessfully disguised by a “standard medicine flavour” and artificial sweetener. Ugh! Still, an excuse to suck a lemon sherbert afterwards. Last time I was in here, the taste was so unpleasant after the chemo that I couldn’t drink it, and had to go onto an intravenous version.

There was an added impetus to wake up this morning – a dawn chorus of pneumatic drills on the building works outside. However their early morning start has paid off, and they have now stopped! Tea break perhaps.

Last night was punctuated by the observations at 2 o’clock, made longer as I had a saline drip put up in preparation for the next dose of chemo. This is a drug called Melphalan that can have some unpleasant side effects, of which hair loss is probably the least worrying! To lessen those effects, I need to be properly hydrated, so I had having a litre of saline pumped into me. The infusion pump seemed to be in an awkward mood, it took half an hour before we got it working (I am becoming adept at loading and running the things) so that was quietly purring away until 9 this morning.

The rest of yesterday passed quite pleasantly. The routine continued after the bloods with the consultant ward round, whose the general consensus is that things are going well. We had a discussion about the treatment, drugs and the balancing act between keeping me sufficiently immuno-suppressed to prevent severe graft-versus-host disease (rejection) and not too much that it prevents the incoming cells from getting to work on the lymphoma cells. I’ll write more about that on a separate page. As I only had one lot of chemo yesterday, the afternoon was fairly quiet, answering e mails and having a doze!

Things livened up when Katie arrived with some bits and pieces, including a 40W light bulb (Eureka!) and the Freeview box which has improved the quality of the TV pictures – now if only something could be done about the programmes…

Talking of programmes, I had a chat with the production team from City Hospital, who have been following my progress for the last 3 months. They will probably be filming the transplant to go into a programme to be transmitted in the next series

And yes, I did do some time on the exercise bike…!