Janet's blog

Settled after sleep during the 1-3 ward closure, strictly enforced today. I look around with a kindly eye at the residents of this PACU bay. For  a spell, and maybe due to a spell cast by day nurses H and K (special people), it feels like family. The chronically ill 17 year old is laughing with her parents, the long-serving ITU nurse, and her consultant. The elderly lady who needed a Punjabi speaker and made me wonder about dementia is speaking apparently rationally with her tall son in his cream shalwar kamiz and sandals. I guess she just wanted her stuff and her stick and didn’t want to hang around waiting for someone else to get it. J’s son has been in with her grandchildren. They peeped in at her sleeping and I smiled broadly at the tall girl with her kinky hair, hoping she would find this a comfortable place to visit. She smiled back. The younger boy peered in in awe through his dark framed glasses, trying to locate his grandmother round a cubicle corner. It was ...

I’m not sure if this is a hallucinatory experience - the dregs of earlier morphine then cyclizine, the Patient Controlled Analgesia of fentanyl - or if it is a dysfunctional health care provision. The constant noise: the majority and loudest of which was coming from my nurse for this night and last. The ripping apart of packaging that is one or more grades up on modern crisp bags in a hard, easy-to-clean-surfaced environment, with the plastic contents then thrown down onto the tops of metal storage cabinets in the cubicle of the sickest person here, a young woman who is now whispering and singing to herself like an Ophelia of the sluice room. He must be constitutionally unsuited to being a night nurse where a soothing, near silent presence, with caring hovering wings are required . One of the others, a soft-soled Irish woman, tucked her patient up in bed, with rolled towels at her sides to prevent her rolling back. My husband brought me wet flannels today to wash my face ...

It feels very much like time to thank people again for all the cards, emails, letters, texts, WhatsApps, telephone calls, offers (delivered) of allotment help, scarves, hats, caps, flowers, visits, seeds, potting up of seedlings, food, dog sitting, books, invitations to visit - what have I forgotten? I still feel overwhelmed by all this and totally undeserving - so thank you, thank you, thank you everyone. I haven't managed to thank people individually - I have truly been overwhelmed and just haven't had time to respond to everyone. Right now, am rushing round like blue-arsed fly trying to do all the things on my lists before having to arrive at UCH at 7am on Wednesday morning. As always when rushing, things go wrong - in this case a full mug of hot chocolate has gone over the light-coloured carpet so I have wasted half an  hour blotting and damping and blotting and washing - and it's still going to need a carefully-placed rug. I'm hoping for an allotment session t...

Surgical consult today - Chris and Maddy in attendance too - CT scan of 25 May showed a good response to the chemo, with shrinkage of some tumours and some no longer evident. So as long as staff and the post-anaesthetic care unit (PACU) are available, I will go under the knife on 13 June for 6 hours. There will be a lot of rummaging about, deep inside my personal space. She now thinks there's a reasonable chance I'll get away without a stoma, but there are  no guarantees and the scan doesn't tell her what a good look and a poke about will.  If there's a shortage of staff or PACU, I might get bumped to the next day (maybe with a different surgeon) or have another chemo s ession instead with the surgery put off for another three weeks.  As long as they can avoid this scenario from Gary Larson's twisted imagination, I'm pretty confident I'll be OK.  Mums' funeral is on 7 June and I'm supposed to be finalisi...

My mum died in the night on 23 May. She was at home, my sister-in-law was there and she was peaceful and free of pain. She had not been well for a long time so it was not unexpected and in many ways I had been saying goodbye to her bit by bit over the last few years. But I had hoped to get down to see her again before I have surgery in June. There is a lot to do of course and we simply don't have the resources to do it all properly right now. We're not combat ready, as my brother put it. So we've decided to have a very small family funeral in early June, then hold a celebration of mum's life in the autumn when I will be fit. I'm also feeling a bit down in the dumps about my 60th birthday. When I retired last year, I was truly thinking of breaking the habit of a lifetime, expecting to have the inclination and the time to organise some sort of get together to mark it. But it's gone the way of nearly all my other big birthdays - 16th was in the  middle of ...