I skipped ahead a bit. This is one bit I really found hard to take. Den came with me to get the post-surgery results. Marilyn and her husband provided the chauffeuring service yet again - I can’t thank them enough (and all my other friends who rallied round with offers of lifts. There are advantages to being the only driver in the household when you’re a control-freak like me - and the world is emphatically a safer place without my husband on the roads - but not being able to drive when you’re a phobic is a bind).
This time, I greeted the results in stunned silence. No quiet expletives. What had happened to the reassuring ‘I don’t think there’s much to worry about?’ I just stared at the floor, hearing a gentle voice telling me the results weren’t good: the two malignant tumours and the skin eruptions were now supplemented by 19 of the 21 lymph nodes removed in the axillary clearance being infected. Now I would need a CT scan to see if the cancer had spread and chemotherapy would be essential within 4 to 6 weeks. Did I still want to remain in private treatment? I couldn’t think beyond the word ‘chemotherapy.’ Chemotherapy = vomiting. My obsession. To say I catastrophised is an understatement.
I still considered breast cancer ‘just a disease,’ and wasn’t much fazed by it. It was the prospects of the treatment that well-nigh broke my spirit. I truly felt I was now facing something unachievable. I said I’d like to go privately, anxious of the prospect of getting tied up in NHS bureaucracy, delays and systems and needing to feel I still had a modicum of choice and control. I meekly thanked Mr B and the nurses and was driven home in a haze of misery. I gave no thought to Dennis and how painful this was for him. I had my own feelings to cope with.
My referral was to to the original hospital I’d planned to attend, closer to home. First came the summons for the CT scan. For the first time, I turned to the internet, having no idea what one involved. It seemed manageable for someone with claustrophobia. Then came the letter and the catastrophising. I could barely swallow fluids and was badly dehydrated (by now my GP had a nutritionist trying to fatten me up, a steady flow of community nurses checking my healing wounds and advising me on fluids - no one oddly had the answer to what was obviously a psychosomatic problem with fluids) and I was being told I’d have to drink 2 litres of water AND be injected with dye. Yep, another phobia: I am terrified of unknown things going into my body (don’t bother wondering).
Looking back, that period of waiting was hell. I rang repeatedly to speak to the radiologist but he proved elusive. What an anticlimax when I managed to speak to him. Nothing threw him as I explained all my problems. He simply said he scanned people straight from accidents - he just adapted. It wasn’t the end of the world if I couldn’t drink the water. My mind can be (no, it simply is) my worst enemy. The scan was quick and a doddle because he explained carefully what I would experience physically as the dye was injected. Had he not, I’d have gone into panic and probably knocked myself unconscious as the first rush of heat I felt was in my throat and that should have signalled vomiting. It lasted a few seconds and rushed on to my bladder. No danger.
Another hurdle over. Now I had to see my new consultant, my first oncologist. Such an ugly word, oncology...
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