Fade to Black

Day 89

General status update

Jaw: the wretched tooth is still twing(e)ing – still not completely convinced that the American forces, in the shape of the antibiotic Erythromycin, are delivering the requisite Shock and Awe – and I’m still keeping my fingers crossed.

Hair: it’s BEGGING me for a trip to the hairdresser. It says it’s desperate for a trim and, chemo or no chemo, it’s ashamed to be seen out with me looking like this. Ah, how soon it forgets that we were expecting to be completely bald by now.

Nose: pretty much better. Am hoping that this particular side effect will not reappear during FEC5. A nose full of cold sores was just a chemo side effect too far.

Nausea demon, Chemo Muse, Anti-Tooth Fairy, Despair Demon, and Chemo Brian: have temporarily put aside their differences to form a five-a-side football team to compete in the West London Demons’ League. It’s a quiet few days for all of them before they’re back at work again with the root canal treatment (Tuesday) and fifth dose of chemo (Thursday) next week. They’re all out training on Brook Green at the moment, and they’ll be playing in their first match on Sunday.

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Fatigue/weakness: not too bad, considering

Anxiety level (1-10): anxiety assuaged by simply refusing to think about what is going to happen to me next week. Denial is one of the most powerful anti-anxiety remedies there is, and you don’t even need a prescription for it.

State of mind: as the days go on, and I feel myself becoming increasingly more demented, I begin to wonder whether that mightn’t now be something for others – possibly psychiatric professionals – to judge.

Previously on Chemo Nights: it is the morning of October 4^th, 2012, and I am in the Riverside Ward at the Charing Cross Hospital, waiting for my lumpectomy operation. The kindly duty anaesthetist has talked me down from my perch on a windowsill, and prescribed some Diazepam, after which I go to sleep for a while…

I wake up at around 11 am and, seeing the time, think that my operation will no doubt be taking place soon, as I have been in the ward since 7.30 am. I am starting to feel both hungry and thirsty – before a general anaesthetic you are not allowed to eat, so my last food was the evening before, and my last drink was a few sips of water before leaving the flat this morning. I ask a nurse if it would be OK to have a drink of water, and she says no; I may be taken in for my surgery at any time, and you must have nothing in your stomach because of the risk of vomiting.

I get out of bed and start to prowl around the ward, trying to take my mind off my growing thirst. I briefly consider going into the bathroom and drinking water out of the tap, but the nurse has scared me – I don’t want to risk vomiting whilst unconscious. I try to read on my Kindle, but it’s hard to concentrate, knowing what’s about to happen to me, and my thirst is growing by the minute, making itself more and more felt. The Diazepam has taken the edge off my anxiety, but it can’t assuage my thirst.

The minutes and then hours continue to drag by - 1pm comes and goes, then 2pm and eventually all I can do is lie on the bed, in the overheated hospital ward, and think about water: cascades of water, fountains of water, long cool glasses of water clinking with ice cubes. There comes a point during these long hours of waiting when I would willingly have swapped one of my kidneys for an ice cold can of Diet Coke.

I will discover later that the very long delay before my operation was caused by the operation prior to mine – a full mastectomy – encountering complications and taking twice as long as anticipated.

After more than 7 hours with no food or water, by now quite distressed and disorientated, I am simply lying on the trolley gibbering to myself; then, at ten to three in the afternoon, someone finally arrives to take me for my general anaesthetic. He wheels me into a room and leaves me, and shortly afterwards a man in surgical scrubs walks in and introduces himself as Dr. Ivanesevic (not his real name – but it was definitely consonant-heavy, with that Wimbledon-winning Croatian tennis-player vibe to it); he will be the anaesthetist for my operation.

‘You met my colleague earlier’ he says.

You bet I did, I think, and he must have finished his shift hours ago – he’s probably played a game of squash, done the shopping and walked the dog since then.

‘How are you?’ he continues.

‘I am very, very thirsty’ I say. ‘I have had no water for 8 hours. No one will give me any water. I am DYING OF THIRST.’

‘Never mind’ says the doctor, cheerfully, ‘I’ll just give you a litre of fluid intravenously before the operation. Now, this may hurt a little bit, as you seem to have rather small veins…’

With this he drives a needle into my wrist and I scream; after a few seconds I stop screaming, but the pain continues. Dr Ivanesevic looks down doubtfully at my needle-impaled wrist:

‘Hmmm… you really do have remarkably small veins, and you seem to be rather dehydrated’.

This is the only moment in my entire life when I have regretted never taking up kick-boxing; if only I’d had the foresight to acquire such skills, I could have floored Dr Ivanesevic with a swift left hook right there and then from my recumbent position on the hospital trolley.

Leaving the first needle painfully in place, Dr Ivanesevic lifts up my arm and peers at the inside of my elbow.

‘This ought to work’ he says cheerfully ‘although you do have unusually small…’

At this point, mercifully, a veil of darkness descends: I don’t remember how many times it finally took him to get a cannula suitably positioned in my pathetically inadequate veins, or the re-hydrating, or the anaesthetic. All gone, hopefully never to return.

(to be continued...)