Home Sweet Home

Finally yesterday I came home. I won't go into all the ridiculous details, suffice to say I found out they weren't planning to discharge me til next Wednesday when the drainage nurse was back from annual leave, and then after being told I could go at 9am we ended up having to wait 6 hours for some antibiotics to be brought up two floors.

The drain is intact and still working, yielding around 400ml a day of lymph fluid (although it periodically stops and my leg swells pretty rapidly). 

The nerve pain in my leg is getting worse both in frequency and in acuteness. It woke me up crying in the night. I have discovered through researching that its medical name is peripheral neuropathy (information here) and that it's not massively uncommon as a complication or side effect in both cancer drugs and surgery. Given that information, it is massively surprising and disappointing that I have had to find this out myself, and that the on-call doctor didn't realise it was nerve pain causing the agony during vaccing. It seems that it is one or more of three things:

1) A temporary effect caused by the placing of the drain which will be alleviated when the drain's removed

2) A side effect caused by swelling and bruising pressing on a nerve which, again, will subside as it heals

3) Permanent damage which will have to be controlled by medication or further surgery

I am trying to be positive but having a little dip of my toe into 'why me' territory at the moment as it seems again I have been very unlucky in experiencing this complication.

Also, my parents want to visit me one evening this week. How the hell do I hide that I can't get up on my own, or that I have a whopping long tube coming out of my pants into a big 2 litre drain bag. Do I tell them? How do you tell your elderly parents that their child has cancer?