Waking up on your 40th birthday is never going to be an amazing feeling. Waking up on your 40th birthday totally delirious, spewing your guts out, with a temperature of 39C and horrific diarrhoea is not what any of us have in mind for officially entering middle age. Nonetheless, that's what happened to me on 28th February.
Being an amazing hospital that specialises in cancer, the Christie gives you a little card to carry round with you that has a 24 hour hotline number on it. You call it if you have any adverse side effects to your treatment, and that's what I did mid-morning. By 2pm, an out-of-hours doctor was round at my house and examining me. He ignored my vomiting and diarrhoea, instead honing in on the lymphedema that sits in my leg (lymphedema is swollen tissue caused by fluid retention, in my case because scar tissue and a lack of lymph nodes prevent lymph fluid from moving round and exiting my leg properly, meaning my right leg and foot are always swollen). He insisted that I could have a blood clot and that I needed to go to A&E right away for a scan. Have you ever wanted to scream because you know that you're right and someone else is wrong? That. My leg is always swollen, has been since 2012. But the doctor would not listen to me and insisted I go. It was snowing heavily outside and I had a high temperature and was vomiting on the reg. The last thing I needed was to schlep up to A&E and wait for several hours amongst other sick people. So instead, I listened to my instinct and went back to bed.
The next morning, I was woken by my phone ringing. It was my dad. The bloody Christie had only gone and called him wanting to know why I hadn't attended A&E yesterday per the doctor's instructions. Like I was a small child in trouble with my parents. Jesus. By now the vomiting had stopped and my temperature had come down a little bit. Reluctantly, now that I felt a bit better, I moped off to A&E in the snowstorm once Alex got home. Totally pointless as I guessed it would be. The scan the doctor told me to have wasn't doable. I had to wait several hours just to have a blood thinner injection for a blood clot I knew perfectly well didn't exist. And by the time I got home, I was feeling absolutely bloody awful again. Worse still, I had to go back the next morning for a scan to look for this non-existent clot. Looking back, I could slap myself for going against my instincts and going to the hospital just to please everyone else. If I hadn't gone, maybe the rest of it wouldn't have happened.
To be continued...
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