Home again

I forego my creative space (I managed to start a shawl yesterday) in lieu of bringing you the following.

The doc briefly bobbed in to my room this morning to ask why I didn’t take Aciclovir or Septrin and I informed him it was because I didn’t take steroids.

He called back in later this afternoon about 2:30pm (see I’m so considerate I’ve nixed the whole 24 clock thing) to say that my ears must have been burning as I’d been discussed.  The report on the heart ultrasound confirmed that no infection could be seen.  Our Prof stated that I had presented like this when the myeloma relapsed in February so basically I could go home, keep taking the tablets and come back to clinic a week tomorrow.   Now I was graciously enough not to point out that ‘someone’ wearing jim jams, sitting on the bed and looking remarkably similar to me had in fact said the same thing on Tuesday ie, when the Revlimid kicks in the temps will settle down.  I believe I may also have mentioned it to the radiographer.

B knows me too well  he’d been there all of five seconds before he asked if I was okay and when I said ‘Yes’ he said ‘Well you don’t look it round your eyes’.  Well that would be because the rest of the conversation went like this…

‘You know it’s serious.’

‘Yes.’  Polite laugh

‘People must have said that to you before.’

‘Have you ever spoken to anyone else about the myeloma?’

Glazed expression – ‘Well I chat to the ladies in the wool shop a lot and like who else – man on bus, women walking her dog?’  ‘Here?  Or at Whiston?  Well there was the doctor there and then we came here and we’ve recently seen the transplant doctor…’  Trailing off in a I really don’t know what else to say way.

‘Have you spoken to anyone in palliative care?’

‘No’ slightly high pitched

‘Would you like to?’

‘No!  I’ve always taken the view that I’d cross that bridge when we came to it.’

‘Well if you want to you may find there’s someone who can be really helpful…’ – okay there may have been something else said but things went a bit fuzzy about then.

Now Chris arrived to be a participant from the ‘serious’ bit so when B said that I didn’t look okay she said she’d go (declining a lift home) so we could discuss things.  So we did and then we discussed it some more in the car on the way home and I had a little cry and then B got teary and had a coughing fit – not exactly getting hit by a bus but definitely potential road traffic accident potential.

So I have it on good authority that B will be saying something when we go to our clinic appointment.  Chris rang me before and we both came to the same conclusion independently regarding the ‘serious’ question.  This doctor doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know I am generally happy so he maybe thought that I was so happy because I was completely oblivious as to the ‘seriousness’ of the myeloma situation.

So I’m happy to be home, am tired but feeling reasonably well and have so far only nearly ended up in tears twice more – the second time when B went to work when I would gladly have given his left testicle (to make a common expression as polite as posssible) for him to stay home.