Every week seems to be a funny week at the moment. I get my portacath put in, finally, by quite a grumpy doctor. I ask for sedation, he disagrees. I ask him to cut out the keloid scar the last doctor left me with and he tells me people heal differently and that it is not the responsibility of the doctor. I disagree and tell him the last doctor sewed it sides together so the ends were sitting proud, and that he was also gossiping with a colleague about other colleagues while he did it. He silently disagrees and is grumpy when I tell him not to do blanket stitch. Perhaps everyone says this. I have to wait in recovery for 2 hours and then I can go home. When I get home, I am so tired I go straight to bed and sleep for a couple of hours. When I wake, I feel totally disoriented. Mr Mason wakes me and I ask the time. He says it is 6-o-clock. I ask day or night? I ask what day of the week it is. I am not with-it at all. I get up and dress and go downstairs. He has made supper but after a forkful I realise I am really not feeling well. I take my temperature and it is over 39 degrees. In my delirium, I manage to make the thermometer read farenheit instead of centrigrade and can’t work out how to change it. Mr Mason asks what my temperature is and I tell him it is 104 at which point he says “If that’s in centrigrade your blood would be boiling”. I say I need to ring the hospital. Mr Mason, ever the optimist says “Come and sit in the garden and cool off”. I decline. He suggests I have ice in my drink. I am too far gone to even give him an old-fashioned look but I do phone the on-call oncologist. She asks me to convert the temperature for her but I can’t. She realises from my babbling that I need to come in so we drive to Charing Cross A&E and get waved straight through.

My temperature is 39.9 so I need some fluids and probably antibiotics. The fun part comes when they have to put a canula in. First they try My Best Vein but the nurse can’t do it so she calls the doctor, Salvo. Salvo looks slightly demented and, I suspect, is quite overwhelmed at the job he is being asked to do. He tries the Best Vein, then decides he will go for the groin. I don’t know if you’ve ever imagined someone scrubbing at your groin with a Brillo pad but this feels like I imagine that to be. Dr Salvo goes at it with zeal and then insists on scrubbing up and having full protective gear and gloves on. I try to tune out of the worst bits, including the many anaesthetic injections, but I look up when he says “It’s not going to work” and I see him with a slightly manic grin on his face, holding up 2 feet of thin tubing while his gown and gloves are liberally splashed in blood. So, Plan C means they try to fit canula in each of my feet. No success. After almost 3 hours while Dr Salvo gets increasingly anxious-but-cheery, he decides to call the anesthetist who he thinks can help. While we wait and I get various bits of tape stuck to me, someone finds a portable ultrasound scanner and they finally manage to get a canula in My Best Vein. Result. I go up to the ward just after 3 and spend the rest of the night being monitored. I have fluids and more antibiotics and towards the end of the day, we are told I can go home. Relief.

On another front, my hair decides it has had enough and begins to drop out. I leave a trail of hair throughout the house, it comes out in my hands and hairbrush and is annoying so Mr Mason agrees to shave my head for me. It’s good to have most of the hair gone but the little bits are still falling like autumn leaves. Clearly there is no need for a No-no in our house. In other news, I am having chemo number 2 tomorrow which I hope won’t depelete my energy any further. At least they will be able to use my new port which should dispense with the Brillo pad groin technique.

It is Monday and I know we need shopping and feel I could go with Mr Mason if we drive. We just go to the local Sainsbury’s and park on the first floor. There are 3 lifts at our local branch, 2 for customers and 1 for Sainsbury’s ‘colleagues’. Pressing the lift buttons brings all 3 but I am just a tad slow and so Mr Mason is in a lift with the doors closing before I realise it. He doesn’t leave me stranded, though, but presses the button to open the doors again and when I get in, I realise there is a woman in there who is shaking her head in barely suppressed fury. As we get to the ground floor, she stomps off, still shaking her head and muttering. I feel strangely drawn to her. Mr Mason goes off to buy some disposable containers for putting our own meals in the freezer (and, all too often these days, my leftovers as my appetite is pretty poor) and I wander into Sainsbury’s with my trolley thinking “I will seek that woman out”. I don’t know why I do it, really. I suppose there is some need to make a connection and to pass on some information rather than wisdom. Anyway, she is fussing at the fruit section and I walk up to her. “Excuse me” I say, politely. She ignores me. I say it again, this time laying a hand gently on her arm. I get her attention. “I couldn’t help but notice you were a little frustrated by my slowness at getting into the lift earlier. I just wanted to let you know I am having chemotherapy for terminal cancer and so I’m not as agile as I’d like to be.” “I’m in a hurry!” she snaps. I understand that but I want to give her a moment to pause and be aware and, perhaps thankful she is not in my position. I want her to realise we spend so much time rushing and being stressed and that maybe she could re-evaluate her situation right here and now. I am clearly expecting a lot. I tell her I just wanted her to know and maybe understand. She just looks at me like I am a lunatic and says again, emphatically, that she is in a hurry. I smile and say “OK”. She still looks frustrated and cross and she really does not want to make a connection with me. She is a middle-aged woman dressed in black lycra from head to toe and then she says she is going to a funeral. I give her a long look and say “Aren’t we all” before turning away.

I cannot understand people who don’t want to make a connection. It feels totally alien. I connect with people all the time, whether it’s a smile or holding a door open. It is just about recognising our human nature and acknowledging the other person. Animals do it all the time and I think it makes the world go round a little more smoothly. When I first had hair after my last bout of chemotherapy, I was walking along the road when a young woman, sitting at a cafe, shouted out “Hey – I like your hair!” It wasn’t the compliment that made me fizz inside, it was the connection. Maybe I am not being articulate enough in my explanation but I wanted the cross woman to soften and to be more than a cross woman in black lycra. She wasn’t having any of it and maybe on another day she would have been different.

We shop and buy a trolley full of treats for the next few days as Mrs Lavoll is coming to stay. Treats include sausages, ice cream and chocolate. Sausages in Norway, Mrs Lavoll’s home country, are not the same as ours. They are like frankfurters and full of smushed up meat. After living in England for many years, Mrs Lavoll has gained a taste for English sausages, particularly Cumberland although we are also trying to convert her to Lincolnshire. Another mystery is why the Norwegians do not have coleslaw. Given their predilection for open sandwiches with cold meat and fishy caviar, it seems extraordinary that they have not gone for coleslaw. It seems it just does not exist in Norway. Periodically I suggest Mrs Lavoll starts to import it and become a coleslaw magnate but she seems surprisingly reluctant to change her career in this way. We spend a lovely couple of days together but my energy levels are already dipping and my sleep becoming fractured. I have lots of mouth ulcers by this point and spend quite a lot of my day showing them to anyone in the house. I am a child at heart. But Mrs Lavoll is a friend who would, and has. flown over from Oslo just for the day to hang out and eat Thai food. Just the thought of it makes me smile.

With the weather becoming increasingly hot, Dog wanders in and out of the house at will. We put a rug down in the garden and he lays on it, sunbathing. Having his roots in the Sahara, it is not surprising he likes to sleep in the sun but when he comes up to me for a random bit of attention, I am immediately drawn to what looks like blood on the side of his face. He doesn’t seem bothered and lets me gently dab at it with some damp kitchen towel. Mr Mason and I look at it and worry at where he could have sustained an injury. I remember giving his lovely face a scratch earlier in the day when I was laying on the sofa but definitely don’t remember seeing blood. And this blood seems to be dark pink in colour rather than red. Hmmmmm. It is Mr Mason who does the Sherlock Holmes thing and says “Raspberries”. Of course. Dog has laid in the garden and put his big old head on an errant raspberry and squashed it and the juice has seeped into his fur. Dog is oblivious to this and just thinks we should continue paying him close attention and scratch behind his ears……..just there. Aaaaaah.

Time passes so quickly and before we know it, we are back at Charing Cross. The hospital rings on Monday to leave a message telling me I must go in and have more fluid drained on Tuesday. As we will already be there on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, this is a little frustrating but we duly turn up. We cannot park in the car park so park instead on the road behind the hospital. There is a lorry on the corner from which horses are being unloaded. This is an unusual occurrence in almost-central London but then we see a sign on the front of the lorry which says ‘Funeral service’ so we guess they will be harnessed to a hearse. I would like at this point to show you a photo I took of the horses but for some reason, although it is uploaded to my laptop, it will not allow itself to be uploaded to wordpress so you will have to imagine 2 large, white horses standing around on the pavement.

Yet another x-ray and then up to the ward where I am shown to my usual bed, a bit like a favourite restaurant. This one has views over London and even shows a bit of the river. Again, I can’t show you what it looked like as, yes, you’ve guessed it, wordpress won’t allow me to upload the photo. So even the selfies I took with a winning smile on my face will have to be imagined. Mr Mason hangs around for a while and then goes home to continue with his decorating frenzy. After he has gone, Ms Marsden arrives with Hummingbird Bakery cupcakes and a pile of canvases. She has the art bug big time and is painting anything that will sit still long enough. We discuss various ways in which the cupcakes could be divided which is anything from ‘share them with Mr Mason’ to ‘eat them all yourself, you greedy pig’. After a while, she has to go and I busy myself with my e-reader and a hospital luncheon which ended with jelly. It’s years since I have eaten jelly and I’d forgotten exactly how nice it is, especially if you’re having trouble swallowing, like I am.  Back in the dim mists of time, we used to make jelly in a variety of moulds. There was the racing car but my favourite was always the rabbit. I suspect they are long gone from my kitchen but I would quite like to resurrect them.

While I wait to be taken down to ultrasound, a doctor pops her head around the door to ask if she can see me. She tells me she is from the 11th floor and is having an exam but has heard I have a pleural effusion which she would quite like to listen to. Would I mind? Absolutely not. As long as her hands and stethoscope are warm, I am all hers. She taps away on my back first then looks at my chest, noting bits that are there and bits that aren’t. She has asked me not to tell her which side the effusion is on but then sees I have had a recent drain which rather gives the game away. Then she listens again with a stethoscope and then more tapping during which she asks me to say “99” each time she taps. I wonder momentarily if I should say it in a variety of voices or if anyone is listening and thinking me deranged. I want the final “99” to sound like the final 99 but I can’t tell when she is going to finish so give up. She says she doesn’t think the lungs sound different to each other giving me a rather suspicious look as though I have been a medical stooge, placed in her way. I suggest she goes to look at my last x-ray which will tell her exactly where the fluid is and will suggest how much.

At 3pm I am wheeled down to the Ultrasound department. While I am in the waiting area, I am rather distressed to see an elderly lady sitting in a wheelchair with a hospital gown on which doesn’t even cover her knees. I want to ask someone to cover her with a blanket or sheet but I am whisked away into the darkened recesses of the department. It is quite strange being wheeled about in bed by a total stranger. I feel a little like a parcel being delivered. The doctor is all ready for me and is pleased to see I have brought some Mepilex with me, the only adhesive dressings I am not allergic to. She decides to go in through a different rib and while she is putting the anaesthetic in, she hits a nerve which is the most peculiar feeling. It hurts but it feels as though the nerve is jumping all over the place. I have already asked for strong meds to be prescribed in case I have as much pain as last time when I thought I might be having a heart attack. The nurse looks at my available meds and reads them out, saying she doesn’t think I’ll have much problem controlling the pain with all that lot. The procedure is not very painful or even uncomfortable, apart from having the anaesthetic, ironically. As soon as fluid starts to flow, my oncology registrar appears and scrambles about on the floor, getting samples which she is going to deliver to the lab personally, the last lot having gone walk-about. Not having the cytology report means there is no proof that there is cancer in the lungs but I personally have no doubt it’s there and the oncologist doesn’t, either.

After I get back to the ward, I am given a dose of ora-morph to deal with the pain in my shoulder and, apart from observations being taken every 30 minutes, I am left to relax and doze off. There is some slight anxiety as to whether I can go home or not but the registrar appears and decides there will be no more fluid to come out so she removes the drain and asks if I will have one last x-ray before I leave. It is almost more than I can bear, so much do I want to escape but she arranges for us to have one done in A&E and we are whizzed through in record time. She takes my phone number in case there is something wrong on the x-ray so although I didn’t want to have it done, I appreciate her diligence. Mr Mason and I stroll back to the car and we are soon home. A cup of coffee and a Hummingbird cupcake later and I feel almost normal. Almost.