hanging on in quiet desperation

The clouds were good today. I passed a pleasant hour with my feet up on the radiator watching them to a Pink Floyd soundtrack. Don't judge too harshly - I'm not up to much else.

Tomorrow I get out of here. Neck scan first thing in the morning then I get picked up and taken back to freedom. There is nothing I can think of that I will miss about being in this room. I want to back on the T3 with a working brain and walkinh somewhere instead of just on the spot in my head virtual walking.

Here is a poor quality pic of the view from the window, although its actually better than this. It's just here because I can....

nothingness

Thank the lord for crazy doctor 'mummy' May and a decent EastEnders for a change! And for Bill Bailey and Black Books. Apart from that I'm bored out of my mind - although to be fair there really would be something wrong with me if I wasn't.

Things I'm glad I bought with me - this laptop, a digital camera - another gizmo to while away a bit of time fiddling with - and most surprisingly of all, a decent pair of Sennheisser headphones so I can listen to stuff loud.

Well, got another 2unit time slot to fill with a couple of episodes of Black Books and it'll be time to turn in for an early night with my book. And I've still got Hello magazine saved up for tomorrow when my brain really has turned to mush (although I've got a bad feeling that Hello might speed the process....)

night night world out there.

room with a view

I doubt this is going to be a very interesting part of the blog – apart from as an experiment – as I am in a room 4 and a half paces by 7paces (and I have short legs), and despite bringing a big activity bag with me I can feel myself slipping into a slough of inactivity which will lead to inertia before long. I’m truly living up to my name though and have the contents of a small branch of Dixons here. Still wish I’d bought my PDA it’s got a better mic on it.

The radiographer kindly let me hear what I sounded like on the Geiger counter after I took the radiocative iodine – after the traditional 4 hour wait. It was less exciting than I expected. The best thing is that I have a room with a stunning view over the whole of the city and I can tell I’ll be spending a lot of time just watching the clouds go by.

Question of the day – is having soft underarms really that big a selling point for a deodorant? Wish I’d remembered to bring beer…..

Now - why did I come upstairs.......

Things not to do when you're hypo:

• Go shopping in Asda on a Saturday afternoon. This would probably extend to going shopping in any supermarket on any day, but it was particularly manic this Sat.
• Try to remove the Special Needs baby blackbird from the kitchen - although by the time he hopped out of the open window I decided he probably wasn't special needs, just kicking back against authority, rebellious teenager blackbird as he seemed to know exactly what he was doing once he decided to go.
  
• Become an e bay seller for the first time - especially if you've set your auction to end 12 hours before you go into hospital for four days. I spent an hour and a half on Friday pm trying to find one of my auction items to answer a question, what with not knowing where I'd put it, coupled with forgetting what I was doing every 10 mins. Unusually for me I had put it away somewhere sensible and it was hanging innocuously in the wardrobe under a shirt. So I guess that leads to point four....
• Change long established patterns of behaviour for new and better ones.
  

So I'm just going to leave my house a mess and hope that the mum fairy who has come to visit might at least wrestle the vacuum out and put it over for me.....

hypo loco

So here I am nearly three months later, waiting for my Radioactive Iodine treatment to start on Monday. In preparation I'm on a low iodine diet which you would think would be easy but it involves no dairy - therefore no cheese - and they advise you to make your own bread as you never know with the shop bought stuff.

I've never been on a diet in my life and hate having to think about what I'm eating all the time. I'm eating unnatural amounts of fruit and dreaming of salt and vinegar crisps. In fact I'm going to take a big bag in with me so the minute they say I can come off the diet I can amuse myself by eating them.

I've stopped taking my T3 - thyroid hormone replacement tablets - which will make me hypo ready for treatment. It makes the iodine thing work better, but has the bonus side effect of making you too dull and stupid to care that you've got to sit in a room on your own for 3-4 days with only the first two series of Buffy for company. That's right - no visitors and even the nurses don't pop in to see you. Someone slides your food under the door three times a day and they measure you with a geiger counter once a day to see when you'll be safe to let out again.

Actually I'm just over a week in and feel OK although things get muddier as the day wears on. I shall be having trouble following the plot of Eastenders by the end of the week. Oh well. So typing coherently is hard work at this time of night so I think I'll stop and go to bed.

carved up at last

Actually it's a bit unfair to say carved up as the surgeon did a fantastic job and I imagine in a years time you'll barely be able to see I had an operation - even though the scar is about 20 cms long (had to go off to find a tape measure and piece of string there.) I had my op on the 16th March, with my nice consultant and an audience of hundreds - it felt like anyway, given the number of students who came on the ward round beforehand. One of the nurses said they liked having max facs patients on the ward as the doctors were good looking. Glad I helped make someone happy.

The op lasted 4 hours - it's a weird sensation to go up to theatre in broad sunshine - not that you could really see it through the grime of the hospital windows - and come back down as it's getting dark. The op was fine, I was relieved when the surgeon came out and told me the muscle in my neck was still there and he didn't think he'd damaged my voice or calcium producing parathyroids. But I woke up with drains coming out of either side of my neck, an oxygen mask on, a catheter in and a drip going into the back of my hand. I was pinned down on my back by the tubes and didn't dare move in case anything came loose.

Bang went any idea of a nice cup of tea when I came round. In fact, bang went any idea of sleep for the night. Hospital wards are noisy places and you get very closely monitored all night - not helped by the panic that set in every time they found my temperature raised, pushing my heartbeat up. I was terrified of catching something whilst I was in there and not being able to come out for days. No idle worry as it turned out - two weeks after I was in there 8 wards in the hospital had to be closed because of infection. Yikes! I got off lightly...... I won't go into details as its not very interesting, but the nursing care was excellent, the other patients were nice and we were all very supportive of each other. Good to get out though - I had the op on a friday, they let me go on the Monday.

My tips for quick recovery from an op - if you get a chance to prepare beforehand - take arnica for 10 days or so before and a few days after, take mega amounts of Vit C and don't take refuge in alcohol as a coping mechanism - just in case you were thinking of it. I'm healing up well, despite a uncomfortable feeling in the muscles in my neck still. I could drive and cycle fairly soon after, but the feeling still hasn't come back to the skin in my neck, which is a shame as I liked that bit. It may do, it may not.

yes it defintely is

The next appointment came really soon after the biopsy, and it was confirmed that I definitely had papillary thyroid cancer. It was a relief actually to know it was definitely this as the consultant had mentioned the possiblilty of it being some sort of metastasis of a more 'serious' cancer (my words, not his). As you can imagine this gave a whole new flavour to the early morning insomnia.

So the next hurdle was the op. When to have it? Who to do it? Would I still have a voice at the end of it? Would I have a missing muscle in the side of my neck? Would I be on calcium tablets for the rest of my life? Blimey - those pre op warning things you have to go through don't help the anxiety levels. I wanted the consultant I had been seeing from the max facs team to do it, but he was off to Australia for 10 days so I would have to wait til he got back. So began the juggling act of ops and theatre time that is the NHS. I won't go into long boring details, but sorting out when the op would be and who would actually be doing it was one of the most stressful parts of a pretty stressful process, although I was probably projecting a lot of fear - of not being able to speak, of things going wrong - onto it all. So I would like to apologise now to anyone at the hospital that I shouted at or hung up on..... It was actually sorted out reasonably well in the end, with not too much waiting and with the consultant I wanted. It felt like an eternity though. Remember I had been expecting to have this op since the beginning of January and it was now mid March.