T - 3. Ladies and Gentlemen presenting the Unravelling Wilburys

I think it's called an earworm -when you have a fragment of a song stuck playing on a loop in your head.

Nurse came in at 5.40am this morning to do Obs and hook me up to a bag of Aciclovir and it kind of sprang fully formed into my head as I opened my eyes;

'Reputations savable,
Situation changeable,
Wibble wobble
Cannon ball - handle me with care'

George Harrison's singing most of the time but Tom Petty has popped up on occasion, -  it seems that I don't know all the lyrics so we've whacked a bit of brain fluff in there to make it scan and the job's a good 'un.    It's decided to stay with me all day, so I thought what the fuck you can have it as well.

I fell asleep after that and woke again when the porter came in about  to wheel my bed down to surgery to get my line fixed. Only it turned out that because it's the weekend, the right chap/xray kit wasn't available to either replace or remove the Hickman Line, so that's been strapped tight to my chest until they can get the guy to shift it. I've had a new one fitted and it's of a different type, called a Central Venous Catheter it goes in the side of my neck and into a vein that drops straight into the heart. It's a short term measure and will be replaced by another Hickman in due course, of which I promise to take better care.

'Wibble wobble
Cannon ball - handle me with care'

As I've said to a couple of people I've been chatting with on Fb/instant messaging, last night and this morning were the toughest times so far. I really felt like death warmed up this morning and only started to improve after a nurse in the recovery room finagled a couple of paracetamol for me after surgery. I had to have an X-ray to verify that the CVC had been correctly inserted, then it was back up to Waddington Ward for a bag of NAC which I now know is N Acetyl Cysteine but I don't have the foggiest wot it do as the Google search is blocked by the Kings College Server, sounds promising though - eh?

I am now four hours and  twenty minutes into the second infusion of high dose nasty, one hour and forty minutes to go. Shiny upper lip, heavy, overfull head some slight feeling of disconnect and being out of phase.

'Situation changeable,
Wibble wobble...'

A doc swung by a while ago to take out the Hickman Line, it had been strapped tight to my chest, maybe in the hope that it could go back in - I dunno. It was mostly out and as she pulled the last inch or so emerged from the hole in the upper right quadrant of my chest and hallelujah it didn't set off another bleed. BTW platelets were up to a count of 70 this morning in spite of being nuked all week weird eh?

I thought the bloody removed Hickman looked a little like one of the foetus state face grabber aliens from 'Alien 2' with its' hunched body and little legs hanging down. I wanted to keep it, but it had to go for incineration. Oh another thing that chemo and especially The Nasty seems to specialise in is what were known as 'The Screaming Kidneys' back when me and my twenty-something year old friends were into weekend long drinking binges. Lower back pain in a band just around or above where we all perceive our kidneys to be - it passes though.

Apologies if this entry doesn't rock along as fast as those that have come before, but the reality is that when you people in the queue reach this point in your therapy you will feel like you've been shattered into little pieces and reassembled - just not quite properly. Some advice that I can pass on from very direct experience is to embrace sleep -  if you can sleep through the whole experience, your life will not be one experience less rich for abdicating this one.

I haven't fought sleep, but I haven't embraced it either and the combination of a diet rich in chemo and palliative care drugs (and shitloads of coffee) is certainly enough to piss all over anybody's fireworks after eight days. Enough whinging for now, the end of the start is in sight and compared to the way I felt when I first opened my eyes 16 hours ago I am more than golden now.

'Reputations savable,
Situation changeable,
Wibble wobble
Cannon ball- handle me with care'


I like the 'Wibble wobble Cannon ball' bit best, I just wish it would get the fuck out of my head as I'm needing earworm space for Joe Bonnamassa a bit later on tonight.