Stem Cell Transplant Journal Day 5 – 5 December 2015 (Cancer and Me 46)

It’s Saturday today. Chemo-wise it’s exactly the same as yesterday, so I won’t bore you with it. The mild nausea comes and goes, and I mainly feel fine.

I slept ok last night. Ironically the thing that kept me awake, if anything, was the fact that nobody woke me up to do ‘obs’! I was waiting for the gentle tap on the shoulder around 2am and again around 6am, but it never came. That’s quite a serious oversight, and was apparently because they had agency staff working last night who don’t know all the procedures. No excuse really! If body temperature starts to flare because of an infection while a neutropenic patient is asleep, IV antibiotics are needed as quickly as possible. Their body doesn’t have an immune system to fight it, so it can quickly turn very nasty. Picking it up 9 hours later, because the agency staff didn’t know to do observations every 4 hours, could have been too late for someone. I made the point gently to the nurse in the morning, but she’d already noticed from the notes when she took over at 8am.

Jake, my No1 son, who is 18, came to see me this morning. That was lovely. The time went so quickly, though. He got here at 8:30am and left about 12pm, and it felt like 30 minutes, as we gassed about football, Christmas, Syrian refugees, family and many other things.

And then after lunch, and a couple of episodes of “The Walking Dead”, with chemo finished until 10pm tonight, Heidi came to visit it with Tom (14) and Anna (12). They brought their PS3 and played Call of Duty Zombies with me!

Dinner arrived, I ate, and the family left to go home, and then after doing my daily exercises I lay in bed for a while trying to have a snooze.

The evening was pretty boring really. Whatever intentions one has to do useful things while cooped up, the environment is not really conducive. So I did some more work on my book, and while my last lot of chemo for the day finished dripping through, I watched ‘Match of the Day’ on TV.

Tomorrow will be much the same, even from a chemo point of view, so I will probably skip the journal tomorrow.