Here we Go - Oh! Barfing all over the Ward!

Hello everyone, plus even more new people! Are you absolutely barking? Do you know what you've let yourselves in for? Indeed you do. And you're in good company.

Well, that was an ‘interesting’ week, in the sense of the Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’…

Last Wednesday I went for my first dose of radiotherapy, (I have 30 doses to look forward to) which involved being stapled to a piece of steel for 25 minutes inside the mask I have had made up for me. To say it fits my face & throat like a glove is a bizarre exaggeration. It’s so tight that I can’t even open my EYES when I’ve got it on. Now THAT’S sensory deprivation for you. In fact, to riff off my Ripley / Alien theme, it really isn’t much different to having a face-hugger adhere to my face (thankfully without tube down throat planting alien seed in my stomach…)

Luckily, I’m not claustrophobic, and I can just about relax & persuade myself that it’s a bizarre, beepy, if oddly futuristic sci-fi spa treatment. Yes, I do have a lively imagination. Good thing too!

Anyhow, got that out of the way, and because it was Week One, I had to have one quick dose of chemo.

Quick? Well, that was the plan.

However, I had the worst reaction to any of my treatment so far.

When the Doctor asked me how I was, my answer was to throw up all over myself (how lovely – all my previous tossing-of-cookies has managed to hit a receptacle of some kind), have a massive collapse in the middle of Outpatients involving stretchers, ECG machines, nurses running around with heart monitors & twittering how I had a systolic blood pressure of 27 (impossible apparently) and a haemoglobin count of 7 (ditto).

Clearly, once again I just WASN’T GETTING ENOUGH ATTENTION and had to throw a big drama queen special. Sheesh.

So, I was hauled onto a Ward, and given my very first blood transfusion ever!

Three Bags Full, and all.

I am finally a true vampire living off the blood of others! How apt.

I’m only Type O Neg however, nothing exotic.

I was finally released on Friday night – or rather, I kind of discharged myself. I was fed up of not being able to stop vomiting. I just couldn’t eat the hospital food, and knew I was getting under-nourished, and would just get ‘iller’ if I stayed in. So, I am home and feeling better now that I can eat stuff I can actually (and indeed, literally) stomach.

So, it’s Monday, I have a wonderful friend taking me into radiotherapy, and here we go all over again!

29 doses to go. And counting, believe me.

Big love to all of you gorgeous gorgeous friends!!

Rosie xxxx

‘Some people are like Slinkies, really useless, but make me happy when pushed
down the stairs...’