««	July 2008					»»
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

Mailing List

ian734

ian's bowel cancer blog

27th March 2006 -

note to new readers - you can use the calendar on the left to find previous entries

a rough guide to entries:

March 2006; diagnosis, hospital, intensive care, home again
April; life with an ileostomy (including the messy bits)
May; start of chemotherapy
June: sunshine and showers
July: end of chemo?
August: halcyon days - calm before the storm
September: a testing time
October: liver surgery
November: R and R
December: one year on
January 2007: hopeful new year
February: life returns to some sort of normality ....
March: ... or does it?
April: the bowel and liver are scanned ....
May: .. and are 'clear'
June: the party season
July: bag-free
September: life returns to some sort of normality - part 2
December; that's all folks ....

Frying pans and fires

« H » email link

Frying pans and fires

July 20th 2007

“You look just like your hero”.

I’m lying on the sofa watching the Tour de France. It’s hot and I’m uncomfortable. A fan does little to ameliorate the situation. My belly is swollen from surgery - and the two pairs of incontinence pants that I’m wearing under my Y fronts.

“Lance Armstrong?”

“No - Homer Simpson”.

Thus begins my road to recovery.

I’m sore and a little worried that I’ve done the right thing. I need to dash (can’t though – hence the nappies) to the loo about every hour. My bum is on fire. Storing toilet rolls in the fridge does not help. The Bag-lady suggests Vaseline.

That song (Air Hostess) by McFly springs to mind; “I messed my pants/watching the Tour de France”.

Hospital was a nightmare; I lied to get out. They'll only let me home once my plumbing is working and I’m eating solid food. The mess in my bed testifies to the former and the packaging from a sandwich (contents of which were binned) testifies to the latter.

I can’t keep anything – food or drink – down. Sickness and hobbling to the loo dragging the umbilical of the drip with one hand, while preserving my modesty (an ill-fitting hospital gown) with the other, is no fun. And there is no way of doing this discretely – once the drip is unplugged from the mains it cheeps like a hungry fledgling waiting for mum to return with a juicy worm.

I’m surrounded by misery – a man opposite is to be moved to a specialist hospital some 70 miles away. He can’t get out of bed unaided so is manhandled into an armchair at 10.00am to await transport. It arrives at 5.00pm. In another bed - another bowel op gone wrong. The plumbing works but the epidural fried his stomach muscles so that he can’t eat anything other than soup. He’s been here 3 weeks so far.

At first I keep thinking ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ – so many sad stories. Then it hits me – ‘Hotel California’ – “you can check out any time/ but you can never leave”.

The final straw for me is asking (politely) for pain relief at 1.00pm and not getting until 6.00pm. I decide that I would be better off at home with Annie and some paracetamol.

The escape is made and I get home on Saturday just in time to see the start of the TdF.

A couple of days of home cooking and my appetite returns. But – no apples yet. Back to the Homer Simpson diet until any discomfort from food passing through the repair to the ileum had dissipated. Two weeks on and that happy state has not yet arrived. The consultant says it could be a couple of months.

The wound is leaking – badly. The district nurse will give it one more week and then I’ll have to go back to be re-stapled. It’s unbelievable – the wound from the liver op ran from one side of my body to the other and had 42 staples in it. The dressings came off in 3 days and the staples were out in 10. This wound is about 3 inches long and won’t close.

The constant trips to the loo are wearing and uncomfortable. I resort to Imodium to try and slow things down. I still have the runs but the frequency drops to more manageable intervals. Imodium is a double-edged sword – it undoubtedly helps – but I can’t tell if things are improving because my large bowel – atrophied for the past 18 months - is stirring from that long sleep and slowly remembering what its job is.

Now here’s a sentence I never imagined thinking let alone writing: I have no rectum. And here’s another: I really miss it.

This unappreciated drone performs a role much like a flip-top bin in the kitchen. It’s a handy place to store rubbish. Now every time I want dispose of a something as trivial as say ….. a tea-bag, I have to run outside to the dustbin.

So the crucial thing over the next few months is – will the remaining bowel take over and learn to do this new job? Is there a culture of multi-skilling down there or is it all demarcation and jobs for the boys? Time will tell. In the meantime it’s back to the bacon and the frying pan.

posted Friday, 20 July 2007comments (1)

JJ made this comment,

Hi Ian I am so glad to hear from you but frustrated that things havent gone smoothly. Cancer is such a b*stard for making a person glad for the most mundane of things, the smallest of mercies. I think of the lines from Hotel california as beinf applicable to cancer in general - once you have joined the club you never get to leave it.

Please let me know when you can start on the veggies as nothing would give me greater pleasure than to send you a basket of them

comment added :: 24th July 2007, 11:56 GMT