Of Angiograms and The Man in Bed 7

Bit of a gap since the last post but my excuse was that I've been in hospital; properly, with a bed and nurses and everything.  I've actually done pretty well as I'm knocking on the door of 50 years old and this was the first time I've had to stay overnight in a hospital.

The reason I was there was they need to fiddle around with my liver a bit before they shove the radioactive spheres into it. Now the idea behind these spheres is that if they squirt them into the correct artery that supplies the cancerous bits with blood these spheres are just the right size to stick in the artery where it narrows thus allowing them to offload beta radiation directly into the tumor. Neat! The downside is that this "correct" artery has a couple of branches off to the stomach and elsewhere and these need to be blocked off first so the spheres don't do to the healthy bits. This procedure is all done under a very clever (and expensive) X-ray angiogram machine and through a wire and tube that's been inserted into the groin and threaded up to the liver.

So on the day of the procedure I'm wheeled off the ward to the lift, then back to the ward as they've forgotten to take bloods to check my platelet count* and then off we go again. Everything is all explained to me and yet more consent forms are signed and then my role appears to be lie under the machine, don't move and hold your breath when we tell you to. In the meantime you get to listen to the two registrars and the senior consultant (the nice and amiable Dr See who came in and advised on the tricky bits) going about their work which, at times, sounded like you were in a machine shop and they were trying to work out which size screws and bolts would fit...

"... well that's a good sized gastric artery so we'll try with two ten-by-fives and the see if we can get a three-eighteenths Armstrong-Whitworth countersunk to close it ..."

Right at the end when all the stray blood vessels are closed in came the guy from Nuclear Medicine with a lead lined box. Now this isn't the treatment but it mimics it and is a very low dose of Technitium-99m which is used as a radioactive tracer. They inject this where they would put the spheres and if it only goes to the liver we're onto a winner.

So I'm injected with this stuff and I aquire my first superpower which is "lie completely flat for the next two hours and firmly press this cotton pad into your groin to stop the bleeding" which, as superpowers go, is a pretty crap one.

The wait isn't too bad mind as I spend most of it underneath a rotating gamma detecting camera which builds up a pretty 3D image of my insides. When it was done the technician showed me the image of my liver rotating round and round in pink and orange hues; it looked absolutely normal, just like in the text books and it's hard to believe there's something wrong with it.

So there we all are and its back to the ward.

Fig 62: An NHS ward, last week .

To be fair I was expecting worse. It was clean but too hot** (enough to raise my body temperature to a nurse-worrying 37.9 at one point) and the staff were great - friendly, courteous and attentive. Even the food wasn't bad.  The big problem was the noise and constant disturbance; the day kicks off at six and they didn't turn the lights down until midnight, everyone including me was on 4 hour observations so even if you do get to sleep they wake you up at 2am for blood pressure and general pokage and this being the oncology ward half the people in my bay of 7 beds are on machines that go "beep" so as they roll over in their sleep they block the flow and "BEEEP BEEEP FECKING ATTEND TO ME BEEEEEP!" happens.

And of course there are always the other patients. Now most were fine, nice people whom I exchanged pleasantries and a little conversation with. And then there was the man in bed 7.  At first I was being charitable and thinking maybe being elderly he was a bit confused, frightened and in pain. Then I thought he was a bit of a git. Then a fully paid up git. Finally I settled on the fact he has a PhD in gittishness from the University of Gittingen and was currently Emeritus Chair of Obnoxiousness and Git Studies at Trinity College.

His constant background routine was like the old priest in the Father Ted comedy series except his yelled phrases were "Nurse!", "Bottle!" and "Tablets!". This went on all night. In the early morning he decided he was going home, whilst connected to two drip lines. The nurses, under lots of provocation including racial and extreme sexual harrasement (he offered a nurse "more than the NHS paid for an hour" at one point) managed to get him back into bed several times until he decided quite calmly to disconnect his drips - fortunately he was just on fluids rather that chemo - and stand up. And promptly fall down.  At this point he got moved to a smaller side ward. Which was probably just as well as a queue was starting to form to kill him just like in Murder on the Orient Express.

They let me go home after two days in which, despite taking earplugs and eyemasks, I probably slept a total of four hours.  That was Thursday. Now you know why I haven't blogged until today. I've been asleep.

A hospital is a treatment machine. It's there to do stuff to to you. It most certainly is not somewhere you go to get better.

And I get to do the whole thing again next week.




* That's important because if its too low I bleed out all over the angioscopy suite and that blows the NHS cleaning up budget for the month.

** But the hospital as a whole has the heating cranked up to the max