Hubris & Nemesis

Hospital food. I shouldn't have bragged. The clinic has a new cook. Cuisiner (cook) in French. A chef is the boss. Chef de cuisine is the boss cook. O.K., probably a new chef de cuisine. Actually, probably an outside service. I am avoiding the issue. The food was terrible!

Good news. I didn't get to eat for 4 days.

Bad news. I didn't get to eat for 4 days.

The doctor kept asking if I'd burped. I kept saying "No." After four days I realised he meant gas at either end. (Last August, I remembered, he'd asked me if I'd farted. Someone must have told him the English find the word offensive.) They were waiting for a gas eruption before feeding me. So I lived on broth until I had sense enough to tell him I'd passed gas.

Then I got a little more to eat. A "cheese" course. A slice of packaged cheese so rubbery that you could bend it in two without its breaking. Tasted like a pencil eraser.

Eventually, the dietician came around and asked if I'd had a bowel movement (Vous avez fait des selles?). Even my pronunciation of "Oui" must arouse doubts about my understanding because she repeated it in baby talk (Vous avez fait kaka?). Like I understand baby talk better. The answer was still, "Oui."

So I got dessert, my first fruit. Compote. It's sort of an apple sauce, sometimes flavoured with other fruit, which only makes it worse. It comes in a little container like a one-person jelly tin. It's awful and I didn't eat it. However, if they'd wanted me to make kaka, why had I not had a vegetable since I'd entered the hospital?

The last night I got my tray and, under the plate cover, was green! "Vegetables? For me?" I asked. The serveuse had no sense of humour. I was desperate; I ate half: overcooked, watery, unseasoned courgettes (zucchini). Yuck.

The good news: I lost 2 kilos, but that includes the fat and tumours lifted from my stomach, an event no more gross than the meals I was eating. Or not.

The American Patient

Thank you all for your prayers and thoughts and even your jokes.

And thank you to my blogger replacement who has done sterling work, as always. (I married him, didn't I?)

On March 31, we arrived at the hospital reasonably on time and were promptly seated in front of an in-take person. Good. She immediately got a telephone call, evidently from a friend. Bad. After 5 minutes, I was muttering to Nick. After 8, I interrupted her to ask, loudly, if someone was available to take care of us. She hung up. (Credit where due, many others would have continued nattering.)

She had no record that I was being admitted. She had no file. She had no private room. That's when I exploded. It was a loud explosion. (Poor Nick; he does put up with some stuff. I have never been able to get the hang of the stiff upper lip, mustn't complain, let's find a queue and join it attitude.) It got loud enough to have the entire waiting room's attention and, better, a supervisor. We sat down with the supervisor.

Gosh, my file was exactly where I'd said I'd left it (on the surgical floor). And, son-of-a-gun if there wasn't a private room for me, too. Breathe in, breathe out. Lower voice.

I was scheduled for surgery at 10:30 the following morning. Priority, even! And yes, Jane, the cute orderly was there to take me to surgery, again. That's all I remember. Boy, that anaesthetic works fast.

Woke up in less pain than last time, probably due to the extra drip and the extra pump. The rest of the stay went pretty much as usual, except that my platelets were low, so they had to give me a different kind of anti-coagulant that required 2 shots a day, rather than 1. Picture of right leg. Left leg is the same with bigger bruises.

Normally, I have to continue the anti-coagulants when I come home, but my platelets are too low.

Platelets are what make the blood clot, right? Why was I getting anti-coagulants at all? Anyone?

Between my inability to formulate questions until after rounds, and the surgeon's "you don't ask; we don't tell" policy, it took until this morning for me to get the report straight. Maybe. The tumors on the ovaries seem to be connected to other tumors on the bladder and intestine. Or the tumors on the ovaries are also connected to the bladder and intestine. One way or another, they couldn't take them out.

But -- get this -- he did drain my abdomen and remove some fat that came with the cancer (?) and had tumors in it. Liposuction -- the hard way.

I will be going back into chemo, probably with a change of drugs or protocol and we will try, again. Appointment with the oncolgist is scheduled for April 27.

This stay was good for lots of blog material. More to come.