Home again.

Evening all.

My first course of chemotherapy treatment is now complete and with things looking reasonable as far as my blood counts are concerned I've been allowed home again.

I'll keep this short today as I am feeling very tired, hence the late hour of this post. I got home just in time for the boys to get home from school and after a quick hug I've been to bed for a sleep. I think the last few nights restlessness and lack of sleep have finally caught up with me and last night in particular was no exception.

Unfortunately one of the older guys in the bed opposite me was struggling last night and going up to midnight had a constant stream of specialists in attendance to assist with his breathing primarily. This resulted in just after midnight him being put on a CPAP (Continuous Positive Airway Pressure) machine which was extremely noisy.

The constant disruption and the noise from the CPAP meant that I didn't have a chance to get to sleep. Relief (for me at least) came about 1am when they decided to move the patient to one of the bays nearer the nurses station to make observation easier.

The patient has the same type of Leukaemia as me so once again it's a reminder of how lucky I've been so far, but also how quickly things can turn around if I pick up an infection. I enquired how he was this morning and whilst he's still poorly he's stable. I hope he's ok and my thoughts go out to him and his family.

I finally managed to get some sleep but woke a little later to the sound of the patient in the next bed snoring like a pig. I've never heard snoring like it! Needless to say that didn't help either and I was awake for some time until he finally shifted position and things were a little quieter.

The consultant came round mid morning and confirmed that I could go home. The plan is that I was due to go back for my bone marrow biopsy on Wednesday, but as the list for Wednesday is full I await a phone call to confirm when this will be.

I start my next cycle of chemotherapy on Thursday but this is then followed by four days of follow up drugs which they currently plan to be administered by IV. This would mean that I'd have to be in hospital every weekend for the next 4 weeks which I found really disappointing. Discussing this with the consultant, she said that there is an option to take the drug as an injection into the stomach, and if I was happy to do this myself they might be able to let me do this at home. I'd be much happier doing that and it would free up my weekends so I'm hoping they agree to let me go down that route.

That will do for me tonight. Thanks as always for reading.