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by Hugh Cook |
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Section 135 Entry 0001. Date: 2005 March 23 Wednesday.
(diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) For my third cycle of chemotherapy (number three of a projected six) I spent five days in Auckland Hospital and was discharged on the afternoon of Monday 21st, just a couple of days ago though it feels much more distant. The same day, I took possession of a couple of big plastic bottles from an outfit called Diagnostic Medlabs, which has an office right here in Devonport, down in the shopping center. From yesterday Tuesday at 0700 to this morning at 0700 all my urine went into the bottles, giving me a twenty-four hour sample which I will take to Diagnostic Medlabs today. The sample is to test for something called creatinine. When I show up at Diagnostic Medlabs,I will also have blood samples taken to test for a bunch of stuff: a full blood count, electrolytes, potassium and urea. The results will go directly to the medical staff at Auckland Hospital, allowing them to fine-tune their understanding of how I fared, physically, during my latest bout of chemotherapy. So today I will hike twenty minutes downhill to the Diagnostic Medlab place then twenty minutes back. My exercise for the day. Today I also phoned Auckland Hospital to confirm my next appointments, variously at the oncology department, the haematology department and the eye clinic. A very bright sunny day today. My mother suggested I start using the sit riser that I gave to my parents when I left New Zealand for Japan some seven years ago. So I have. A sit riser is a kind of chair you kneel on, which sounds uncomfortable but it really is excellent for typing. The buttocks are on a chair-type pad, but the knees are kneeling on big pads, which tilts the body forward into a good typing position. Back when I was writing professionally, which I did for a few years, I started to get backache from long hours sitting in a chair typing, but the sit riser cured that. In Japan, I have another one that I bought in a furniture shop, but it was a devil of a job finding it. The sit riser, I think, is an evolutionary advance in the world of chairs, but the power of inertia is obvious. Today's creative push is on a poem on constipation, one subject which I don't think the world of English poetry has yet done to death. Sample:- Oh brave push! The pendulum stretches the world! Creative inspiration? You find it where you find it. Section 135 Entry 0002. Date: 2005 March 24 Thursday. (diary) (previous) (top) (bottom) (next) (topics) (contents) Because my eyes are all messed up, when I borrow books from the Devonport Public Library I go for the large print editions which are designed for people who have problems seeing. Typically I read crime fiction and the like, for example N IS FOR NOOSE by Sue Grafton and BE COOL by Elmore Leonard. My latest borrowings included a book by a Swedish writer, Henning Mankell, a murder mystery with the title THE RETURN OF THE DANCING MASTER. Conveniently, it comes with a couple of maps of Sweden, a country of which I'm almost completely ignorant. Sweden? Snow, I guess. And blondes. And Swedish. The capital is ... I thought I remembered, but I have to look at the map. Stockholm. Other place names include Sveg, Brunflo, Idre and Varberg. Just reading the names make you think saga thoughts. One of the main point-of-view characters is a Swedish policeman by the name of Stefan Lindman. At one point it's noted that he daydreams about being a soccer player in Italy, as if being an Italian soccer player was more exotic than being a Swedish police officer. For me, as a reader, it's the reverse. What kind of country is Sweden? Well, they have at least one Internet cafe. And the currency unit is the kroner, as I discover when reading the following:-
Yes, Lindman has cancer, of the tongue, apparently. He doesn't know if he's going to survive, which tilts his thoughts in the direction of death:-
I borrowed the book to read about crime rather than cancer, but, even so, find myself a little curious about the details of Lindman's condition. Lindman says the tumor is malignant, but how does she know that? His cancer treatment is not going to start for three weeks, but why the delay? Is there a waiting list? It seems he will have some kind of operation after radiotherapy, but what kind of operation, and why does it come last? And why do his blood tests seem to be so time-consuming? In my own case, after each hospital admission I get a letter giving details of what happened to me. It's a technical letter written for any medical service providers in my life rather than for me as a patient - my GP gets a copy, for example. The latest letter specifies my cancer as "Primary CNS lymphoma," the letters "CNS" indicating the brain plus spinal cord, or central nervous system, with further details including "Diffuse Large B-Cell lymphoma w High Ki-67, -C-Myc" - and presumably there's someone on planet Earth who knows the meaning of "Ki-67, -C-Myc". The Clinical Management sections says:-
The "MXT" designates a chemotherapy drug called methotrexate. In my case, this toxic substance was administered by intravenous infusion over a period of four hours. Later, a substance called folinic acid was administered to neutralize the toxicity of the methotrexate. The term "IT Ara C" means "intrathecal Ara C". Ara C is another chemotherapy drug and it is injected, at least in my case, into a sheath. The word "theca" apparently means "sheath". The sheath in question is that housing the nerves which run down my spine. So I'm getting two chemotherapy drugs, one by intravenous injection and a second, Ara C, by injection into the spinal area. I've been told that the spinal cord descends as a thick bunch of nerves and then, at a certain point, breaks up into a kind of wide delta of nerve fibers. The area involved when the Ara C injections are done is, apparently, this delta area, and it's been indicated to me that it's not particularly risky for someone who knows what they're doing to work on this area. At the same time that I get the Ara C injection by this lumbar puncture procedure (for "lumbar puncture" read "putting a needle between two bones low down in the spinal column") a sample of cerebrospinal fluid is taken for cytology - that is, analysis of the cells. If I've followed the explanation correctly (and I can't always guarantee that I do) then the cytology will indicate how we are progressing against the cancer. At first there was so much to take on that I was a little fuzzy on some of the details of my treatment. However, after three cycles of chemotherapy (three of a projected six) I'm now a lot clearer. In closing, Sweden. It really exists, and its real name is Konungariket Sverige, which translates as "Kingdom of Sweden". It is actually the fourth-largest country in Europe (which comes as a big surprise to me) and has close to nine million people (as compared with about four million for New Zealand.) That ends my blogging for today. My schedule for the rest of the day includes two hospital appointments, one for a sit-down meeting with an oncologist at 10:00, a meeting which my parents will probably attend, and the other being an Ara C injection by lumbar puncture at 11:00 at the haematology department on a daystay basis. (Technically, cancer falls into the oncology area whereas the haematology people typically deal with blood, but this year Auckland Hospital has been using some haematology resources to help trim down an oncology waiting list.) (Parenthetically, standard American spelling would be "hematology" rather than "haematology".) |
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