God laughs at the plans men make

Returned home yesterday evening from an impromptu stay in Maidstone hospital at the weekend. After initially thinking everything was going to plan I had a pain in my left armpit, felt like bruising, which became worse through the latter part of last week. Eventually it became so intolerable that it woke me up in the (very) early hours of Saturday morning, after some debate Stella convinced me to ring the cancer emergency line. I presented at A&E and was taken straight through to a ward for assessment, I had a DVT in my left arm roughly from the PICC line insertion to my armpit (very glad I went in now!). The clot was treated with an anti coagulant (Dalteparin sodium) and within half an hour the pain  began to subside, the pain killers helped here I would imagine. I was moved to a cancer ward where the treatment continued with additional intravenous antibiotics to combat any infection and it was this plus a spike in my temperature that kept me in for a few days.
On reflection I should have gone in when the pain first manifested but I honestly didn't know how much pain was acceptable following the PICC line and infusion procedures. Apparently in a few cases a PICC line can cause the problem I experienced, I have had it removed and opted to have my next infusion in a more conventional way. Fortunately this whole distraction has not impacted on my treatment timescale with the only inconvenience being taking more drugs at home than I would have liked.

This whole episode placed a heavy burden on Stella, particularly this weekend as it was Reuben's 13th and my sister's 50th (two very significant birthdays). Not only has she had to deal with running me to hospital in the early hours and then bringing everything I needed later in the day she has had to maintain a sense of normality, celebrate Reuben's birthday and take the family to the 50th birthday barn dance in the evening the return  reports all indicate a good time was had by all.

I found missing these birthdays very hard.

Today is another day, Stella and I are going for our (now) customary walk in Knole followed by lunch in the town.

While in hospital I restarted reading Don Quixote, I had previously crashed through 250 pages and stopped, Cervantes' novel is a read that demands time to enjoy and given my enforced confinement I had plenty of it, his principle characters are both laugh out loud funny and tragic at the same time. Looking round the ward there were obvious contenders for the part of both the Don himself and Sancho making Cervantes' human observations as current now as when he wrote them.