First christmas in Hospital!

So it's coming to the end of Boxing Day, been my first Christmas in Hospital and it's been alright. My sisters, my parents and my girlfriend were all here Christmas day. Yeah it was nice, naturally being ill I got spoilt rotten, got myself a brand new digital camera, clothes, DVDs, books, parents gave me some money to buy myself some dumbbell's and weights etc... start working off some of this excess food I crave from all these steroids! Treatment-wise it's been very quiet, I've been taking my steroids and my red cell count was a bit low yesterday so they had me on a couple of bags of red blood. Other than that I've no more chemo until... Monday I think, which is probably another intrathecal, not particularly looking forward to that but still should be alright, it wasn't all that painful. I did get a few results from the Doctor, apparently after the last intrathecal my spinal/brain fluid is looking clear from the leukaemic cells, so yeah I should be going back down to the standard number of intrathecal's rather than the weekly ones. However they don't like to do that based on just one result so it depends on the result of the next one, so here's hoping! Everything else is looking promising, there is a bit of a quirk in my liver function apparently so they've stopped one of my drugs for now, but I'm not on any drips any more, just been using my Line for blood samples and the odd bag of blood, so yeah, all going well. I've been talking to some of the people on the Macmillan website, that plus the bit of a scare I had with the reaction to those platelets has shaken me up a little bit. I think, like I said before, I was starting to slide in to this place where I could just think that hopefully this would all be easy, just a few drugs and careful eating for a couple of years and I'll be fine, but there's definitely a lot of complications to face up to. Still, the chemo effects people in different ways, it mainly sickness and vomitting from what I can tell so it could be fairly dibilitating. That mixed with the massive appetite the steroids give me could be a very odd combination. Christmas night I was getting pretty tired and feeling a bit sad after all my family and that left, glad my girlfriend was there though, that really cheered me up. I didn't make too much out of it because to be honest I can get pretty down when I'm tired so it's not worth thinking about too much, but it was definitely a bit of a downer to be in hospital away from all your family around christmas time. Still all the doctors and nursing staff were great, couldn't believe it when I woke up Christmas morning to find a bag of presents from the Hospital! Fair play to the BRI. Started telling a lot more of my mates, letting everybody know about it all, mixed bag of responses, can be pretty hard to talk to some people about it but hopefully it'l all get round soon. It's the sort of thing I'd definitely want my mates to feel comfortable to take the piss out of a little bit, I know it's serious... but I'm very much of the opinion that if you can't laugh about it then what the hell can you do.