It became apparent to me that, for what remained of my life, I would be in the hands of the NHS, a prospect that made me apprehensive, given the fog of bad publicity and gloom that has surrounded it in recent years. Everyone I have dealt with or who has treated me in Oxford’s various hospitals has done so with the utmost kindness, respect and enormous skill. Above all, they care. The problems facing the NHS are many and obvious but, if low morale is one of them, it has not been apparent to me. What is obvious is the dependence of the NHS on nurses and doctors from the EU, the Commonwealth and elsewhere. As well as their skills, these people add hugely to the friendly atmosphere that prevails; two male nurses from Spain were particularly ‘huggy’ with Carolyn when I was in the Cardiac Centre. On another occasion, one of the specialist lymphoma nurses assigned to us gave Carolyn a big hug and confessed that the whole lymphoma team had grown rather fond of us.
As well as the symptoms of lymphoma, there are side-effects of the many drugs that one takes during chemotherapy. For me, the worst and most bizarre of these was ‘the great snot’. During my first round of chemotherapy, called CHOP, my hair fell out, as it does in many cancer patients. Unexpectedly the hairs in my nose also fell out, with the result that, whenever I went out into cold air, my nose streamed uncontrollably. At the time, I still had enough strength to dig my allotment, a task that had fallen behind schedule. It proved impossible to dig the soil with two strings of mucus running from my nose all the way to the ground. Oddly, I could find no mention of this affliction on any of the ‘official’ lymphoma or chemotherapy web sites, but when I looked at sites where people reported their personal experiences of lymphoma I found many graphic descriptions of people who were drowning in snot and unable to do anything useful.
Another delight was a period when I had to take Furosemide, a drug that makes you urinate as often as every 20 minutes. A car trip from Oxford to Bristol to see Alice’s new home involved no fewer than four excursions to the hard shoulder of the M4. Telling friends about this revealed that many men carry some kind of receptacle in their car in case they are ever caught short. The prize goes to our American friend Lary, who has an ‘in-car urinal’ that glows in the dark!
One of my courses of chemotherapy caused my hair to fall out. So common a side-effect of chemotherapy is hair loss that, among the shops in the foyer of the Churchill hospital, there is one devoted to the sale of wigs. Sadly, I failed to acquire a Michael Stipe billiard ball; rather a scruffy weed patch. I did not buy a wig; after a while my hair began to re-grow, but my normally straight hair was replaced by a mass of tight, white curls, a common occurrence known as ‘chemocurls’. Mine were rather admired by friends and family and were a feature of Alice’s wedding but, sadly, they did not last very long.
