And another...

By the time we attended to see the consultant my husband was weak with anaemia, his chest congested with weeks of coughing for which he had only been prescribed cough linctus, then codeine linctus, he was still having unexplained night sweats and felt so tired he could not walk very far. We had been offered no support from anyone after the GP told us the scan results, so left in limbo with that awful news for just short of three weeks. On one occasion he had coughed up a small amount of fresh blood after violent coughing which led us to A&E of the local hospital. He was so tired we had to borrow a wheelchair to get to the correct building in the hospital for the appointment with the consultant, who seemed to take one look at him and make his mind up. He said that the CT scan results were "disastrous" and that we would need to consider carefully if he was fit enough or strong enough to undergo any treatment which would be systemic. He said he could easily tick a box to proceed to a lung biopsy, but the procedure could cause bleeding in the chest, and that we needed to consider whether the gruelling treatment of chemo was in my husbands best interests anyway. So he did a thorough job of dissuading us from taking it up. Otherwise he said we could opt for the involvement of a macmillan nurse to consider the best possible palliative care. He made it sound like it was one or the other. We said we would like a macmillan referral, and would consider further the idea of a biopsy. He said he would report back to the oncologist but was pretty sure she would agree with his approach. We came out of that meeting totally beaten and dejected. Everything pointed to no hope. When the macmillan nurse came to see us a few days later she had a copy of the consultants report which we had not seen. She said that she knew that the news was a bombshell to us coming on the back of a bad cough. She was so helpful on both a practical and emotional level, arranged an OT visit who assessed needs (stairlift and shower stool), PIP entitlement, district nurse contact, a steroid course for liver capsule pain and inflammation, the list goes on.