Chapter Two.
I'll say something here. I'm not scared of a lot. I don't scream when there's a spider in the bath, and I'm not particularly worried by sharks or anything melodramatic. But, there are two things in this world I honestly loathe beyond reason. Wasps, because they're evil little buggers, and hypodermic needles (or any generally sharp, pointy object aimed at me).
I'll just skip over getting to the hospital, as for some reason the GP gave us the right ward, but the wrong hospital. So we went to the hospital, found that we weren't expected, and got directed to the right hospital.
I'll be honest, I was already dead scared when we got to the first hospital. Being redirected did nothing to help, and the only way I could control myself was to deliberately forget how serious it was..
So, we arrived at Stafford Hospital sometime that evening, and got directed to wait. So we sat and waited. We're not called patient's for nothing!
Eventually we got a doctor to saunter over and examine this now rather sore lump. He sat me down on a bed, and hummed and haaa'd about it a bit, and then declared that it looked like a boil, but he wasn't sure.
Then they said they'd put a cannula in.
Just to clarify this all for you, a cannula is like a needle, but thicker. What it does is it inserts a small plastic tube into a vein, with a valve on the other end, so that there's no need for needless repeated injections.
Remember those two things I said I loathed? I'll admit that it's not a hypodermic needle. No, it's thicker, and more painful. Especially when the vein in your left wrist collapsed on the first attempt and they have to try again in your other hand.
Then, I had to stay overnight in the ward. That was also one of the most worrying times of this whole ordeal. Apart from, you know, the rest of it. I was put next to a kid probably a bit younger than me with appendicitis, and he would vomit every few minutes. To this day I have no idea who he was, or what happened to him, but at the time, I felt intensely sorry for him.
So, I was on the ward for three days, if I recall correctly. My parents visited everyday, often bringing packages from the food shops in the hospital lobby / waiting area place. Each day the doctors would always come around, ask how things were, have another look, go “...Ooh!” occasionally, tick something on their noticeboard and stride off.
The wards are probably the hardest places to sleep I've ever come across. There is a constant, dim hubbub within the room, with machines for various fancy electronics beeping and whirring away, the many people coughing, vomiting and generally being ill, and the nurses quick, efficient shoes click-clacking up and down the ward going about their business. There is nothing particularly unpleasant about the wards, I'm sure as wards go it's a very good ward. The discomfort is simply from it being a ward (no offence to anyone who works on a ward).
After three days, they decided to try to lance the 'boil'. Which essentially amounts to lying me down on a table and sticking more needles into my neck. Remember, this lump is really sore. They did inject a local anaesthetic first, and that hurt a lot in such a tender area. Then they tried to stick a larger needle in and try to drain it. Of course, you'd think that would hurt more, but because of the anaesthetic, it didn't hurt that much at all. Well, until the actual 'draining' part...
AAARRGH!
Well, the nurse doing the lancing quickly stopped and patched me up again. He was all very encouraging and 'Well done, very brave' and so on so forth, but at the same time, he seemed puzzled. And quite honestly, I was getting annoyed. Not at the doctors, at myself. I was actually berating myself for not having whatever illness the doctors thought it was! 'Why can't I just get treated quickly and go home?'
Not long after (possibly before, my memories appear to be a bit muddled), I was moved to a private room within the hospital. It was quite a nice room, fairly spacious, with a reasonable en-suite and a TV on an overhead arm, like in the wards. Because it was a separate room, though, there was much more distance between me and the dim clatter of the corridors. Not to mention actual walls instead of curtains.
So, a few days later, they decide to do a chest X-ray. When they got the results, one of the doctors pulled me aside to his office, along with my parents, and showed us the X-ray.
We could see that something was wrong, even without medical training. The shadow that usually indicates where the heart was seemed to be stretched and distorted, and extended upwards more than it should...
The doctor gave his diagnosis. Stage 2 or 3 Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. It was cancer.
Just a bit of technical information for you at this moment, to fill the centuries that seemed to pass in the seconds after those words...
Lymphomas are a cancer of the lymph node system within the ribcage and bottom of the throat. The first type to be classified was termed Hodgkin's lymphoma, after the bloke who 'found' it. Since there were many many different sorts of lymphoma after this, they were generally termed Non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. The differences are fairly minor, but Hodgkin's reacts better to radiation treatments. The stages (if I recall correctly) follow as thus:-
Stage 1: A single lymph node
Stage 2: Multiple lymph nodes, but none above the diaphragm
Stage 3: As above, but below the diaphragm
Stage 4: On the actual lungs themselves.
I won't say much about the immediate aftermath, except for this. My entire family stood like a rock. A very battered and slightly chipped rock, but a rock nonetheless. Especially my great-aunt Rosie, who's reaction to being told over the phone was “...Oh.” as if she was thinking “Is that it?”
Trust me when I say, if I felt lost before the diagnosis, then it was ten thousand times worse after. So, then after a week, we were transferred to Birmingham Children's Hospital. The reason it took a week was because we had to wait for a bed to become available. In the meantime I was put on a course of intravenous antibiotics, to try and get rid of the lump which we now thought was some sort of secondary infection free-riding on the weakened immune system caused by the lymphoma. Four times a day at six and twelve, morning and night, they'd hook me up to a fancy drip machine pump thing, attach that to the cannula and let it run.
There was one time, when I was having the infusion in one hand, and a blood test on my other hand, and my mobile phone started ringing. I couldn't move either hand, so I had to try to get my mum to reach around the wires and needles to reach my phone! It stopped ringing before she reached it, but it was still funny.
Another thing, on the day my sister paid her only visit to the hospital, she brought my top hat, cards, games, two slush-drinks (because slush-drinks are awesome in every way) and basically forced me to cheer up under pain of enthusiasm. Which I did after some initial “OMGWTFLOL”-ness. When the doctor walked in an hour or two later, his face became the perfect expression of Snape's “What's been going on here?” voice.
About this time, it was nearing the Secret Santa for my tutor. Now, I kinda felt bad that there'd be one person who wouldn't get a present because I was laid up in hospital, so I decided to ask for two tins of Heroes and Roses to be sent to my tutor to make up for it, and to assure them I'd live. Even though I wasn't too sure of it myself at that point.
