On 28 December, I got a ridiculously early taxi to take me to the hospital in the Borders. I had received no paperwork from the hospital, so I had only phone instuctions to go on. Go to nuclear medicine at 7.30am, get injected with radioactive isotope, then come up for surgery. No idea what the surgical ward might be. Nothing. On arrival at just after 7am, clearly the entire hospital save A&E was asleep. Even that was quiet. Nuclear medicine was dead as a dodo and located very near the morgue so, sitting on a repaired bed stacked in the corridor, I watched as the bodies of the dear departed from the night before were solomnly wheeled past me, whilst mulling what to do. There was no phone reception, so I went for a walk to try to find some through deserted corridors and coffee area. Eventually, I managed to get through to Reception, who said nuclear medicine would not be open till 9am. So I asked if there was a surgical admissions ward and got put through to them. Oh yes, said surgical admissions, I was on their books and should come to see them for 7.30am. Off I went to find that ward and when I got there, they were a bit surprised I had no idea what the day's game plan would be.
It turned out I my surgical consultant would see me at 8am, then the anaesthetist, then the admissions nurse, then nuclear medicine (maybe sometime after 9.30am once the isotope had been delivered from the hospital where it was made) and then I would go to theatre at lunchtime or thereafter. I was third and last on the list. The surgeon turned out to be my main breast surgeon, which was a relief. He tipped up and had a cheery chat with me. He would remove two lymph nodes and the area around them. It would take about an hour or less. Although a day-case procedure, I was booked in to stay overnight because I've had problems with general anaesthetics in recent years and I had no one at home to keep an eye on me for the first 24 hours. I was in as a social case but actually my surgeon felt it was handy I'd be under supervision and he'd be able to check me the next day.
Due to being last on the list for the morning, I was allowed to drink a sacred glass of water on arrival, having been on starvatiion from midnight. I felt very special! I sat trying not to fall asleep in the waiting area, texting family and friends with the outline of the day ahead and confirming I had got to the hospital in time and was still awake. The day before I had travelled back from Christmas by plane and then driven back to Scotland from London, getting home at 1.30am. After a couple hours faddling and doing the last bits of prep (washing, the last bit of spare room cleaning, having the obligatory pre-surgery bath), I hit the sack at 3.30am and was back up at 5.45am to get ready for the taxi at 6.15am. So I was mildly looking forward to the anaesthetic because I'd get some sleep.
The anaesthetist was a very calm, sensible, serious sort, who just ignored all my jokes about him being the only person I wanted to chat to and get to know, being the most likely to kill me, not the surgeon. He paid close attention to the side effects I had experienced before for the last two generals and took note I might freak out before going to sleep.
The admissions nurse then did a box ticking exercise to make sure I knew what was going on, and so that I could warn them fully what I might be like once I was on the recovery ward (ravenously hungry, frozen, hallucinating, very tetchy and very miserable, if the last experience in London was anything to go by) and we measured up for surgical stockings. I wrestled them on early, given I was sitting around for a couple of hours, and went off for a walk to phone people and make sure I had things sorted out at home when I got back.
After kipping in my waiting room chair (I MUST have snored: there were looks), I woke up suddenly and went to the admissions nurse to find out when I should go back to nuclear medicine to get the radioactive isotope injected. At the end of my question, the phone rang and it was nuclear medicine asking me to see them. The admissions nurse was a bit surprised at my telepathy!
Off I went, and now the entire hospital was a-buzz, and nuclear medicine very busy. Two ladies (nurses or doctors, I have no idea) welcomed me to their lair, and set about injecting the isotope with a fine needle straight into my breast by the nipple. I warned them clearly there would be scar tissue from a previous op to remove a fibroadenoma in 2012. But slightly rushing along they aimed straight for the scar area and found they couldn't get the stuff to inject. After a bit of realisation, they aimed differently and got the radioactive isotope in. Off I pootled back to the admissions waiting room, with one of the nuclear medicine ladies carrying a red notice with her to indicate that people with geiger counters should avoid me.
At about 12.15pm, one of the admissions nurses called me over to get changed into a gown and head off to the operating theatre. Off we marched along the corridor to theatre, and there I positioned myself on one of those narrow surgical beds with a foam brick of a pillow. In went the cannula, in came the anaesthetist, and after the usual very quick preamble, announced as he started injecting stuff into me "right, time for a very large gin and tonic".
I woke up partially, slightly panicking I had not done what I thought the nurse had asked me to do a few moments before. I was convinced she had said something like, "okay, Eleanor, time to get dressed and head up to the ward". I have no idea what I must have replied. Coming round from a general can produce some priceless comical outbursts, that I know well. Certainly the anesthetist seemed pretty amused when he checked me a couple of minutes later at about 12.30pm, and I was lucid enough to laugh about the fact I had imagined I should instantly leap up and get going. Er, no, said the anesthetist, chuckling. I was wheeled off to the ward by the same lovely nurse that had walked me over to theatre earlier and scooted around my surgeon, ambling along from his office with a cup of coffee, greeting me cheerily.
On the ward, in a room of six beds, there were only three of us: Barbara, in her mid eighties, who had had hip replacement along with other complications, and a middle aged lady whose name I instantly forgot but was a day-case who was not allowed to leave until she had delivered a hearty turd.
The nurses on the ward were fantastic. They were very cheery and efficient, found me a wholemeal cheese sandwich as fast as humanly possible and got me tanked up on a morphine tablet and then paracetamol, and got me an extra blanket as my temperature plummetted. After a short time, I was cosy, content, lucid and not hallucinating. I do love a good anaesthetist who leaves you feeling fine.
Settling in for the constant round of obs and tea trolley visits, I texted out to everyone I was in great shape, drank a lot of water, stuffed in my earplugs and slept heavily for a couple of hours. Somewhere around 4pm, a junior doctor came in to examine me. We had a jolly chit chat and inadvertently he got most of my medical history related to him. All he really needed to know what about was whether I would really not eat codeine, which I had previously banned them from giving me. No way, say I. So he wrote me up for paracetamol, ibuprofen, and neat morphine tablets if things got overly painful. He then asked if I had gone to the loo yet and when I said I had been very lazy and just slept, he said: you need to drink water and have a wee. So I took this to heart, drank another jug, and made for the loo.
Weeing was interesting. I had already been warned by my surgeon that they would inject blue contrast/dye into me as part of the operation, to highlight where the isotope had gone. He explained vaguely that when I went to the loo, things would come out blue and green but they would wash through. I didn't realise quite how blue, or later, green. So after downing a jug of water, I did as the junior doctor had instructed, and went to wee. When I checked the bowl I thought, oh look they've got toilet duck in there. But no, as I flushed pristine crystal clear water into the bowl, I realised I had peed what looked like foaming concentrated windscreen wiper fluid, with antifreeze. It was quite startling and I got dreadful giggles.
Barbara woke up and commended me on getting to the loo and back very ably, and that I was very jolly. It only occurs to me now that I must have looked pretty scary because I had been warned my face would look very grey and my veins would look blue, because of the contrast dye still in my system. So no wonder she thought I was doing well, looking like an undead zombie.
I liked Barbara lots. When awake, we had great chats about her family and how she had spent a lot of Christmas in hospital but had only had the orthopaedic op that morning. Whatever painkillers she was on was leaving her a bit all over the place mindwise and she was talking a vast amount in her sleep to the extent I had no idea much of the time if she was engaging me in conversation or completely zonked out. Throughout the evening, tentatively, I would respond, just to be sure I wasn't being rude by mistake by ignoring a direct question or comment. She was, however, pretty disorientated and knocked over her water several times, necessitating a swoop of nurses to change her bed linen. She also suddenly needed the loo a lot, which necessitated rapid application of bed pans, and so we got into a pattern where Barbara would let me know she was in extremis and I would press my button to get nursing help, because Barbara would be too distressed to find her own button. We worked well as a team and the nurses were extremely quick at getting in to help and became adept at turning my bell off instead of trying to work out why Barbara's appeared not to be working.
At about 5.30pm, I was due some ibuprofen, so the nurses found me another cheese sandwich to have before it and at 6.30pm I topped up with a hearty supper of minestroni soup and a banana. Then the tea trolley came round at 8pm, and I had the most ENORMOUS scone and jam. Pig in clover wasn't in it.
I went for a walk up and down the ward corridor to stretch my legs and carried on weeing vibrant blue, which shocked one unsuspecting nurse who had put the cardboard commode in place for the lady next to me. I asked if she really wanted me to pee into it and she said it was no bother for her to clear it up. I remember her carrying the offending contents off for a discussion at the nurses station and then another nurse coming back slightly embarrased to reassure me what I already knew, and to let me reassure them that, yes, it really was supposed to be that colour.
By now, the nurses had started confessing my blood pressure was a bit low. I was told to drink water to get it back up, so I did that. They kept asking if I was feeling faint or nauseous, neither of which I was, and I kept going to the loo without any sign of falling over, so there didn't seem to be much of a problem.
The lady next to me was finally discharged at around 9pm. When washing down her bed an hour later, the nurses found she had left her mobile phone plugged in charging and her husband had to come back the next day to retrieve it. I took careful note not to leave my phone behind too! The nurses turned out all extraneous lights and, after foraging yet another cheese sandwich for me, tanked me up with my paracetamol, ibuprofen, Tamoxifen and vitamin D at 10pm, I started some heavy sleeping.
After a few more incidents, Barbara was moved at midnight to a single room immediately opposite the nurses station so they could keep a better eye on her. That meant I had an entire ward of six beds to myself for the rest of my stay. At 2am, they gave me a morphine tablet to cut out the pain and I got five hours solid sleep before obs at 7am.
The morning consisted of trying to get my blood pressure up from 81/46. Drink water, they said, so when the nurse came round at 8am for obs before breakfast, she asked: have you drunk anything overnight and this morning? Yes, I said, brightly. I've had three. Three glasses, asked the nurse innocently? No, three jugs. What? You've drunk the best part of three litres? No, each jug is only 750ml. After a hearty breakfast of cornflakes, orange juice, a hot drink and bread and marmalade, my blood pressure crept up to 100/60-something and the obs nurses cheered up.
My surgeon popped in to check on me at 8.45am and stayed around 15 mins chatting about where he was trained and now he had brought new plastic surgery techniques to the Edinburgh hospitals he had been working in before coming to the Borders. I asked him to thank the anaesthetist for me for doing such a fab job because, despite the low blood pressure, I hadn't felt any nasty side effects, been very comfortable and had remained on an even emotional keel.
Bored of being in bed, I went to have a very careful flannel wash and shower, and got dressed. I had managed to get my obs up to 116/60 and this was considered good, but I was now "a bit warm". So I drank more water to, er, do something.
Another nurse came in to swap my dressing and my specialist cancer nurse opportunely popped in just before the new dressing was slapped on, so she could admire the surgeon's handiwork and agree with me that she could phone me with the pathology results on Friday 06 Jan, whilst I was still recouping, so I would not have to arrange transport to get me to the hospital for an appointment. In the meantime, she said I should use my arm. The nurse with the dressing said to keep the patch dry for a few days, probably a week and then get to the dressings off because there were no external stitches, just a lot of soluable internal things and glue.
I set about finalising the community transport pick up, and got told Richard would be on the ward at 11.30am to take me away. This got the nurses in a flap because the doctors were still doing slow ward rounds and had not written me up yet. The meds nurse appeared and agreed to bump me up with Tamoxifen, so I would not have to go to my surgery to get the next packet sorted. And after a hearty hot drinks and biscuits session from the trolley, Richard appeared at 11am and took my bag down to the minibus because my letter was still not ready. Eventually the doctor appeared to discuss painkillers, which I had already done with the meds nurse, and fairly soon after, another nurse appeared with my meds and the letter.
All aboard Berwickshire Wheels for the trip home, via the Coop to stock up on a few essentials, like ibuprofen and paracetamol, and home I went to my little house, feeling very chipper and pleased with things.
