There I was, sat in a waiting area for a radiotherapy planning scan, 3 weeks from diagnosis, and over to the side, across some café style partitions, a mere 15ft away at the cancer centre I attended, a bell was rung and everyone around me erupted into claps, and those with the person cheered and took photographs as souvenirs. It seemed to happen every 10 minutes. I didn't know what is was at first but as the truth dawned, sat there alone, it was all I could do not to burst into tears at the realisation I would never get to ring that bell.
Until that moment I had only cried when told my diagnosis while having to lay flat on an A&E trolley, and later on in a ward when I pulled the curtain around me and lost it for 20 minutes out of sheer frustration at being told I could not have the prostate taken out so I could be decatheterised (a urology houseman failed to tell me I could have it cored out in a TURP operation instead), and then again when I got home and saw my cats and after 8 days away said "Daddy's home" and immediately thought of the old Cliff Richard song where the next line is "...to stay".
Yes, I can be and am happy for others, God it's not as if I don't want people to be cured of this wretched disease which took my parents, both of whom I nursed across 4 years, an older brother, and will me, but even so isn't it a little insensitive to have it so close to where incurable/terminally-ill patients might sit as they receive palliative care? I don't know what other hospitals are like but the otherwise excellent one I went to needs a rethink.
