If you have an appointment for radiotherapy at roughly the same time each day, you soon get to recognise the same faces and start to strike up conversations with other patients. These conversations are mostly predictable...
"How far have you travelled?"
"Could you find somewhere to park?"
"How many sessions have you had?"
"Are you having any side effects?"
"Which day do you see the doctor?"
So, nothing very taxing, but it's good to have someone to talk to, especially if you travel there alone. It certainly helps to make the minutes pass - the amount of time spent waiting for treatment is enormous and far more tiring than the treatment itself. I've been lucky; the biggest delay I'd experienced, until today, was around ten minutes. This morning, however, I had to wait for more than an hour in the main waiting room, then another 20 minutes outside the treatment room.
What's unspoken in the waiting room is the mutual distress caused by seeing the suffering of others who are so obviously very unwell; young women with sunken, empty eyes, old men weeping uncontrollably as they wait for their treatment session, children on crutches, in wheelchairs and so on. For those of us who had our cancer caught very early, there's a certain sense of guilt - we feel like frauds because many of us now feel fitter than we have done for many years.
The first time you see the array of the sick people, it is very disturbing. I didn't realise how many people would be in that room awaiting treatment, or that they might be outpatients or inpatients. In my naivety, I'd assumed that inpatients would be too sick to be moved very far and, so, would be treated elsewhere; of course, they aren't! The machinery is far too large and much too costly to make it viable to have more than one treatment centre. Indeed, there are so many people in need of treatment that next week, the centre is changing its opening times; staff will work in shifts between 08:00 and 18:00, thus allowing more patients to be seen each day than at present.
Although I'm very grateful for my treatment, I won't be sorry when the visits to that waiting room stop.
Fifteen more sessions... and counting...
1 comment:
I had another appointment with my oncologist today, 26 February. Yes, I understand exactly what you say about waiting rooms. On the one hand, I find them depressing – so many sick people in one place – but on the other hand, I often feel cheered up as I look considerably better than most of their occupants. I’m normally lucky regarding waiting times but, having had to wait for nearly three hours on one occasion while my notes were faxed through from another hospital, I always take a good book with me and relax.
Today I had news about my condition that conflicts with what I heard from my consultant surgeon. My oncologist was impressed by how well I looked and is inclined to recommend a “watch and wait” policy, i.e. regular 6-monthly checks and scans, while my consultant surgeon is inclined to advise more major surgery (a 10-hour operation) to clean up the remnants of my very rare PMP tumour left over from the operation I had almost exactly one year ago. It’s a hard decision I have to make. The PMP tumour is a slow-grower and currently inactive, and it could be many years before it reaches (if ever) a size where it becomes a nuisance again. It took 10 years or more to become a nuisance in the first place and it’s not the sort of tumour that invades other organs or sneaks around the body via the bloodstream or lymph nodes. Chemotherapy is ineffective, as is radiotherapy, so do I just hope and pray that my body’s natural defences can keep this beast at bay, or do I go under the knife again?
Post a Comment