Week 49 – A nasty fall!

Yesterday Jan and I enjoyed a lovely Yum Cha lunch with long time friend James Deighton in China Town.  James is a management consultant working with McKinseys and we first met in college way back in the 1980s.

Following that I made my way up to hospital for my planned blood transfusion which took about 3 hours.  Everything went well and then I dropped in to see friend and co-leukaemia patient James Watson who had been admitted to Ward 7B with high Temperatures the day before.  James was doing OK but now has very low neutrophils which the doctors are having trouble diagnosing.

After the transfusion I decided to walk home at around 6.00pm and was making good progress until  I expectantly tripped on a very uneven surface on the footpath.

Unfortunately my legs are so weak that I had no time to recover and hit the pavement head first – quickly.  Blood was everywhere!  I knew it wasn’t going to be good given my low platelet count so prepared for the worse.  The bleeding took ages to stem.

Luckily three lovely passers by helped me out while I rang Jan who drove up from Docklands and whisked me off to the Emergency Department for tests and to clean up the wounds.

We had forgotten how slow the hospital system is. The doctors decided to give me a CT scan to check for bleeds (everything was OK thankfully) and organise a top up of platelets.  I also received my first vaccination with a tetanus shot.  My general vaccinations were not scheduled for another month or so but due to the risk of complications the general consensus from the haematology team on duty was to go ahead with this measure.

Unfortunately they had a busy night with trauma and by the time they were able to help me out it was 3.00am before being discharged to head for home.

This little episode illustrates the ups and downs of a cancer patient that many others will hopefully never experience.  It is just one of things that I have to take in my daily stride.