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I went down to the kitchen without a shirt on and the kids pointed out how sunburned I was. I had sat outside reading for half an hour last week and my arms had gone a bit pink, but I thought (at least on that occasion) I'd been wearing a shirt. I went back to the bedroom and looked at myself in the mirror and saw that I had a rash covering a lot of my back and upper arms.
Was this just a harmless side effect of the treatment or might it be a sign of sepsis? Luckily I had the handy mnemonic to remember the symptoms of Sepsis.
S is for sore back?
E is for elevated spots on your body
P is for pink spots
S is for sore arms
I is for I have a rash which means I have sepsis
and S is for spotty skin
I can't remember. The mnemonic is too vague. I checked the list and the last S stands for "skin mottled or discoloured". Which again is just too vague to be of any use at all. Is a rash mottling? Is having a red back a discoloured back?
My main fear was that whatever this was would delay my final shot and this horrible circus of pricks would go on for another week or two and even worse that I might have to spend more time in hospital being woken every three hours and trying to sleep with a drip in.
I texted one of the nurses who got back to me a while later to say that I should go for my appointment as usual so it could be assessed. It didn't sound like they were too worried.
Nevertheless I packed an overnight bag, just in case I was going to be readmitted, reasoning that if I had to lug that round with me then I'd definitely not need to stay over, as carrying the bag would be punishment enough.
This tactic worked perfectly. I nearly knocked a woman's laptop off her lap with it as I tried to get to a chair in the waiting room and when I went in the nurse asked me if I was planning on staying.
My temperature and blood pressure were fine, but I thought I should get the rash checked and the pharmacist had a look and said it would probably be OK and he'd get me some anti-histamine. But that I should come back in if it got worse.
So thankfully I got my final prick deep in my stomach and though I had to wait a bit for my new drugs, I was free to go. Should I ring the bell on the way out?
It didn't seem appropriate.
I am very grateful to the always friendly and funny people staffing this room full of seriously ill people and a comedian with a funny-named harmless cancer.
I will miss them. I'd love to say I'll never be back, but I need to do this again every ten years. So I might see them one more time.
My favourite thing about the chemotherapy unit is that the scalp cooling machine and cap worn by several patients which is designed to help them keep their hair is called Paxman. I wonder if Jeremy knows. Maybe he invented it.
Aside from a little tiredness and my mottled and discoloured skin it's been a bit of a breeze so far this week. I am genuinely devastated that I have been able to eat proper meals and have been stuffing my face with biscuits. I have not really put on any weight, but this is not the life changing diet that I had been led to understand I was on.
Obviously my immune system is pretty compromised, so I am going to miss a few social things (including going to see Michelle Wolf next week), but I have 12 days before we go away on holiday to Centreparcs and I think as long as I am careful I should be able to enjoy that - though maybe I'll be doing more walks in the forest and fewer water slides in the pool.
The remarkable thing about all of this is I would have had zero idea there was anything wrong with me was it not for going in for my annual cancer check in October. I have not felt ill (beyond being a little bit tired, but it's hard to say if that's blood cancer or children - who are a sort of blood cancer I suppose). Had my oncologist not been concerned about my low white blood cell count then I might have been totally unaware anything was awry. So it's good to have it seen to pretty much as soon as possible (though as noted before, it took a bit of a while for anyone to act on results). So having testicular cancer, once again, has probably extended my life.
Thanks so much to the wonderful medical staff who pricked me so gently (usually) and have set me on course (hopefully) to normality. Those of us who live in the UK are so lucky to have the NHS, even the underfunded version. Please do not let this fall by the wayside. It is a literal lifesaver.
RHLSTP with Harry Shearer (Spinal Tap, The Simpsons) and Tom Leopold (Seinfeld and basically every decent US sitcom of the last few decades)
is now up here.As listener Matt Atkinson pointed out it's a podcast with Tom, Dick and Harry.
