Hello, sorry it’s been a while since my last post.  But I’ve been a bit busy – being back in hospital AGAIN.  As you might remember, I left CUH on Friday 24th March with the plan being a week at home and then back in for a quick overnighter to finish the bile duct stenting procedure.  Well, I managed a weekend at home, with three lovely nights sleeping in my own bed and being woken in the morning by two little moppets.  But that was it.  I went for a nap on Monday morning and woke up two hours later with Arctic shivers and a 39.5 degree temperature.  And so hi ho, hi ho, back to hospital I go.

My Oncologist said I most likely had sepsis and I needed to be admitted asap.  I won’t go into the A&E saga (and it was a saga!), but I was given IV fluids and antibiotics there and very early Tuesday morning a bed to crawl into.  And I was very grateful for that bed.  A&E was manic that night and the corridors were bumper to bumper with people on trolleys and in chairs waiting for beds.  My temperature was bouncing around all night so I was going from shaking with the cold in four layers of blankets to passing out with the heat and throwing everything off the bed.

So that was Monday.  It’s now Sunday and I haven’t gone anywhere since.  I’ve had multiple blood cultures and drain fluid cultures done.  I’ve had tubes flushed and a lovely little procedure called a cholangiogram where dye was flushed through the tube in my bile duct to check for blockages.  If you’ve never had liquid run through a tube in your chest you’ll have no idea what that feels like but trust me when I say it’s not comfortable.  And everything has come back okay.  Which on the one hand is great because it means the tube is working properly but on the other hand means there’s no easy explanation for how I picked up this infection.  I’m on two different IV antibiotics now (one just wasn’t cutting it!), so six times a day I’m hooked up for them.  With any luck another couple of days and they’ll have done their job and then it’ll just be a question of when the Interventional Radiologists want to finish the bile duct procedure – hopefully soon.  And then I’ll be out of here again, for however long I can manage to keep away this time.  It’s the food that keeps me coming back…

All I can say now is, after the last few weeks, I need a holiday.  And not in Hotel CUH.