Let the chemo begin...well not quite

If you received a letter from a hospital telling you to start attending chemotherapy appointments what would you think that meant???

After extensive tests and biopsies etc this is the only info that has landed on the doormat at my parents house. So off we all trotted last Thursday to the hospital (in Sunderland) where my parents were told all future treatments would take place.

Needless to say my mum has cried a bit about the implications of all of this...but somehow I feel it is all very bizarre. There are a few reasons for this.

There has never been a conversation with anyone about the results of all the tests...I'm talking a couple of days of tests here. There was no reason give as to why the chemotherapy was being recommended. Does this mean that if nobody says the big 'C' word that it doesn't exist. Or is this all precautionary as nobody seems to want to touch my mum with a scalpel or an anaesthetic if they can help it...which leads me back to the chemo appointment last week.

Having trekked 30 miles to the hospital, we got to reception in plenty of time and realised that we'd never noticed a sign to the department listed on the appointment letter. My dad was still somewhere in the car park with the map, and me and my mum were talking to the receptionist. Thankfully the receptionist really knew that there was no such department, and despite the letter head on the consultant's letter the REAL appointment was in a different hospital 12 miles away in Durham.

The Sunderland receptionist phoned the Durham clinic and explained where we were. My dad was gently prised away from the reception area where he briefly looked like he was contemplating whether to explode or cry with irritation, and we zoomed as fast as my car would go (within reasonable speed limits...and with due care and attention...particularly as there are speed cameras in Tyne and Wear), to Durham.

Then commenced the parking fiasco that is Durham hospital. Whilst the building is quite cosy, the car park is on the compact side and there is no way in the world that everyone visiting can park their cars. I have no idea where the staff park, I think they teleport in somehow. BEFORE the PFI hospital this place had a VAST car park...it is now a (very expensive) housing estate.

So I dropped my parents off at the door and went off to stalk people who looked like they were about to move their car. I have a mystic approach to parking, I imagine my ideal space, and usually it appears. The visualisation worked and I got a space within 5 mins and headed back to the hospital.

But my mum had the appointment letter and I couldn't remember the name of the unit...thankfully a helpful cleaner showed me where to go...where I found my mum, but my dad had gone looking for me. I'm still not sure how I missed him as there is only one corridor. So off I went back to the car park where I found him talking to another lady who had lost her relatives somewhere. I noticed there was quite a lot of this sort of thing going on in the car park...so if you screen people for confusion at the hospital I expect you'd find that the whole population is disorientated and confused..as it is very hard to be anything else.

Meanwhile back in the chemo unit they were reading out the drug sheet to my mum. When we got back it looked like everything was all systems go , so my dad and I headed off to the restaurant for a coffee...mainly to avoid my dad having to being to close to the chemo unit.

Soooo one hour later we went back to find my mum reading the Daily Mail and looking very perky. The reason being that as soon as the nurse doing the chemo read her notes she decided that the whole thing looked like a very bad idea. Something about warfarin, excessive bleeding and artificial heart valves seems to do this to the medical profession (it had a similar effect on the anaesthetist in Sunderland).

Turns out my mum had waited an hour for someone to find a registrar to find out about prescribing an antibiotic that my mum isn't allergic to and then to administer it intravenously before even thinking about the cancer treatment.

My mum appeared to be ok with the whole thing - a tribute to her new heart drugs which seem to have done the trick at last - but the nurses were apparently making a bit of a stand as they clearly don't want to risk the bleeding thing happening in their unit.

This Thursday they are going to try again. The whole process will start two hours earlier to allow for antibiotics to be given (prevents infection in heart valves so essential). My dad has printed out a list of all the things my mum is allergic to and my mum has promised to pay attention. My dad can find Durham and is quite happy to sit in the chemo lounge with his mp3 player on this week, which means I don't have to go.

Which only brings me back to the 'why is this happening?' question. I did ask my mum if she wanted to know the biopsy results, but her view is that whatever they are the medical profession have clearly got it into their heads that they need to give her chemotherapy so why bother asking.

I hope it all stays surreal like this, as it is much less scary this way. But very odd.