And so it begins

So, we left the story with me in hospital, being fed on gruel and camomile tea, having had a stomach tube fitted. The hospital kicked me loose on Monday with only two scheduled appointments for the week at that time: one with a nutritionist and the other with a cancer doctor, an oncologist—both in Elda. Because not everyone has the advantage of living in Culebrón, I should say that our local health centre in Pinoso (5 km away) is linked to Elda Hospital (25 km away), but sometimes, for specialist services, patients are sent all over the place. The hospital I'm going to in Alicante for the radiotherapy, Perpetuo Socorro, is a private hospital about 55 km from home.

The nutritionist was a bit of a hoot. She gave us a box with 30 tubes to connect my stomach feeding tube to a pouch full of a Complan type food. That box was bulky but light. She also gave me a scrip for the feeding pouches, and the bloke in the chemist offered me a sack trolley to take those to the car. He also showed me how much they would have cost but for the health system—€768.

The next stop, with the oncologist in Elda, was make or break. She was subbing for my doctor, who's off on holiday. As she shuffled papers, when she wasn't quite sure what sort of cancer it was, etc., I rather cut across her and asked the one important question: has it spread? Is there metastásis/metastases? If the answer were yes, there would be no radiotherapy the following week; if the answer were yes, the €768 worth of sloppy food and the feeding tube were all a waste of time. If the answer were yes, then death was around the corner, and all the clinicians could do was to hold it back a bit. The answer was no. Relief a go go.

So now all that remained was to get started on the radiotherapy in Alicante and the chemotherapy in Elda. There were lots of criss-crossed phone calls, quite a lot of them taken as I drove across windswept Teruel Province in the car. The private hospital's appointments don't show up on the state system calendar that is used by the local health centre, the hospital in Elda, or the ambulance service, who I will be using to transport me up and down the road to Alicante. Appointments were made and unmade, but in the end, we had times for the radiotherapy, and when that was done, I was told to simply turn up in the chemotherapy unit at Alicante hospital, and they would get me started on intravenous chemicals when I arrived.

The radiotherapy was easy enough, at least the first time. They strapped me to the bed wearing a big fishnet design facemask, played soothing plinkety-plonk piano music backed up with tweeting birdsong while a big Space 1999 thing blasted me with Flash Gordon-type death rays. I didn't feel a thing. They have promised the pain for later.

I turned up at chemotherapy in Elda. We were instantly on first-name terms. They set about cabling me up and couldn't find a vein to get one of the needles in to direct the chemicals into my bloodstream. They tried with different people, people who do this every single day of their working week, and they tried five times without success. Eventually, two very pleasant blokes turned up with one of those ultrasound scanners—jelly on belly, ah, it's a boy—things. They're called ecografías here, so don't be surprised if I say eco. With that, they were able to see the veins in my arms and the needles as they were introduced. The veins collapsed the first twice, but it was third time lucky—or so they thought.

They hooked me up to some saline; again, I may say suero, but I didn't know. I thought it was the cancer-combating chemicals. My arm started to hurt; I was a bit surprised—drips are usually painless. After maybe twenty minutes, it was hurting a lot, and when I stroked my arm, I realised it was swollen. I'd sort of associated pain and nasty potions. In fact the vein had collapsed, and the saline was dribbling into my arm turning it into some sort of human sausage. A nurse squeezed some of it out, but six hours later sitting at the computer, there is still a steady drip of saline from my arm.

I'm going to have to reorganise the ambulances so that on Thursday I drive myself to Alicante for the radio and then on to Elda to get something called a Picc Port fitted, which is a sort of more permanent entry to plumb me into the drips. And that's where we rest.

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Just a couple of related things. Thank you to the tens and tens of people who have offered good wishes and practical help. I apologise for not always responding. The other thing is about the delay in seeing me. I have to say that I see nothing unreasonable about the delay outside the fact that the health service doesn't have enough capacity, probably because paying taxes is not a popular thing. I haven't come across lazy or indolent staff; I don't think anyone has screwed up or let me down anywhere. The initial referral took a long time, but I told the GP about a sore throat. She couldn't really refer everyone who went to her with a sore throat to a specialist every single time. The people who got to see the specialist in front of me presumably got there because their GPs saw something more urgent or because they'd waited their turn and got to the head of the queue as they should, as I did. I would be very unhappy if I were the queue jumper denying treatment to someone else.

Anyway, I'm well and truly on the treatment conveyor belt now, so fingers crossed and on to whatever the next thing is. Expect more blogs.