My First Week in Birmingham

When people ask about my two months that I spent in Birmingham Children's Hospital, I often tell them that I don't remember too much of the experience and largely this is true, so please do forgive me if I get my dates a little muddled, but generally I'm pretty sure I've been accurate with my recollection. However, there are some things that I do remember vividly and I haven't felt ready to speak about them until now as I found the challenges that my family and I faced, quite difficult to come to terms with. I found my first couple of months of treatment pretty terrifying due to the fact that the infection which had "triggered" my Leukaemia meant I had to undertake some very intense chemotherapy and antibiotics as soon as possible, which completely shocked my body. This meant that, amongst other things, my body rejected any food or drink outright for almost 3 weeks!

The most immediate and physically altering effect of the chemotherapy was my drastic loss in weight. I lost two stone in a week and a half and went from being, if I say so myself, reasonably athletic, to a skinny, chicken legged shell of the person that I was. I remember I'd just stare at my hands for seemingly hours, as if watching them deteriorate day by day. I'm not entirely sure why I did this, but apparently I was fascinated with them and it really freaked everyone at the hospital out! After a few days of chemotherapy, my teeth and eyes soon became too big for my face and according to Mum and Dad, I began to look like Frodo after he was bitten by Shelob, the giant spider in Lord of the Rings, void of all colour, eyes glazed over and skin stretched thinly over the outline of my face. Not my finest look I've been told!

Other than my physical appearance, which frankly I was too ill to really come to terms with, I had to grow accustomed to some other massive changes in hospital. The worst of which was probably the fact that every 2 hours I had to be woken up to receive more chemotherapy, blood tests or anti-sickness pills (of which there were countless dozens!). I was incredibly lucky in my treatment in that I had amazing support from everyone imaginable. All my friends and teachers sent photos and cards and I cannot overstate just how vital they were, in making me open up my eyes each day. However, the people who I will probably never be able to fully repay and have been incredible over the course of all of my treatment, were my family. My Mum stayed in the same room as me every single day and night, on a fold up bed for the entire experience, while my sister had to persevere through school every day and Dad would take as much time off work as he could to see me and ease the pressure on my poor Mum. She would be by my side every single time I needed to take more medication and would help me choke back my tablets which invariably I coughed straight back up anyway. Due to the lack of fluid in me, my skin became very dry, very quickly and in particular my lips became cracked and swollen, often bleeding for no apparent reason. Every few hours, my Mum would apply some anti-bacterial liquid to them to stop them getting infected and although it stung like nobody's business, it was vastly preferable to the arid condition that they would otherwise have been left in, as I was too weak to apply any of it myself.

By this stage, I had become too weak to walk and required a large amount of assistance to go anywhere, including, obviously, the toilet. Therefore, whenever I needed to go, I had to either wake up my Mum, or call for a nurse to pass me a cardboard, flask shaped container to urinate in, while trying desperately not to pull out the multitude of tubes that had been inserted into my arms, hands and nose. To put it mildly, it was bleak.

On the 19th of October 2012, a week after arriving in Birmingham, I had been scheduled for a Lumbar Puncture and was going to make my way down to surgery. However, as I tried to pull myself out of bed I ended up fainting and apparently toppled headlong into my mother's arms which was really quite lucky for me! I awoke to some mild panic from various nurses and only later did I discover that this panic was brought about due to me falling unconscious with my eyes remaining wide open the entire time, which I suppose was a little traumatic for all. Whenever I try to picture this, I imagine a puppet having all of it's strings cut that were holding it in place. From that moment onward I needed a wheel chair to move anywhere, although predominantly I was bedridden anyway and received the vast majority of treatment in my room. However, the doctors had insisted that I have a scan of my brain so I was wheeled down a very dark corridor to determine if the fainting had been brought on by a blood clot and could therefore, lead to a stroke. I was eased into an MRI scanner and honestly remember nothing else until, before I knew it, I was back in bed after a pretty grim day!

At this point I hadn't seen anything of the outside world for almost two weeks but I can remember lying in my hospital bed at night and having really sudden moments of clarity where I knew exactly where I was. I'd look upwards through the window in the ceiling of the room and see an airplane flying overhead with it's flashing red lights in the night sky and I used to wake up my Mum (who must have been exhausted) and we'd pretend that they were shooting stars together. We'd then lie there talking about anything, discussing the smell of rain or old holidays we had been on, before cancer had infiltrated our family. Afterwards, I'd then fall asleep for a couple of hours, only to forget who I was once more, by the time the next day had come.

I can't imagine how difficult that must have been for her, one moment, I'd be seemingly sane and well within my own head and then the next, about as full of life as one of the machines pumping chemotherapy into me, with their never ending and painfully consistent "bleeps". I spent many nights not knowing whether I was in a dream or actually awake and each time I did wake up, there would be a struggle to differentiate between the real world and some nightmare which might have been brought on by the chemotherapy, as the drugs I was taking are known to cause very vivid, hallucinogenic dreams.

I know I've said this in previous posts but my family have been and continue to be amazing throughout my treatment, but in the first few weeks, they were just astonishing. It must have been a thousand times scarier for them to experience what I went through, compared to what I had to deal with, as I was barely conscious for the majority of it and they had to sit, seemingly helplessly, by my side, watching me. It's only now that I can fully appreciate every single thing they did to help me, in a time when I was so completely reliant on others for my own well being.