Many of you will know that when someone goes through chemo their immune system takes a hit and they have to be really careful about bugs and infections… Well I was being super good, I told people before they came to see me that they couldn’t come if they had had a cold/cough/bug or someone in their household or close to them had had one and they couldn’t come if they had had or been near someone who had had chicken pox, measles or rubella (or something like that)… I know long list but I was taking all the precautions as I didn’t want to go back to hospital…

Well guess what I got an infection! Oh yes I did! But guess what… It wasn’t from someone else, noooo, no, my own body had created one at the entry of my pick line.

I had spoken to the hospital on the Wednesday before my next planned chemo session as a check up on how I was and whether I had any problems and I just asked was it normal for your arm to feel like a dead weight when you have a pick line put in… They asked what it looked like.. I explained and they said it sounded like it was healing… Oh ok I thought, just me being silly, but no I wasn’t! Mum took my temperature that evening (I now have it taken morning and night) and it had gone up to 38 degrees (the ok margin is 36 to 38) so mum left me for a bit and came back a half hour later and the temperature had gone down! Yay I get to go sleep (not to hospital).

Next morning mum annoyingly came in and woke me up to take my temperature (just in case, as mum’s do), good thing too, my temperature had gone up to 39.9…Oops… I said and I quote “at least I didn’t achieve 40”. Next thing is mum’s on the phone to the hospital and the instructions are to get me in ASAP (call an ambulance if you need to… definitely not happening as that is soooo not my style).

After packing a bag, off to hospital we go, we arrived at Derriford and get taken into a side room on the day case ward and sadly next thing is I have to have a cannula put in my hand(no not more needles!), as they learnt before about my fear they gave me the numb cream and treated me like a child (which is fine with me if it doesn’t hurt and I don’t feel the needles). Cannula in, blood taken and the questions start so they can try and find out what the infection is… I then show them my pick line arm and yep sure enough I was right, the arm wasn’t how it’s suppose to be… We had found the infection! The terminology for it was manky! They removed the pick line, cleaned it up and started the antibiotics drip and after this I slept for the rest of the day and then their next step was to take me to a ward as I was definitely not being allowed home with the way my arm looked!

All settled in on the ward, mum and dad left me to sleep with the nurses checking me every hour and I was kept on a constant drip of fluid or antibiotics (you end up needing to pee a lot!). When mum visited the next day I was not in much of a fit state as I was sleep deprived and to be honest fed up of people… The ladies on the ward with me kept talking about me as if I wasn’t there… “Ahh do you think that poor little girlie has got cancer like us? What do you think is wrong with her? Do you think she can walk? What has she done?” In the end I answered all their questions and the old lady across the room from me then went on to explain to every person that visited our ward that “that poor little girl in the corner is gluten free but not just that bless her, she is lactose free too! She can’t have chocolate you know and as she has cancer too you would think she would like some chocolate!”

So on the Friday this was the day I was originally coming into the hospital for chemotherapy and a PET scan (this scan lights up my Hodgkin’s Lymphoma like a christmas tree…apparently and is done so they can check up on how I am doing). As I was so ill with the infection they delayed the chemo until my body was able to handle it but as the PET scan had already been delayed before I still had to go for this. This involves having radioactive substance put into your body and then laying still going through an MRI type machine. Sadly nothing glows after, teeth didn’t, pee didn’t and even in a dark room I found nothing changed… I’ll double check when I have my next one though (I wanted at least some kind of super power). The only side effect is that children and pregnant people aren’t allowed near you. This wouldn’t have been a problem but sadly the other ladies on the ward had visitors which happened to be children and I felt pretty bad when some of them arrived and had to immediately leave because of me (the nurses didn’t want me to go anywhere else and the other ladies were bed bound). Thankfully that day they moved me back to Bracken the ward I had been to on my previous visit! (Private room… Yay I get some sleep, peace and don’t affect the other people.)

I sadly hadn’t noticed that since I had arrived in hospital and they had removed the pick line my arm had started to swell and my arm grew to such a large size that I wasn’t able to put my thumb and finger together, once we realised this my clever nurse Yvonne decided to elevate it as that is what you would do if you had swollen feet and I spent my arm raised for 2 days during the day and during sleep, thankfully it went down eventually.

After four days in hospital on antibiotics my temperature spiked again at 11pm this meant that the night doctor was called for me… I ended up having blood taken at 4.50am and being woken up lots during the night for the nurses to take observations aka obs (blood pressure, temperature, heart rate and oxygen level). They found that the infection I had was worse than previously thought, this meant they changed my antibiotics and did more tests. Yay…

Monday morning came and my lovely nurse Demi came to see me and told me that they were taking me to chemo in an hour so to get ready (aka wake up and eat something… I have become a night owl again. This is mostly due to how often they like to wake me in the night). I was a bit shocked to find this out as I thought it was being delayed till the infection had gone and I had had another pick line put in. Mum and Dad arrived and we all went over to the day centre where they give chemo standardly and I had to have another cannula put in as the old one had failed (to put it into perspective, I have tiny veins in my arms and in the first week in hospital 3 veins collapsed in one hand and my hands are now starting to look like I had bad chicken pox scars as they needles and cannulas don’t last long that’s why I need a pick line). The treatment went fine until we got to the final drip which she took back to my room as it was late and the ward was starting to close, once she started the drip it immediately was painful, she did her best to make it comfortable and made it slow down from 1 hour to 3 hours and gave me a heat pad to make my veins swell up so they are larger but once mum and dad went home I spent the rest of the time left FaceTiming my eldest brother swearing at him because it hurt that much (people should know I don’t swear very much at all, no point). Thankfully it came to an end and hopefully when I have my next treatment it won’t hurt as much as I will hopefully have a new line by then…

The rest of the week I spent doing as I was told, I had a ultrasound to check my arm, sure enough I had a clot in my shoulder… So that’s why my arm swole up so much! I kept having the antibiotics by drip and thankfully on Wednesday they decided that I would hopefully be able to change to the tablet form of the antibiotics so that I could go home and finish the course of tablets at home. On Thursday they started the tablets but they had to observe me for 24 hrs on them to make sure my temperature didn’t spike again or I declined in health. Thankfully Friday morning came and my body had behaved itself and the doctors came to tell me I was allowed to go home finally, the only conditions were that I now had to take the antibiotics for 2 weeks, start a neutropenic diet (because of my immune system) and I now had to have an injection into my belly every evening because of my blood clot (I had been having these in hospital but hadn’t had to take it home…)

So the lesson I learnt from this hospital visit is… Do as your told, they give you the instructions for a reason! Infections are serious! And to listen to my own judgement more seriously I might have been able to stop the infection being so bad if I had gone in on the Wednesday when I first questioned it, you know your own body so listen to it!