For those of you that didn't know, I contracted Thyroid Cancer about 3 years ago. I am lucky that I have a wonderful GP week who picked it up pretty quickly, and he referred me to an excellent throat surgeon who fixed me up quickly. For 3 years, all tests have been clear and I was well on my way to earning the title 'Cancer Survivor'.
At the start of November 2012 I started noticing subtle behaviour changes. Nothing I couldn't handle but they got slowly worse as the weeks went by: slurred speech; bumping into walls; messy handwriting; poor typing. A speech pathologist friend suggested I see my doctor in case I was heading for a stroke.
My GP arranged for an MRI, the technician took one look at the image and said I needed to see my GP straight away (gulp!). By the time I got back to my GP, he and the neck surgeon had arranged to send me to St Vincents emergency dept the next day. I had 2 (yes, 2!) tumors deep in my brain - that fucking cancer had moved (it happens apparently). Who knows how long I had before a brain explosion became imminent?
You can't imagine how rough that night was. You have to get through all 8 stages of grief in about 12 hours. How do I tell my family and 2 young girls. I was scrambling to sort out a will, leave details of login/passwords for Jacqui, sort out finances as much as possible, tying up as many loose ends as I could. I didn't know when I'd be coming home again... Or whether I'd be coming home at all! But you hope for the best and plan for the worst.
I got myself admitted the next day (Dec 19) and it all started. St Vincents was great. 15min after I walked through the door I had an ER bed and in 4hrs a ward bed (the letter my GP gave me helped, I think). An MRI and a CT scan was done over the next couple of days and I was sent home for Christmas. Phew, I'm not ikely to get into trouble in the next week or 2 but they said I needed to come back on the 27th for a brain biopsy (yuck).
Just so you know, avoid hospitals during the Christmas - NY period. Medical staff like to take holidays as well as you and me, and the hospitals get inundated with drunken fools. The 27th, 28th, and 29th came and went as hospital resources were taken by more urgent cases. I called the Oncall Neurosurgeon who advised to get myself admitted to Prince of Wales Hospital (POWH) instead. That suits me because POWH is closer to home and the kind of treatment I need (ie. brain cancer surgery) was best available there anyway.
So here I am, sitting in a bed, waiting for a doctor to come along and tell me something. Its pretty frustrating that I'm in an information vacuum but its holiday season and everyone is away. I'm taking it as a good sign I'm not in any immediate danger. I've been as proactive as I can be and know I'm in the right hospital with the right resources. But I have questions and I want to take control. I'm already a victim of this fucking cancer, I don't want to be a victim of the system as well.
I thought it would be interesting to be blogging this journey - after all, you don't get brain cancer every day - and hopefully people will get something out of the experience. I'm learning stuff about the hospital system all the time, as well of course the cancer, so its worth documenting.