The Road to Recovery

The past few days have flown by and I’ve barely been cognisant of how long it has been since I last posted. This morning I checked and saw that five days had passed. Readers may believe that I’ve been in a paralysed state, terrified of surgery and cowering from the outside world, too stressed to interact with it. Thankfully, the opposite is true. I’ve been overindulging in plans, getting out of the house and keeping myself busy. I’ve seen a lot of friends and family and had a lovely few days. Particularly inspiring was my friend Flo’s speech at a University of Bath Alumni event. Last year, she rowed across the Atlantic with two of her friends, becoming the youngest female team to ever complete the 60-day journey. Her speech was centred around the theme of ‘opportunities’ and taking them. It was extremely inspiring and even included some embarrassing pictures of us from university on the screen. Larissa and I were giggling as they flashed up behind Flo whilst she spoke. But today is Monday, and Monday demands a return to normality; a banging drum that reminds you of the seven-day cycle to which you must adhere. When the weekend’s potential is spent, you are forced to readdress whatever is sitting on your to-do list.

I woke up with a few things on my to-do list today. Bake bread, fill in the online questionnaire for my pre-op appointment at Manchester Royal Infirmary (MRI), attend the appointment at MRI and, of course, finally write another damn blog post. It isn’t necessarily in that order of importance, but it is in the order of service. As I write this, at 11:50am, I have left the bread to prove for the final time before going into the oven, have baked some ginger biscuits and have filled in the online questionnaire for the hospital appointment. No doubt I’ll have to come back to this post and continue writing several times over the day, making editing it a labyrinth of differing tenses, incorrect assumptions and interesting events which demand inclusion after the fact. That’s fine, though. I guess the game for the readers is to spot these things now – a sort of ‘Where’s Wally? Ebb and Flow’ edition, where you’re on the lookout for grammatical and contextual inconsistencies as opposed to a man in a red and white striped top.

My family and friends have come together well in response to the news of the surgery. Mostly. There has been the odd moment where I sense someone is more upset than they’re letting on, or where I feel a little let-down at the lack of support, but these things are quite normal I find. Besides, when I feel let down, I recognise that more as me demanding more from someone than they are perhaps able or willing to give at that time. That helps me move past those thoughts. It is much better to make a beast of yourself and never rely on anyone else for any support, ever. Of course, I am being facetious, but you do have to become thick-skinned when dealing with cancer. No matter how supportive your network is, they can’t be there all of the time. You still find yourself laying in bed at 5am, unable to sleep and frustrated with the world. Those are the moments where you feel most alone and your ability to cope is really tested. Mine is standing up to scrutiny so far. The only time I have cried since finding out about the surgery was when I was trying to comfort my brother Greg on the phone, only to spiral off on a tangent and spit out sentence after sentence of doom-speak. Perhaps I needed that; I’ve felt very positive ever since. I am frequently waking up at 5:00, which is annoying.

The appointment at the hospital was at 14:30. I wasn’t really sure what a pre-op appointment would consist of. There are a few things that I could have guessed would occur – at least one blood test (they never let you out of the hospital without taking some of that red gold from your veins when you have cancer), a long questionnaire and at least one thing that I didn’t expect but that is very uncomfortable. Guess what, it offered up all three. My favourite kind of hospital day.

First up was the questionnaire. Considering my surgery is a major one that may last from 9:00 until 18:00 in the evening, I don’t mind answering a long list of questions. It is probably required more than ever. I’m hopeful that I’ll be under every type of drug available to man which will make the experience more pleasant for me; if I have to answer 5000 questions to make that possible, then so be it. I’ll talk to you about the inner workings of every bowel movement if it grants me the top tier of pain relief. Hell, I’ll let you observe me on the toilet and then study the result with you if it’ll convince you that I can withstand 5kgs of ketamine and a couple of barrels of general anaesthetic.

It was during this questionnaire that the uncomfortable moment revealed itself. “Have you been admitted to hospital in the last twelve months?” The nurse asked me. I responded by telling her that I had been admitted to King’s College after my diagnosis, as I needed a stent installed in my bile duct. That is where she warned me that things were about to get a bit ‘unusual’.

She went to a medical trolley which sat in the corner of the room and opened up a drawer. Out of that drawer, she pulled a sealed plastic bag. Inside was a double-pronged cotton bud with a very long plastic stick to hold. There was then a long plastic tube which the cotton bud could be screwed into. “You need to insert this into your anus until there are faeces on the end of it. It’s to detect a bug that you may have picked up whilst in hospital.” I broke out laughing almost immediately. It was funny as I had just done a swab on my inner thigh and said to her “it’s quite a weird sensation rubbing a cotton bud there – you don’t often feel things in the crease between your leg and your thigh,” to which she had replied, “it may be getting weirder after this next question!” She was right – it was weirder than rubbing your thigh.

I’m not going into too much more detail about what happened afterwards, but you can see why I had bowels on my mind during that previous paragraph. What I will say is this, pushing something into your bum for the first time is a little disconcerting. A part of me wanted to go back and ask the nurse to help me, but I thought that might be a little awkward. She didn’t extend any offers when she told me the task at hand. I’m assuming that she may have done that when she was young and naive, only learning through experience that by offering you do in fact have to assist if they call your bluff. I would have been calling her bluff. I thought about asking my fiancee Anna to come and have a go. That has the potential to kill the relationship, though. “Hey honey, can you push this far enough into my anus so that a little bit of faeces is visible on the end?” There isn’t really a way to ask that question without it killing a little bit of your relationship at least. My mum was with her in the waiting room too – it might be a little embarrassing to broach the question with her there. I’m now writing it on a blog that many of my own family and my fiancee’s family read so I guess I’m not actually that embarrassed about it all. It’s knowledge sharing, Dan; someone else might be reading this in anticipation of their own pre-op. Just keep telling yourself that. That makes it way less weird that you’re writing this on the internet to be consumed by anyone, including your own colleagues.

The rest of the survey was pretty dry. The nurse had a nice and dry English humour about her. That makes it better. She sent me back to the waiting room and told me that I’d shortly be called to do bloods and an ECG. I was also told that once my bloods are done, I will have an opportunity to meet with an anaesthetist to talk about that side of the procedure in more detail. After returning to the waiting room for about five minutes, I was called into the bloods office.

Bloods were pretty normal. Me sitting there clenching my arm, pointing out that I have a scar on my vein from the number of times I’ve been stabbed in it. The nurse also had a dry sense of humour – perhaps working in a highly stressful environment, full of intense emotion and anxiety leads one to blunt their emotions and actively seek humour, wherever they may extract it from a situation? Just a thought. The true extent of this humour didn’t come out until the ECG. “Take your top off then, let’s have a look at you,” she said. I warned her that I had a lot of tattoos; she told me that she was still married. As I lay on the bed with her attaching stickers all over my body, I started to discuss where the incision may be on my stomach. I have a tattoo of a man dangling from a star in the middle of my abdomen, starting just below my chest and finishing just above my belly button. I told the nurse that I’d been wondering where the incision would interrupt the tattoo – whether it would mercilessly kill the man directly, or whether it would cut off the rope which we assume is sparing his life. She told me she wasn’t sure. I told her that it probably didn’t matter either way, as he’d be dead whether it was him or the rope that was cut. I think I’d reached the boundary of her humour with a patient – she probably thought I was sympathising with the tattoo a little too much for it to not be a projection of what I assume would happen to me during surgery. I really did just think it was a funny concept; it’s one of my favourite tattoos and it’s being ruined – I have to find the humour in it somehow.

Back to the waiting room in anticipation of the meeting with the anaesthetist. Anna pointed out that they are some of the smartest people in the medical profession as they constantly have to keep calculations in their heads; I still question this. If an accountant does not have to do any adding or taking away without a calculator, why would an anaesthetist have to figure a lot of important information out in their head? I wasn’t buying that. I’m sure they are extremely intelligent people, though. What I really want them to be is incredibly liberal. That is far more advantageous for me. Drugs, drugs, drugs. I want them to feed me so many drugs that I wake up in 2031 when they have finally found the cure for cancer and are administering it directly into my brain, toe or elbow; wherever they have to stick the damn thing to get rid of it.

Another five minutes or so and we were called in. I have to give it to Anna – this woman did have an aura of intelligence about her. What she was saying, however, was less impressive. I sat there as she described how I’d have a drain in my body, how I’ll likely have a line in my neck, and how I might need an epidural. I’m not sure what my face looked like as she was speaking, but I’m pretty sure there was a blatant look of concern slowly forming in my expression. There were so many words that I did not want to be hearing in relation to my body. Even the whole “if we need to give you a blood transfusion, are you ok with that?” thing is a little bit much for me – I immediately just imagine bags of blood and want to throw up. Maybe all the blood that I’ve been giving to the hospital will benefit me in the end, when they give me a load of it back to try to save my life after an operation… hopefully that won’t be necessary, though. I know that they don’t really keep your blood after blood tests by the way, but it’s fun to imagine the staff constantly adding it to a large oil carton with a ‘Dan Godley’ label on the side.

I left the conversation with the anaesthetist feeling more queasy and anxious than I’ve felt in a while. It was a healthy dose of reality – that this is really happening, that it is really complex and that it is actually happening soon. 9:00 until 18:00 – that’s more than the average work day. I don’t even wake up feeling well-rested afterwards. The anaesthetist warned me that I’d be very tired for a week or so. That was probably underselling what the worst of recovery is. I haven’t heard many who have come out of major surgery only complaining of how tired they are, but I guess I’ll be finding that out the hard way.

And that was that – the pre-op was done. Assuming that I don’t fail any blood tests or get told that I have one of these bugs from my previous hospital visits, I should be good. Tomorrow I’m back at MRI for a meeting with the dietician team. Hopefully, they won’t require me to put anything in my anus, but I won’t assume too much. You can never be sure what might happen with these appointments; once upon a time, I went to A&E expecting to be home at an annoyingly late time but with my abdominal pain sorted – that meeting spiralled into 5 weeks of uncertainty before receiving a cancer diagnosis. You never know what life will throw at you, but you start to get an idea when you still find yourself frequenting hospitals eight months later… sometimes you get told you have cancer, sometimes you stick a swab into your anus, and sometimes you probably do both. At least those things were eight months apart for me.