I’ve spent so much time in hospitals over these past 12 months that I’m starting to consider myself somewhat an expert on them. Sure, the staff at a hospital spend much more time there than I ever could, but they aren’t then forced to sleep on the thin foam mattresses and eat the inexplicably disgusting food. When I go into the hospital, I really walk the walk. I throw up in the cardboard buckets, sulk in the side rooms and indulge in the various sizes of cannulas. Once, I had 3 separate cannulas in my two arms, yet the nurse still approached me and asked if she could put in another one. “What is wrong with the ones I already have in?” I asked. “They aren’t big enough for a blood transfusion,” she responded. I wondered how my veins were still managing to carry blood around my body at all. They were starting to resemble a Kerplunk tower.

My knowledge of hospitals is exactly what makes them so unappealing to me. The overbearing smell of the chemicals used to clean every surface. The solitude of the shared wards, where I am forever damned to being at least half the age of everyone else in the room. The excitement when a nurse or doctor shows up to talk to you about something, only for the conversation to last a mere 3 minutes; a momentary break in your daily routine of watching videos on Youtube, trying to sleep and staring at your own legs. A&E is even worse, though – a holding pen of drunk, miserable and desperate people, most willing to exaggerate, lie and even scream to get a 5-minute improvement in their overall wait time. Pair that with the average wait time being approximately 2 weeks and you get a pretty unappealing offering.

A&E is so unappealing in the UK right now that I spent 4 hours last Saturday night projectile vomiting and trying to withstand some of the worst abdominal pain I’ve ever felt just to avoid it. My theory was that it would all pass if I just waited another hour…

Another hour…

Just one more hour…

Eugh.

That theory never materialised and as I lay there on the sofa, keeled over in pain, I finally succumbed to the inevitable. At first, we tried to ring an ambulance to take me. The last time I required an ambulance was to be transferred from Leighton hospital to Manchester. During that journey, the ambulance crew encouraged me to ring an ambulance in future if I am in a lot of pain as they described my case as “more worthy than 99% of cases that we spend our lives attending to.” Encouraged by this advice, and in desperate need of some top-grade morphine, I called the ambulance service.

Unsurprisingly, they told me that I could wait, but it would be at least 4 hours. Who would have guessed that the ambulance service would be busy on a Saturday night? Perhaps I should have lied and told them that my chest and back were indeed hot, and that my stools were so black and tar-like that they turned the water in the toilet basin the colour of squid ink, but that isn’t the kind of person I am. I answered their list of questions as honestly and positively as possible, which got me exactly where it was always going to get me. Deprioritised. Rating your abdominal pain an 8 out of 10 and repeatedly projectile vomiting 2 months after major surgery is only worrying if your chest is also warm… You really do need to be on death’s door before they’ll take you seriously. My last ambulance crew told me that they spend their lives attending to low-priority calls about issues that barely require hospital attention, but maybe they were just liars.

My mum, Anna and I jumped into the car. Royal Stoke hospital is a 20-minute drive, so it isn’t too bad. It was the pain relief that I was so keen to get, and I knew that I wasn’t going to get it for hours if we walked into A&E. When you get an ambulance, you get it before you even make it to the hospital! It is a life of luxury in an ambulance – you’re given your own driver AND a separate paramedic who can prescribe you morphine; no wonder they’re so popular on Saturday nights. I crawled into the back of the car. My mum handed me a bucket, which was a good idea in hindsight, as 15 minutes into the journey I started throwing up again. The car stank for the last 5 minutes, but the bucket was then left in the back of the car, to my mother’s dismay as she returned to the car a few hours later. She then had to drive back to the house with the smell of stale sick lingering in the air.

Anna and I went straight into A&E whilst my mum negotiated the car park. One thing I will say about having a major operation and a history of pancreatic cancer is that you do get triaged very quickly. As the receptionist was handed my discharge notes from Manchester, which includes my original diagnosis of stage 3 pancreatic cancer, all of the gritty details of the operation, as well as the fact that I am now fully ‘insulin dependent’ (AKA Diabetic), she looked a little overwhelmed. We sat in the waiting room for no more than 10 minutes before I was called up. I was glad to be out of the waiting room – it was full of drunk, miserable people. I was also miserable, but the others were really miserable; there was wailing, shouting and some chaotic laughing coming from a man lying on a set of chairs who was occasionally shouting something at a man sitting across from him – I’m pretty sure he was being racist to the poor guy, but he could barely form a coherent word, so it was hard to really know.

The nurse took us into a bay and closed the curtain. As she asked me to explain what was happening, and I started making my way through the history of Dan’s cancer, I started to cry. At some point during my recital, a thought hit me like a freight train. I remembered watching an advert about cancer a few years ago where a woman described suddenly falling violently ill, projectile vomiting and not knowing why. A week later, she was diagnosed with cancer. I sat in the chair, bent forward and holding my abdomen. “It’s fucking spread, hasn’t it?” I said to Anna. Shortly after the nurse took us to a room and told me that I can’t be around the general population in case anyone passes something on to me. There we waited about 30 minutes for a bed and then we settled in. It was about 23:30.

It took around an hour or two for the nurse to put in a cannula, take bloods and give me a course of pain relief. Things slowed down after that. The nurse told us we were “going to be seen next” for a grand total of 5 hours. By the time a doctor finally came to speak to me, it was around 6:30 in the morning. After the pain relief had dampened my abdominal pain, I’d spent most of the time drifting in and out of sleep. Poor Anna and my mum were taking turns alternating between the two chairs in the room – one was actually a stall, so to sleep on it, they were having to lean their head forward and rest it on the bed. It didn’t look comfortable at all.

Luckily, when the doctor did eventually see me, she was extremely knowledgeable and diligent. She quickly went through my blood test results, telling me that my infection markers weren’t worryingly high but were raised. The plan was to do a CT scan at some point that morning. Unfortunately, the shift changeover was at 7:00am so after that brief interaction, we didn’t see her again. After a few more hours I was moved into another part of the hospital where I stayed for another few hours, before being admitted onto a ward. I really didn’t want to be admitted. In my experience, trying to get out of the hospital once you’ve been admitted is like trying to escape Alcatraz. The amount of procedures you have to fight through just to leave on the day you are discharged is crazy. You sit around waiting for the doctor to write the discharge notice, then you wait for the ward to process it, then you need a porter to ferry you to the discharge lounge where you have to wait for the Pharmacy to put together your medication, which has never taken less than 3 hours for me, then, finally, you’re allowed to leave. By this point, it is usually 20:00 in the evening and you’ve spent all day in purgatory, resisting eating any more hospital food because you know that soon you’ll be able to have real food from home, food that actually tastes of something.

So I went to a ward, then got moved to another ward and then went to do the CT scan. A few more scans were planned for Monday morning – the hospital needed to order some of the materials required to do the scan. The CT scan used a contrast dye which is pushed directly into your blood via the cannula which is connected to a line. The type which they couldn’t do was one where you drink a liquid before the scan, taking a cup of it every 15 minutes for an hour, and then you go into the scan. I believe the liquid you drink can be tracked as it makes its way through your body, allowing them to trace how things are moving through. Some of the details might be wrong there, but hopefully, you get the gist. The hospital didn’t have the liquid you need to drink prior to having the scan, so this is what we were waiting for.

The results of the CT scan showed that I had a blockage in my colon. One of the new joins in my digestive system had swelled up, I think, and it was causing my stomach to not empty properly. When my body realised it couldn’t digest food, it went into emergency mode and decided to fire it back out from where it came from. That seemed to explain why I’d had such a bad pain in my abdomen.

A downside to the next scan being Monday was that I wasn’t allowed to eat anything until after the scan. This wasn’t a problem Saturday night, with the taste of sick lingering in my nose and with me barely stomaching water alone. It was starting to become a problem by Sunday afternoon when I was actually feeling a lot better. My stomach was hurting but I was starting to get quite an appetite again. There was nothing to be done, though, so I settled into another night in a hospital.

A downside of being diabetic is that not eating can send your levels all over the place, especially if you’re ill. My body was not only fighting whatever was happening now, but it is also trying to recover from the surgery. The surgeon had warned me that this will likely be the case for 6 months and that my blood sugar levels will be difficult to control throughout this period. Between the illness, recovery from the operation and not eating, my blood sugars kept dropping to dangerously low levels.

For those of you who don’t know much about diabetes – the idea is to try and control your blood sugar levels in a similar way to how your body does when it is functioning properly. You inject insulin to stop your blood sugar from spiking when you eat and to bring it down, and if your blood sugar gets too low, you urgently take on sugar to bring it back into a safe tolerance. By ‘take on sugar’, I mean that you drink something sugary like fruit juice or Coke. You can also eat sweets that are all sugar, but anything that also has other nutritional content, like chocolate bars, which also contain fat, will take longer to digest. That means a slower increase in your blood sugar, which could be dangerous. Your blood sugars can be high without it being dangerous on a short-term basis, so it isn’t too concerning if they are slightly elevated. Low blood sugars can be very dangerous, though, and can result in an individual passing out, with the risk of falling into a coma.

Another downside of being diabetic and being an inpatient in a hospital is that nurses, in general, do not seem to know how to manage it at all. That night, the nurse came to take a reading from me. It stated that my blood sugar was at 2.7, which is low. The ideal range is between 4 and 7, but I consider anything up to 10 as Ok. The reason it had got so low is that my Continuous Glucose Monitor (CGM), the device which is attached to my arm and continuously sends readings to my phone, tends to record around 2 points higher than my blood sugar level when tested. It isn’t always that different, but when the blood sugar levels are changing frequently, as they were that night, it tends to be more inaccurate. That meant that I thought my blood sugar levels were around 4.7, which is fine, but in reality, they were lower than this. As I had recorded low blood sugar levels, the nurse had to put me on a sliding scale.

Now, I repeatedly told her that I’d rather manage it myself and that my body will be very susceptible to insulin when my levels are being so volatile, but that couldn’t supersede the ‘process’. If your blood sugars are recorded as low, the staff have to ‘take control’ the nurse told me. The problem is that most of the nursing staff don’t seem to understand how to control a diabetics levels. I heard the nurse repeatedly asking another nurse how a sliding scale works, what she should be doing with it etc. I wasn’t particularly happy that this person was in charge of it.

A sliding scale is a machine which is hooked up to the cannula and monitors your blood sugar levels. The nurse can tell it to give you a certain amount of insulin per hour, which is what this nurse did. The problem is that my level was randomly dropping without much warning, so why would I want to introduce more insulin into my body at this time? I said this to her, but she told me that they had it under control. Of course, that night, I had 3 hypos where I urgently had to eat glucose gel to get my levels raised again. Eventually, the nurse listened to my pleas to stop leaking insulin into my body and changed the amount of insulin being issued to 0. This was happening throughout the night as I was trying to sleep. I genuinely lay there terrified that these nurses were going to kill me if they didn’t listen to me and stop what they were doing. It is incredibly frustrating.

Going into the hospital as a diabetic is genuinely scary – you really see the lack of fundamental knowledge in the area. You are constantly given things like orange juice with your meals, there is no indication of how many carbohydrates are in a meal, which would help you inject the right amount of insulin for what you eat, and the nurses frequently seem bewildered by what to do with you as they routinely check your levels. I don’t blame the individuals, but something really isn’t working in this area of care. You’re far better off at home where you can eat healthier and be responsible for controlling your own blood sugar levels.

The next morning, the surgical team came and spoke to me. “You seem well,” the head surgeon said as he approached me. “Yeah, I feel fine now. I’m just starving,” I retorted. “Well let’s cancel the scans, let you eat and get you discharged then,” he said, to my surprise. He explained that these types of blockages usually clear themselves up and then the subject is fine. I was sceptical but I accepted what he said – he knows better than I do, and I was feeling much better now. That was that. A few hours later I was let out (I did not have to pick up any medication to be discharged with so I missed the pharmacy debacle, which was a relief).

My problem since leaving the hospital has been that some of the issues haven’t gone away. It isn’t comforting to be released from the hospital with nothing – no antibiotics, no advice on what to do next time, or what not to do to help prevent it from happening again, nothing. For the first few days at home, I did feel better, mostly. Since Wednesday, I’ve started getting this heavy feeling in my stomach and lower abdomen again. When I try to eat as much as I feel I want to in order to satisfy my hunger, I start feeling incredibly sick. The whole thing has left me feeling lost, and I’ve just reduced the amount I’m eating by a lot. I feel hungry all of the time, yet still a little bit sick. It is exhausting. As a result, my blood sugar levels are also all over the place. I seem to have at least 1 hypo every night, where my blood sugar drops too low and I have to have a glucose gel. Luckily, when my phone records a low reading, an alarm goes off. If I didn’t have this, I probably just wouldn’t be sleeping out of fear that I wouldn’t wake up.

All of this is worsened by the fact that my wedding is on Friday, so I am extremely nervous that I may have another episode around then, which would ruin the entire day. There are so many growing pains with everything going on – the diabetes, recovering from the surgery and, now, mentally preparing myself for the next bout of chemotherapy. Sometimes you wish life would just give you a break. I really need it right now.