The time before this is very much of a blur to me-it's almost like a big void in time. I remember going home for the weekend, and Richard and I celebrating a very low-key valentines day with a 'dine in for £10' deal from M&S and my landlords moving me out of my room to rip my ceiling down, but apart from that it's pretty blank!
I arrived on the Thursday morning and was promptly poked, prodded and asked sufficient questions so that I was allowed to go into hospital. I then experienced my first ever CT scan. They are definitely an experience!! First, you have to drink this HORRIFIC substance. It tastes like watery, milky, orangy, chalk. With a bit of mint thrown in for good measure.
After you've sufficiently drank 800ml of this, the take you out and put in a canular so they can pump iodine into you while you're being scanned (this was the best bit, as after she'd put in my canular, she told me to go back to my boyfriend, who was actually my dad. Much hilarity ensued, and it seemed to be the general opinion that Castle Hill took of my dad....bit awkward when Richard was around, who they incidentally thought was my brother...) Then, you are taken through to. Nice big, airy, air conditioned room, and lay down on a little bed. Then you lie there, and are moved back and forward, while this big donut passes over your body several times, and thousands of pictures are taken. When they finally administer the iodine, it really does feel like you've wet yourself-your whole body goes really warm, and it is only because they warned me of this before that I wasn't too embarrassed to get up! (for the record, I hadn't wet myself). Then that was it! After 15 minutes of being pushed around in a tube, and 10 minutes waiting for the canular to be removed, I was set free, until the following Wednesday, when my surgery was scheduled for.
It had been agreed that my Mom would come up to Hull to stay with me post-operation so that she could look after me and do Mom-type things. She arrived over the weekend, ready for a shopping day on the Monday for some suitable post-operative clothes, pyjamas and skin products. On the Tuesday, I had to go back to the hospital to have some radioactive dye injected into the original site of my melanoma. The idea is that the lymph system drains this dye up to the related lymph, so it can be detected which lymph node cleans out that bit of skin. The thought process goes, that that lymph will be the first place the cancer has spread, so to test that node is the logical next step. If it has not spread to that node, it is unlikely it has spread anywhere else, but if it has spread, it is more likely it has and could be in further lymphs. If this is the case, a full auxiliary dissection has to take place...not what I wanted to happen at all. So I had this dye, and they x-rayed it to show that one lymph was linked to that piece of skin, and that was the lymph they would remove the next day. Tuesday night, we all went out for a meal, and prepared ourself for the next day. We were up at 5(!!!) to get ready for the hospital at 7.30. The hardest bit so far?? NIL MY MOUTH!! No tea, no coffee, no squash, not even water! Nothing was allowed in my mouth after midnight, and that was pretty bad. Especially at 7am... (it was even harder at 11.30..!) We all went to the hospital (Richard, Mom and Me), I checked in, and then I waited. Even though my operation was supposed to be early, by the time I was seen it was getting later and later. Richard had a rugby match to play in, so after I'd seen the anaesthetist and my surgeon, they left. I got all dressed up in my 'scrubs' and it was show time.
I was taken into a room and lay on a bed, where they took off my slippers and my glasses, leaving me all-but blind! There they inserted a canular into my hand, attached me to several monitoring devices (blood pressure, heart rate etc) and then pumped me full of something that made me drift off to sleep.
I woke up a few hours later feeling pretty numb, with my first question being 'have I had a skin graft?!' it had been something up in the air, and I was really hoping I hadn't...unfortunately I had. I was allowed to go home a few hours later where I settled down and slept for the majority of the next 48 hours. Groggy was definitely the word!
I had to wait three weeks before I had the results of my operation, which was testing to see if the cancer was in the local area (wider excision) and if it had spread to my lymphs. So they took a coffee-cup size chunk out of my arm, which needed a skin graft to heal (from my left thigh) and they also cut open my arm pit a little bit, to get at the lymph that had been detected with the dye. So needless to say, I was pretty sore. The wait for results was a long one, punctuated by visits from parents, friends, trips out, and lots of healing. The main grief I got was from my leg where the skin graft was, and where they warned would be the worst. After the first couple of days, it was weeping very badly and making a mess everywhere. After several bandage changes it sorted itself out though! My armpit was incredibly sore too, and I struggled to do anything with my left arm. The wider excision itself didn't really hurt at all, which made me think it wouldn't look too bad when I first saw it. Boy was I wrong.
I'd had several dreams about what it would look like, one being like meat and one like a box in my arm, but nothing had prepared me for what it would look like, and still to this day I am shocked by it. I honestly thought it was someone else's arm when the nurse began unwrapping the layers and layers of bandages and I saw a sponge sewed into my arm (as a pressure garment). As she unstitched it and pulled it off, I was dumbstruck at what was underneath...
And that was it...in all it's glory. It looked like prosthetics, and made me feel pretty sick!
That was accompanied by my arm pit...
And my skin graft site...
Lovely.
The next three weeks passed, with various other bandage changes and dressings-it was almost like having visitation rights to my own arm! And then we all waited with baited breath for the results...
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