He had come towering over my VIP armchair just as I'd settled in, thrusting me a leaflet.
"I am here!" he'd said. "Just put up your hand if you want me to do your feet! It's free!"
The leaflet explained that he was a reflexologist, here to put gentle pressure on my feet to achieve all manner of good things. Relaxation, for starters.
"Nausea?" I asked. Yes, reflexology can also improve nausea. Right. Count me in.
So when the last bag on the drip stand was plopping its poison into my veins, he put a cushion under my feet, snapped on the gloves, lathered them with cream and set to work, mumbling important technical information (for my benefit, I think, even though I was happy to believe him without the small print). Pathways were being cleared, liver and kidneys were pressed into better service. All good. But it didn't stop there.
Because wait, what have we here? Ah. "Lower back pain?" (Yes indeed. A longstanding problem. Occupational hazard for nurses.) "I'm twisting your spine," he said knowingly, although he wasn't really. He was twisting my foot. My spine felt lovely. Actually, all of me felt lovely. I was tired at the start of the chemo session, and now I was beginning to lose all interest in conversation and ready to doze off. Either the leaflet was right about Relaxation, or it was simply the end of a long slog in the VIP lounge.
"Can you feel this?" he asked, pinching my big toe. I could. It was my brain, in apparent need of attention. Has this man read my blogpost about my frazzled brain? Let's wait and see whether this time round, there is less frazzling and less nausea.
Owl was next.
After a serious assessment, Reflexology Man decided he needed to work on Owl's circulation, which required deep pressure somewhere around the bottom seam. Can you do reflexology on seams in the absence of feet? Will it still work? We'll see.
And no, Reflexology Man was no stranger to dealing with fluff-filled patients. "You'd be surprised," he said, a note of triumph in his voice. "I can have a very serious 15 minute conversation with a bear."
Only 15 minutes?! Here at the Tuffrey Household, conversations with Bear can go on for hours. Seriously. Bear and his owner have gone to stay with their cousins for a couple of days, and the house is remarkably quiet without his constant chatter.
(I was ready to tell him this, but then I remembered that it was not a who-has-spoken-with-the-most-talkative-bear-competition. Plus, my husband was gradually trying to disappear behind the newspaper, and if I spoke of Bear I'd lose him completely.)
 |
| Reflexology Man working on Owl's circulation |
I know the drill. I know the nurses; the good ones now recognise and greet me. I don't really need someone with me anymore, although it was handy to have my husband there once I was hooked up to the drip.
Being an experienced patient makes me feel completely in control. Somehow, this throws me back into professional mode. I no longer have to focus on what on earth is happening to me. Who are all these people, what is that trolley for, what will happen next? No. I am a Professional Patient.
I look at the patients dotted around on other armchairs; I look at the nurses; and I find that I identify with the nurses rather than with the patients.
Most patients are several decades older than me, but that cannot be the only reason, because my nurse is several decades younger than me.
It is the nurse's experience I want to hear about. I don't want to hear about other patients' experiences. They all inhabit their own world. There's an aura of a weighty story around each of the armchairs, and I do not want to go into it.
Opposite me, there's a thin-looking elderly man with a bald head (can't be due to chemo because his beard is flourishing and I don't think Wish You Were Hair does falls beards) He is accompanied by a solid woman with brightly coloured scarves tied around her dyed-black hair. I try to smile at her but she is not in the business of smiling, not now. Her man doesn't look as if he is going to be cured by the chemo.
There is a husband accompanying his wife, who has smiling eyes, a hat pulled over her remaining wisps of hair, and a lovely bubbly face. (Steriods? See, that's the trouble. I am trying to diagnose everyone.) She is at home here. Another Professional Patient, clearly. She cheerios everyone on leaving, see you again next week.
Staff keep telling me about a centre that offers stress-reduction techniques and patient support groups. But I don't want to go to a centre for cancer patients. I might like to have a bit more of the toe squeezing (as my feet now feel pleasantly relaxed and are urging the rest of my body to feel it too).
But I definitely don't want to be in a group with other cancer patients. Because if I was, I would listen to their stories and be the Professional Nurse I have always tried to be, the one who knows that proper listening is therapeutic and helps patients to move forward. I would not be able to switch off the instinct to focus completely on the other person's troubles. Talking with fellow patients would feel like work, just when I am trying not to be at work.
Now that I am beginning to have some space in my head again, I do not want to fill it with other people's cancer stories.
So I talked with my lovely young nurse.
You can't help but talk to your nurse if you are having Red Poison, as she has to sit there for ages pushing the stuff into your vein.
This was her second job. Why the chemo ward? (My standard question. I really am interested in the nurses and keen to find out what makes them tick. Perhaps I should turn it into a research project. Might it be possible to distill the characteristics of a Good Nurse from what they tell me about their jobs and career path? I am beginning to think so.)
For this nurse, it was more a question of Why this hospital. Her previous hospital had asked her what additional courses she wanted to do (she listed seven) and then said they didn't have any money for training, sorry. But how about half a day's training in something utterly unrelated to her specialty? That was on offer for free, you see.
It made her feel undervalued. St George's Hospital, she said, was just a nicer, friendlier and more supportive place to work. She had heard this, and it turned out to be true. So when this job came up, she applied, even though her friends from nursing training warned her that she'd lose her nursing skills if she worked on a day unit.
"Nonsense," I said. "Any nurse, working in any specialty, loses some of the technical skills and knowledge required on another ward. I've worked in a hospice for years, and there's no way you could have put me to work on a cardiac ward. But you pick it up quite quickly if you start somewhere new. You never lose your basic nursing skills, and most importantly, you don't lose your ability to support patients and families."
(I know this. I was beginning to doubt whether I'd be able to go back to work in a hospice after an absence of over a decade, but looking after my dying mother, it all came flooding back. How to wash her and change her sheets, even if she is fast asleep. How to make her comfortable and free of pressure sores. Wonderful.)
What's next for this young nurse? Well, she has a one year secondment lined up with the research unit. Aha. Right up my street. We had a good natter about this.
"I love research!" I said, encouragingly. "It depends on the research you do, but for me, it wasn't true that I lost my contact with patients." (This was her worry, or rather, her friends' worry). "In fact, it's a privilege. To be able to interview patients and families, talking to them in depth, and then think and write about them, making sense of their stories... what could be better?"
"Oooh thank you so much," she said when the Red Poison syringes were both empty. "I was starting to feel unsure and nervous about my choices, but you have inspired me again."
See? I'm not a patient. Not really. I am a colleague. I like it better that way. Let Owl be the patient, and I'll ignore the fact that I've got cancer.
 |
| My younger daughter insisted that Owl should take Jokery along to the chemo unit |
After this, there will be no more Fluorouracil, no more Epirubicin (the Red Poison with the violent side effects, including hair loss) and no more Cyclophosphamide.The second half of my chemotherapy treatment involves just one drug, a different one (Docetaxil).
This will have a different set of side effects. No nausea (which is good) but, apparently, aching bones. ("How bad?" I asked the breast care nurse. Well, some women are OK with paracetamol, but others are begging for morphine. Hm.) Plus numbness, tingling and pain in your hands and feet. More news about that, I promise you, in a month's time.
For now, I am making the most of the few hours before my brain collapses and the nausea sets in. You, too, know the drill by now. You'll have to entertain yourself whilst I sign off for a week.
Or perhaps I won't? If Reflexology Man has been successful in his Brain Treatment?
I live in hope and expectation, because there is strong evidence that he has done an excellent job on Owl. In fact the evidence of success with the pressure points for Owl's circulation is right in front of you, on your computers and smartphones and iPads.
As you can see, Owl is being widely circulated.
Comments
Post a Comment