Stormy Seas

So yesterday I had a CT scan of my lungs to check if there was a blood clot in them, which thankfully there was not. The next thing that had to happen was that they needed to remove my Hickman line. This was going to be tricky because the line itself had a clot in it and care needed to be taken. This was awful. The procedure normally takes about thirty minutes, but in my case it took two hours. It was carried out in my room at the bedside. To remove the line, they had to open up the skin and soft tissue on my chest wall, and then remove the line by cutting the tissue around it that was encasing it. This was done under local anesthetic, so I was awake, but I must have been cut five or six times on parts of my skin that hadn't had the local anesthetic on it. There was blood everywhere, even the nurse looked like she was about to faint. Eventually, when the line was taken and I was put back together, they had to press on the site for another hour and a half to stop the bleeding.

So what's the plan now? Well unfortunately, they are pretty sure I have something called Infective Endocarditis. Basically, it means I have an infection in my heart caused by a specific bacteria. I have a clot on one of the walls inside my heart that carries that bacteria. They need to give me IV antibiotics for a month which I will have to stay in hospital for. The problem with this is that I'm going to miss my window where I can get out of the hospital for a couple of weeks before the start of the next cycle because they can't really delay the treatment regime. 

So I am a bit gutted about the whole thing. I was so relieved that the chemotherapy treatment had gone so well, I never expected something like this to happen.  When I think about the fact that I'm not getting out of here for a long time, I feel numb and maybe a bit angry. It feels very unfair. The future looks bleak filled with nothingness. I don't think that the emotional trauma of the last week has properly hit me, but I know it will in time. But I guess this is the part of the storm where the I will need to trust that the anchor will sustain me. Time will tell how the story plays out.