I spent a morning at this Edinburgh hospital and it was eye-opening
I accompanied my sister to her first chemo session
There are a few hospital rooms that you hope you'll never have to visit.
Intensive care, say, resus, or the chemo ward. That’s where I find myself, on a Thursday morning, at Edinburgh’s Western General Hospital, along with my younger sister.
Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer, back in September, she’s been dreading this bit. More so than the mastectomy.
It’s easy for me to say, but she seemed to sail through that part relatively easily. At least, I suppose, they knock you out. That’s the sprint over, now we’re onto the marathon.
At the beginning, there was a lot of swithering over whether she would need this adjuvant therapy or not.
I think they drip feed information, so patients don’t implode. Or maybe they just didn’t know for certain, until the tumour's pathology report.
After the operation, it was confirmed that she would need 16 weeks of chemotherapy. This would blast any stray cells that were lurking down her body’s dark vennels.
Everyone knows that this treatment is effective but gruelling, though I think symptoms vary, and it depends what drug regime they’re using.
Anyway, it's the Soutar way to imagine the absolute worst, so anything less can be greeted with vague relief. I know she’d been counting down to this like it was a one-way trip to the gallows.
To prepare for the hair loss bit, her pal cut my sister’s long blonde style into a swingy bob. The ward nurse, who talked her through the practicalities of chemo, said that if it falls out - and it almost certainly will - then it could grow back completely different. We shall expect a cascade of ginger curls in the summer.
On a patient’s first session, there is a lot of admin to wade through. Things to sign. Details to discuss. They ask your name and DOB about three times, I suppose in case they accidentally administer chemo to a random interloper. Not much of a joyride.
You are given a huge list of foods that you can’t eat, from blue cheeses to raw nuts.
However, nothing was a surprise. My sister is not the sort of person to enter into something like this blind. She has read the entire internet, including the prologue and acknowledgments. They still gave her a handful of leaflets, and a bright red card for a symptom hotline that she can call 24/7.
Then they put one of those hospital name bracelets that you get when you’re a newborn on her wrist, and the sign-in ritual was complete.
For her first session, she’s here for four or five hours. I know I’m going to be booted out way before that, but I hang around for as long as possible and try to make myself invisible.
Eventually, the cannula goes in the back of her hand. We ask if she can choose a paw, because it might be handier for reading and texting to have a spare right one, but, nope, it has to be the opposite from her mastectomy. Leftie it is.
Not that practical, and my sister also soon works out that going to the toilet means dragging along her drip and its stand, like a clingy greyhound
She’s assisted on all counts by the staff, who are lovely. The nurse tells us that she’s terrified of needles and blood, which amuses us.
There will be steroids going through the drip now, and, later, doses of chemotherapy drugs.
While we wait, it’s strange to see other people check in for their first session, acting so normal. I wonder if any of them slept last night.
Although I’ve brought my sister a cinnamon bun and a book, she’s already got two paperbacks, lunch, handcream, snacks, headphones and a blanket.
She’s never listened to a podcast before, because she’s a single parent of three children and doesn’t have the time, but she plans to give one a whirl.
We’re in a very warm room with three others, all newbies, and each is allocated a big navy blue chair. There is a surprisingly green view out to trees. I tell my sister, when they kick me out, I’ll stand outside the window to watch and wave, but of course I wouldn’t be so silly.
It’s barely noon when the lunch trolley comes round. My sister perks up.
She had been getting a preparatory ECG when the morning tea trolley did the rounds, so she’d missed the cellophane-wrapped bakewells and two-finger-packs of shortbread.
I eye up the chicken sandwich, but food isn’t for us visitors.
Anyway, she wolfs one of these down. Just as well. I think she would’ve been a bit self-conscious, eating her potentially stinky prawn pasta salad in close proximity to other patients.
That’d be like when someone microwaves a fish pie at the office. The lavishly iced cinnamon bun - not on the forbidden food list, thankfully - will have to wait until she gets home.
I have stayed for as long as possible, but I’m kicked out as the chemo drugs are administered. I wind through the Escher-like maze that is the Western and feel guilty.
Later, she tells me that she chatted to the other patients in the room, and got their stories.
Since then, her symptoms have been operatically up, down and all over the place.
This isn’t going to be an easy ride, but at least she’s one week down. That’s only 15 left until she can think about eating blue cheese and styling those burgeoning ginger curls.
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