Today the medical team squeezed Dominique in to have a PortaCath installed.
Basically a pipe that gets inserted into the jugular and enters the one ventricle of the heart. (Alarms bells all over the place with the potential number of things your imagination can come up with that can go wrong)
Anyway testament to the fine doctors we have available it went off without a hitch.
Notably the gears of the health system do turn pretty slowly when you are looking for high speed delivery in what I would best term as the Instant-Age we live in.
Leaving the house at 9am for an afternoon procedure, booking in at the hospital reception, then checking in at the Surgical Admissions reception, then meeting a nurse, then going for additional blood tests, then reporting back to a junior doctor then waiting to be seen by another nurse and then off Dominique went to the next place - no support people allowed.... she was on her own.
It had being indicated that I should see her within 2 hours. So you can imagine how much of an internal panic I was dealing with when 5 hours had gone by. By the time we leave the hospital from the 2 hour procedure - we have spent 10 hours there.
Like many things in the hospital you cant ask one department a question and get an answer that only another department can give you.
You learn to go with the flow (even if it feels like a circular reference)
Once again we get given a prescription for medication that we need to get somewhere - generally we would need to find an after hours pharmacy or wait until the next day.
The weird thing is that this is a recurring theme. Visit to hospital - prescription for the next batch of drugs and another lump sum of money not really expected.
And all this to occur again because two days after the PortaCath we are going to go for Chemo (we think - because we need solid confirmation) - so another day we need to set aside. Another batch of caregivers to find for our kids- but it doesnt end there - Saturday while many ppl will be dreaming of the Easter Weekend and what that may mean to them - we are back to have the ChemoBag removed. Usually done by a nurse at your house, but this is symptom of the public holidays.
Its a lot to deal with and often quite frustrating, but we know we need to deal through it because the means justifies the end. The business process improvement nut in me tells me that there is definitely enhancements that could be made to lower the turnaround times for cancer patients...
But to be fair - this didnt pass my mind when I didnt consider this to be something I dealt with.
We missed Poppies "blastoff" at kindy today as she finishes there and gets ready to start big school...
Cancer is many things but it not only robs you of your quality of life, but it starts stealing important dates from you:
So far
Wedding Anniversary (not just ours - many of the people in our immediate family have their anniversaries around now - so all taking a back seat)
Poppies Blast Off from Kindy
That being said - we are determined to look this straight in the eyes and fight the fine fight.
