With the trachy out, it was time to start breathing through my mouth. My nose was entirely blocked so there was no chance of it helping me out. My mouth got so dry. Night time was the worst. I already wasn’t sleeping much, but now my mouth and throat were dry and burning. And I…
Tag: hospital
Little adventures
On day 13 of my hospital stay, Kat the Physio said I was allowed to go for a little adventure, so I actually got to leave the ward and we went up to Level 16 and looked out at the view. UCLH has a tall tower, and is situated pretty in the middle of London,…
Trachy tales
While a lot of the point of this post is really to say ‘Kat the Physio is amazing’, because I definitely haven’t given her enough time yet, I feel I also need to talk a little bit more about the Tracheostomy. The concept is great. Hole in the neck to breathe through, so no matter…
Meet my Surgeons (otherwise known as best friends)
I think it is time to introduce you all to my surgeons. These guys honestly became my life line, they felt like my best friends – visiting me each day, telling me things were going well… I knew they were looking out for me. They didn’t all visit me every time, sometimes a lot of…
Struggles and some gory details…
At this point I was waking up every morning not able to open my eyes, as well as being cold, wet and covered in blood. It was pretty grim. I couldn’t breathe through my nose or close my mouth. I had blood and yellow discharge streaming out of my nose, and blood and saliva running…
The second trip to the ward in 3 days…
When I was transferred to the ward for the second time in 3 days, I was back in a shared ward. Thankfully this time there was no one wailing all night like there had been the time before (I remember writing to my nurse saying ‘just give her sleeping tablets and give me sleeping tablets…
Last day in ICU
I had a very odd nurse that last day in ICU. She kept grabbing me by my painful cannula arm (like literally grabbing my cannulas) or grabbing me by my shoulder injury. At some point she managed to hit me in my swollen face and instead of just trying to apologise she tried to grab…
The second trip to the ICU…
Second time in ICU, I had my own room. That was quite nice. The first night, when I had just come out of anaesthetic, I was propped up really high in the middle of the room in this very uncomfortably set up bed, connected to a hell of a lot of monitoring devices I didn’t…
Taking stock of the damage post surgery #2
So when I woke up from surgery #2, it seemed like a good time to take stock of what had happened to me over the past week, physically. Let me relay it to you. So in the original surgery, they took the bone, some muscle and the blood supply out of my shoulder/back – the…
Friday turns to Saturday and back into surgery we went
I’d been having regular checks of the flap (the new roof of my mouth made from shoulder) – they would look at it, feel it for temperature, then use a ‘Doppler’ machine on it, which would amplify the sound of its pulse. Somewhere over the course of Thursday night the Doppler machine got misplaced. When…
The Cancer Chronicles 