Overheard at the Beatson

At the clinic and in the treatment room at the Beatson Oncology Centre there is a certain camaraderie between the patients where old treatment stories are swapped, especially with regard to how long it had been since their diagnosis. The terminology is always the same with people saying 'I've got x years'. In the treatment room in particular you can strike up a good rapport with the patients that you see regularly and reassure each other that whatever they're going through is, for want of a better phrase, normal. That was put to one side on my last visit when I overheard a pair of older fellows chatting away (one had 5 years, the other 3) and one started talking about something that even I at nearly 13 years had never heard of except myself. 

The guy with 3 years was talking about the time he fired a nail through one of his fingers with a nail gun. Now if you had asked me to draw a Venn diagram of people that have done that and also had a bone marrow transplant it would have involved two massive circles overlapping at one tiny point marking me. Alone. Now this guy was a bit different from me in that he was using smooth nails so got a pair of pliers to pull his nail out, leaving only the tiny sliver of metal that joins the nails together in his finger. Apparently after his chemotherapy sessions the little sliver eked its way out of his finger after having lay there for years. It apparently just poked through his skin and then just fell onto the floor with a clink.

Now when I did it I nailed two fingers together in the now almost universal signal for 'fuck off' (or if you're of a certain generation Churchill's victory sign) but I had used barbed nails - the barbs are designed to make sure you can't pull the nail out - and I, being hard as, well nails, decided to pull it out with my teeth. I soon found out that it wasn't for shifting and, more than that, it was rubbing against the bone in my finger which was very sore indeed. When I got to the hospital the doctor treating me so was so thrilled with the X-Ray that he got an extra copy for his own file of interesting cases and took a photo of it before the first attempts to remove it was made. It had to be cut at the top and dragged through rather than out backwards. An incision into the second finger allowed it to be pulled back out of that one. If you're wondering at this point just how you put a nail through your finger in the first place in both cases it was a knot in a piece of wood that the nail bounced against and ricocheted away and into (and in my case through two) fingers. I never got the chance to speak to the man directly as he got his blood results and allowed to go home before I could interject so I never got to ask him if he had ever had an altercation with a circular saw as well. In the same job at the timber yard where I nailed the fingers together I also cut the top off my right thumb with a circular saw. I am immensely proud of the fact that I finished my shift and cycled the seven miles home before my mother demanded I go to the hospital to get it seen to. the thumb got dressed and eventually had to be cauterised after it got infected. I also broke 3 metatarsals in my right foot in my time there (before David Beckham made them famous). It was a happy day when I got moved in to the office at the timber yard. 

Anyway, it's a weird time as not very much is happening in my own life. There are things that concern me going on in some of my friends lives and I'd love to try and crystallise my thoughts on those matters by trying to put them into words here but that would be a terrible breach of trust so I'll keep my own counsel for once.

What I can tell you is a sweet wee story from my Sunday just past. I've spoken before about how I can't clear the mucous from my lungs that normal people can get rid of with an ordinary cough, so for weeks it can build up and leads to a constriction in my windpipe until it eventually loosens itself and it moves and I cough up a large lump and can breathe a bit better again. Now on Sunday one of my three nieces Chloe (3 years old) was sitting talking to me when all of a sudden a plug that had been building moved but I couldn't cough it up. It got stuck in my throat and I was choking and I had to make the (really disgusting) decision to swallow it back rather than asphxyiate. I was genuinely in a bad way but she sat patiently until I got my breath back. Just then her brother Ewan who is four and a half (half years very important at that age) years her senior came in the room where he was given short shrift by Chloe who proclaimed "Uncle Paul's sick Ewan, go away". So she made sure I was ok before going downstairs and asking her granny, who was making me a coffee "Is that for Uncle Paul, he's feeling sick?". So I suspect there might well be another nurse in this next generation of the family. She just sat there unflustered and then when I had my coffee she helped me count out my morning's medication. Bless her, it didn't half make something a bit scary pass without freaking me out.