Update 23 to 25 July

Tuesday, 23 July.
Woke up this morning feeling generally OK and after breakfast updated my blog. Around mid day I started to feel tired, so I stretched out on the bed for a rest but when I woke up I had a bit of a shock - my stoma bag had filled with air and excretion and was almost forcing itself off my body. Quickly I got some water and was just about to change my bag when cousin Joan rang from Australia, I said I was dealing with an emergency and she agreed to ring back about one hour later. Removing the bag the excrement was unusually soft -- I had diarrhoea!! I had been warned that this was a high possibility, so I decided to use a drainable bag this time, I hadn't got one prepared so I had to mark and cut out the hole to fit it around my stoma causing me delays and worrying about a sudden rush of soft excrement before I could get the bag attached (I should have done the preparation before removing the bag, folks!!). Everything worked out fine and I went down for lunch and as promised Joan rang to see how I was getting on and to say she found the blog site a useful way of keeping in touch. She said she had recommended to Ann "Dissolution" by C. J. Sansom set in the reign of Henry the eighth and featuring the lawyer Matthew Shardlake. I read a few more pages of the book before going to bed each night at around 11.30 pm.

Wednesday 24 July.
I woke two or three times during the night to drain my bag that had filled up with loose excrement each time. That morning at 6 am Wendy said that I should be taking the tablets the pharmasist had given me.  She went down to get them and started me off with 2 2mg Loperamide Hydrochloride capsules and the she made sure that I took the rest of them one at a time every two hours until 6 pm. Wendy has been fantastic through this week making sure I have my treatments and logging my blood pressure for next Monday. The rest of the day went fine with the diarrhoea under control.
In the afternoon I had to go back to the Sir William Rouse Unit at 4 pm to have my PICC line cleaned. As my daughter Alison was working a 12.5 hour shift as a student nurse in Alexandra Ward of Kingston Hospital I had arranged for her to come and see how the device should be cleaned. After the cleaning the sister on the Chemo Unit said that before Alison could do the cleaning at home she would have to come back another time and be monitored by the Sister to ensure that she was competent to do the PICC line cleaning (Something to do with Insurance).

Thursday 25 July.
I have found so far this week that I now tend to get tired very easily without doing anything particularly strenuous. Most days this week I have had to have a short 1-2 hour sleep at some point during the day. I hope that this will decrease as the week goes on. I arranged to take Alison into Kingston to set up a savings account for her at a Building Society. After that we shared a banana split  ice cream at Creams, I had to go to the Hospital as Alison said my PICC line looked a little inflamed and was oozing. It turned out to be OK.  Later that evening we all went to the Thursday evening Curry Club to enjoy the company of our friends from the URC. I am trying to keep doing those things I would normally do as far as possible including cycling and gardening whenever possible.