And up since 3am. As I just typed in an e-mail, if the doctor today doesn’t give me something akin to elephant tranquillisers, I may pin him up against the wall with a knife to his throat. Well, perhaps not the knife, but you get the point – pun intended. I am completely over the ‘I will not take sleeping pills’ phase and now fully in the ‘I will kill you if you do not give me the RIGHT FUCKING sleeping pills’ phase.

But – today is the half way through chemo day. Well, actually it marks 2 months of chemo as I began on 15th September – but as I am typing I am completely confused since it should be 12 weeks. 4 sessions of EC (the type of) chemo every 3 weeks…which makes 12 weeks…but its only 2 months. And there you have it…welcome to my world….I spend waaaayyyy too much time on things like this – getting completely confused over something relatively simple. In 3 weeks time I will have completed this round, technically speaking, having just consulted my calendar, gone through a panic that actually this wasn’t my 4th round but my 3rd and I’d got it wrong, then double and triple checking and realising the 12 weeks would be the full round – i.e. 3 weeks after this treatment. THEN I go into phase 2 of the weekly chemo – well, actually, I will go into it in 4 weeks time as I will inform my doc today. Phew. Did I mention I am a senior manager who’s job it is to make major decisions on a daily basis? Count yourselves lucky you don’t have to work with me :-).

I made an appointment, well, to be precise I am in the process of trying to make an appointment with the Marsden resident shrink. And contemplating if I should go in wearing my teddy bear onesie…although we thought if I did I may go out wearing a lovely white jacket with very long sleeves over the onesie. If I do manage to actually see him, the idea is that I will have a professional who understands cancer in ‘control’ of any meds like sleeping pills, that I will be taking – some sort of a safeguard. Great idea in theory. The only flaw is that the Marsden private unit seem to be hell bent on you not actually seeing doctors of any description – yesterday mornings attempt was met with me still waiting today for the call back after 10 minutes as I was promised. I think its a conspiracy  – when running an emergency, I used to have ‘stand up’ meetings every morning with the team – 10 minutes, all standing up to go through key actions for the day. I think they do the same at the Marsden, but the key action is ‘how do we make sure today that no patient gets to see a doctor’ and they then develop the strategy for how best to achieve that in the coming day.