I have always been fairly chilled out when it comes to health. I seem to have a special talent for catching almost every cold that gets passed around throughout the winter months so I'm pretty experienced at just battling on through the mucus, and until October 2013, I hadn't been to my GP for six or seven years. Minor illnesses just don't phase me - I've had enough experience of them to know that they normally clear up on their own. I also know enough about science to be aware that demanding antibiotics for an infection that is probably viral is pretty much the least helpful thing you can do for yourself/the future of medicine, and pretty much the most helpful thing you can do with regard to aiding our friendly neighbourhood bacteria in their quest to mutate into Scary Incurable Plague Monsters.
As soon as you become a chemo patient, you apparently can't afford to have this attitude. The number of times I have been warned against catching an infection is verging on the absurd, and I'd probably find it funny if my doctors didn't go to such great lengths to scare me out of my skin every time it's mentioned. Chemotherapy is designed to destroy cancer cells, but it's not quite advanced enough yet to target only cancer cells, which means it wreaks havoc on your immune system too (among other things such as the lining of your gut and, weirdly, for me, the nerves in my fingertips). My body's defences, which used to fight off coughs and sniffles like a champ, are compromised, and my chilled out response to minor ailments has been thrown out the window. Please welcome to the stage Abi in her new role as Hypochondriac Drama Queen.
The first manifestation of this newfound hypochondria was a few weeks ago, a couple of days before I had plans to visit Durham (I was in danger of going entirely doolally if I didn't go somewhere that wasn't my house or the hospital as soon as humanly possible). Now, I'm going to need you to bear with me for this. We may be entering into the perilous realm of Too Much Information. One thing you have to understand is that once you get into a medical situation which affects pretty much your entire body, any squeamishness you may have had discussing your bodily functions quickly evaporates. I am asked on a regular basis how my bowel movements are, and even if they weren't perfectly normal (which they are, for the record), I don't feel I'd have much difficulty describing in exactly what way they were 'not normal'. I now understand how pregnant women are able to be so bloody open. It's just anatomy. Get over yourselves.
So it was the Monday after Wednesday chemo and I was reaching the end of the super-fatigued spell that always follows my chemo sessions. I was starting to feel a little more normal with regard to chemo side effects (aside from the sore prickly mouth and inexplicably voracious appetite) - but I was also feeling the creeping beginnings of symptoms of something like cystitis. Cystitis is inflammation of the bladder or urinary tract, and it is usually caused by a bacterial infection. Basically, it makes you need to pee all the time, and sometimes makes peeing kind of painful. If you're savvy to the ways of drinking ALL THE WATER, consuming a lot of cranberry juice, and (apparently, though please don't quote me; it's all reported wisdom) a supplement called D-Mannose, a healthy immune system tends to be able to get rid of the infection by itself, without ever needing to go near a pharmacy. Unfortunately, my immune system at the time could not exactly be described as 'healthy'.
In all honesty, the symptoms I was experiencing were pretty mild, but they were enough to send me into a Worry Spiral of Doom. I made the mistake of googling something like 'chemo UTI', which provided me with a handy and exhaustive list of worst-case scenarios which left me all but convinced that if I didn't get my hands on some antibiotics as a matter of urgency, I'd be hooked up to a drip for a week with a complicated and totally unnecessary kidney infection. I got myself worked up enough that I called the Christie Hotline for some advice, which was a big deal when you consider that talking on the phone still makes me so nervous that I often forget how to form sentences. The Christie is the name of the hospital where I am being treated, and the hotline is in place for all the stupid questions a patient may have between visits. Despite the fact that I was using the number for its exact intended purpose, I still felt like the most colossal drama queen who was making a fuss over nothing.
Long story short, the hotline people told me to see my GP, who told me to pee in a pot and then dipped a little strip of paper in said pee. After a couple of minutes during which he flapped the bit of paper about waiting for the results to develop, I was informed that I probably didn't have an infection after all, I could go to Durham as planned, and he'd give me a ring if after a bit more lab testing of my pee, it did indeed transpire that I had an infection. Turns out I was fine, and the symptoms were likely just chemo side effects, much like my sore mouth. As much as this was a relief, it did nothing to banish my sense of being a fusspot, worrypants, and utter hypochondriac.
A second episode occurred just over a week ago, where a sore throat led to a late-night visit to A&E on the advice of first the Christie, and then the out-of-hours GP. The attitude of the nurse I saw ('What did they send you here for? We're not oncologists!') did nothing to help my self-consciousness of the mildness of my concerns, but I was just following orders! I finally managed to explain myself well enough to get a blood test, the results of which revealed that my immune system had recovered enough for me to cope with a cold anyway. The fact that this encounter took place in A&E only managed to make me feel even MORE like I was wasting everybody's time - especially at this time of year, when we are made painfully aware of the the overloading of emergency departments because people think they're dying from a cold (which, come to think of it, for me and my limited supply of white blood cells, could actually be the case).
As awkward as these experiences have made me feel, the doctrine of INFECTION=BAD has been so thoroughly drummed into my skull that I feel I am destined to continue having them until my treatment is over. I hope that eventually, I will be able to re-adopt my old attitude of taking some ibuprofen and waiting for it to go away, but until then I will have to make a grudging peace with the hypochondriac that has taken root in me, and simply do my best to ignore the voices in my head that insist I'm just being a drama queen. In the meantime, please bear with me as I flap about and convince myself I'm dying at every small sign of malaise. Who knows, next time, I might be right...
