Not much of a week off

It's Saturday morning and Ciara has spent another night in hospital on what was meant to be a week off between chemo sessions.

Ciara's aunty came down yesterday evening and Ciara had been looking forward to seeing her all day. Just before we settled down to an evening of wedding planning (Ciara's aunt), I took Ciara's temp. It was at 38.1 in one ear and 37.5 in the other. As she's neutropenic at the moment, i.e., no immunity, all temperature rises have to be checked out. We took her temp again a few minutes later and it was back to 36.8 or something. Fine in other words but we thought we should still get her checked out.

It took me a while to get through to anyone at either Our Lady's or Portlaoise because of nurses industrial action. They've been working to rule for the past three weeks which included not answering phones. Great timing for us! We wanted to tell Portlaoise we were coming in for her to be checked out, hopefully to come straight back home.

When at Portlaoise, the nurse took her temperature every 30 minutes and it came out normal each time. The doctor on duty obviously didn't have any oncology experience and called St John's ward at Our Lady's. She couldn't get hold of the on call Oncologist because of the industrial action and came back to us saying she'll keep her in just to be on the safe side! I wasn't very impressed with this, she should be at home if she's OK, so I got her to try to speak to an Oncologist again.

I ended up speaking to the Oncologist myself. St John's had decided to put her on antibiotics straight away. I was a bit happier with this as something was actually happening rather than Ciara being here just to be observed. We can observe her at home!

Treatment in Portlaoise is a bit different from St John' ward. St John's is a dedicated oncology war and they can be quite blasé about procedures. However at Portlaoise they don't have that experience and so everything is literally done by the book: they have a big 'Oncology Manual'. Getting bloods from Ciara's freddie took ages as one of the lumens (legs of the freddie) was blocked. She needed blood taken from a vein and the doctor on duty was going to leave the line in after the test, something Ciara would have hated. Luckily the nurse had a lot more oncology experience and stepped in to intervene, but the doctor was insistent. The nurse had to take the doctor out of the room to 'explain' why Ciara was not have a line left in her hand (not done with oncology patients:risk of infection). After a few minutes the doctor came back in to pick up the 'manual' to check!. It looked like the nurse was right though, no line was left in. I can't fault the nurses at Portlaoise, they seem to have a lot more oncology experience than the doctors that's for sure. Things just go to pot when non-onc doctors get involved.

After the bloods were taken it was 1am before she got to bed. She was woken up again at about 4am to have a platelet transfusion but otherwise had a peaceful night sleep. Her temperature hasn't peaked either and I'm thinking we've wasted a very valuable weekend because of a duff temperature reading.

This morning she was very upset and just wanted to go "home...home...home!!". I'm hoping that when Portlaoise speak to Ciara's consultant later today, she'll send Ciara home. Failing that Ciara will be here again for another night before going straight back up to St John's for Chemo #4. Poor love. She's going to be mortified when she finds out, we were going to be getting her ball pool out today for the first time this year and Ciara was planning on torturing the cat with the hose pipe. Maybe next time she'll have a few real days off.