Hello this is Mags again (Poodles) Kate's neice. I visited her in hospital sunday till monday and when she was having an hour or so with no talkin or exhausting herself she managed to type up a blog for you all. Feel privellged!!!!

So here from Poodle is a blog...

As many as you know, I’ve had a very poorly couple of weeks. I started this with a simple chest infection caused by one of the usual suspects – the strep one this time and came into hospital on Sunday 1st March. My Ct results were awful as I’ve written previously. I came out of hospital on Tuesday 10th after having the heart echo eventually having been forgotten about the day before with the plan being to start vineralbine on Thursday 12th.
I had a sore throat that evening which was annoying but didn’t think much of it. However, when I woke up on the Wednesday, I felt awful. I really felt like I had flu and my breathing was terrible. I felt I was drowning and felt so poorly that the only way I could get out of the house was by ambulance. We had phoned the chemo helpline and was told by the doctor I needed to be in hospital since I sounded so poorly. We packed first as I knew an ambulance would come quickly once called. I was right – the paramedics came within about 5 mins and with them giving me 60% oxygen, it steadied me a bit and brought my oxygen saturations up and calmed my headache and feeling sick.
The ambulance journey was horrible. They are so bumpy and I developed a lot of right kidney pain on the way to hospital that I was crying with pain. When we got to the casualty department, it was a bit of a race between us and 2 other crews who would get in through the doors first. I never watch ‘casualty’ on telly – do they have scenes like that on it?? I lost the race and came in last!!! I must have waited about 20 minutes for a cubicle and in all this time the pain was building up in my right kidney area. Eventually, I got to the front of the queue and was sent through to ‘major’ trauma where I had some oromorph. I got seen quite quickly by a doctor who put in a venflon – the tube thing they stick in your arm for giving fluids through. I was quite impressed by that as my veins are awful due to having had so much chemo. I saw my junior doctor I saw on the ward and he had to take blood gases from my artery in my wrist. I’d had this done on the ward last week and it had really hurt. This time Ben was brilliant and he didn’t really hurt me at all even as though he had to do them twice as the machine played up the first time. My chest xray looked worse than last week so they started me on antibiotics through the venflon. They wouldn’t use my long line as none of them had been trained to do it so as by this stage I was feeling better, I did my own blood tests and cultures!!!
After 7 hours, I was eventually sent to the ward and back to the same bed I’d left 24 hrs earlier!!!
I felt worse on Thursday but the doctors were hopeful that I could start the chemo on Monday as last time in November I’d been like that. However, I just got worse with increasing shortness of breath and generally feeling very unwell. It then started to be quite suspicious on my 6 bedded ward. They started to strip the beds which the other 3 patients had left but left the bed linen on the beds. Then one of the nurses came up to me and said they would have to move me into a single room and into isolation as I had para – flu, type 3 which was extremely dangerous to patients with low immunity. This all seemed very odd when you consider that I’d never had this flu before and that my immunity figures were actually quite high. The 3 other women left behind were going to have to be kept in isolation in case they got this bug off me so I felt very guilty but there again, someone from this ward had given it to me!!!
I just went downhill so rapidly over the weekend that on Sunday, we were told to expect the worst so said goodbyes to many people which was horrible. However today, am now in limbo land. Still requiring 60% oxygen to get liveable concentrations in my blood but managing to clear my chest a little by coughing and huffing and puffing so have talked things over with palliative care team and hope to get into hospice as long as they will accept me due to this flu bug but they are all saying I may get over this flu bug and then see what happens if am well enough to have chemo or whether I have now met the end.
Thanks to everybody for reading this and for your support and comments on facebook, and the breast cancer forums I write in. It does help to know so many of you care about me when most of you have never even met me.
Let’s hope I do get some sort of reprieve now and can yet again rewrite their chemo history books.