Worst Mnemonic Ever

Warming Up

8600/21519

Fucking Jeremy Clarkson stealing my thunder.

A much less settled night in which I was a big confused and tossing and turning and which led to a spectacular sleep graph. Those orange bits are every time I woke up.

Bizarrely when I went down for breakfast I felt better than I had before the chemo. Maybe it was curing me already.

Bad news when I went in for today’s third jab. They took my blood pressure and temperature and told me that the latter was too high for them to give me my jab today. It probably meant I had an infection and that meant I would have to stay in the hospital overnight for observation and get anti-biotics etc and probably have to postpone my course of chemo.

I was going to say the other day that I have never spent a night in hospital (except for the birth of my kids) but even though I didn’t write it down, I still tempted fate. And now here I am in an isolated room in AMU awaiting medical staff to sort me out. I had very few white blood cells before, but now I have almost none so am risking sepsis if I get ill. When my kids were born Catie got the bed and I had to try and sleep on a chair. At least now I have a bed. So it’s not all bad.

This is the only scary part of this procedure, though apparently about 80% of patients will get an infection during treatment. Even my mask didn’t help me. I am more worried about missing our holiday next month if things are delayed. I am very hopeful I will be fine for Edinburgh (though there can’t be a worse place to be if my immune system has not recovered).

I had to have more bloods taken and a canula put in to pump me with antibiotics and then do a wee in the tiniest little test tube that I’ve ever had to wee in. Managed to get some in though!

So it’s a bit weird not going home as I expected. A little bit scary, but it’s good that I am under observation. I feel if I had come in for my jabs thirty minutes early that my temperature would have been fine and I might have had to cope with this at home.

I will continue to try to look for the funny in all of this and though the booklet they gave me with all the potential side effects and problems was a bit worrisome, I did enjoy the handy mnemonic on Sepsis. They have used the letters of the word Sepsis to let you know when to ring 999.

Slurred Speech or confusion

Extreme shivering or muscle pain.

Passing no urine (in a day)

Severe breathlessness

It feels like you’re going to die

Skin Mottled or discoloured

Firstly the “ors” are doing a lot of work - you can’t have two things on the same line of a mnemonic especially if they are not really connected.

Secondly the bit that made me laugh was I for “If you feel you’re going to die.” Feels like that is just in there cos they couldn’t think of anything beginning with I (though “If you are confused” would have worked.

Does anyone need to be told that if you feel like you’re going to die that something is wrong. I wonder if anyone feels like they’re going to die and then says “Wait a minute before calling 999, just want to check that’s on the list.”

Also as good as the impossible to remember mnemonic is (especially if you are already confused) they then add

And/or

Chest pain

Uncontrolled bleeding

Loss of consciousness

So the mnemonic is actually SEPSISCUL

Or if you want to be strict SCEMPSISCUL

Also how are you meant to call 999 if you’ve lost consciousness?

Now I am in danger of getting sepsis all this is a bit less funny. But it’s still funny.

A brand new studio RHLSTP with Tim Minchin is now up here.