Some of you have already figured out who the boyfriend is, some of you will slowly be putting two and two together. Needless to say, he also writes a blog, a much better one than mine, and those of you who trawl over both our pages will immediately realise who we are.
I’m not a great believer in coincidence really. I firmly believe that things happen for a reason, and that other events can be a catalyst, but there is no such thing as a string of coincidences. OK, one coincidence I could possibly believe, but not lots and lots of them. This I think is how a lot of you have worked out who the boyfriend is, all you have to do is look at the subject of the posts for a few days – what are the odds that we are completely separate people?
I don’t want to spell it out completely. He says that he doesn’t care who knows, but then I think he must do. People only blog anonymously if they don’t want people to know who they are. Now we have both said the same thing here, if you know who I am in real life, and I happen to mention that I have a blog, then I think it would be quite hard to find me. Equally, if you read my blog and don’t know me in real life then it would be just as hard to find out exacty who I am, I think. However, if you stumble across my blog, and know my in real life then you could easily work out who I am. The boyfriend says the same thing about his blog, which is why I’m not going to scream out who he is from the rooftops. If you can work it out then all well and good, if you can’t then enjoy the mystery.
Another coincidence happened last night. My leg started hurting so, so much. I took some basic painkillers and tried to sleep, but nothing happened. So I took some stronger painkillers, and still nothing happened. Eventually after about 2 and a half hours of being in pain I took some ven stronger painkillers and waited for them to work. They didn’t. I don’t know if this pain was all in my head, particularly as before I was diagnosed I was completely symptom free, but it was unbearable. My Mum found me crawling to the bathroom to get a glass of water at about 1am, I was in so much pain I couldn’t stand, even with crutches, and decided it might be a good idea to get me checked out. She rang the ot of hours GP team, who told her that they didn’t deal with palliative care. She tried to explain that I had only just been diagnosed and therefore it wasn’t palliative. They still told her the best option was to go to A&E at the Chelsea and Westminster.
She drove me to A&E whilst I was still in my pyjamas, I was in so much pain I couldn’t have cared who saw me. The triage nurse was lovely and told me that the wait wasn’t that long so it shouldn’t be too bad and that she couldn’t give me anymore painkillers because of what I had already taken. I only sat in the waiting room for about half anf hour before I was seen by a lovely SHO who admitted that oncology wasn’t a speciality of his, but he had completed 4 months in anaesthetics so was over-qualified when it came to pain relief. He gave me some even stronger pain relief and let me sleep in the observation ward for a couple of hours to mae sure that the pain relief was working and the pain wouldn’t come back. He then gave my Mum a prescription for 2 week’s worth of the analgesic, but only to be taken on an as needed basis, and wished me all the best.
I got home at about 5am this morning, whereupon my Dad hadn’t even realised we’d been out. The leg feels better now and I feel so stupid for making such a fuss over some pain. I have realised that things have changed now though. When I went to A&E before I was immediately flagged as the “bipolar, borderline self-harmer” no matter what I was there for. Now that label has been replaced with “cancer patient”. I guess it shows how medics rank diagnoses in terms of importance. I have been told that the Chelsea & Westminster will contact the orthopaedic oncologist to let her know what happened and I have been advised to talk to the Macmillan Nurse about it all next week. Everyone took it so seriously, and yet a part of me is still utterly convinced that it was psychosomatic and not a coincidence at all.
Ruth
Fighting The Urge 