A new enemy

All the images I have seen of Poseidon suggest that he was very big and hairy. The images also suggest you should watch out for his trident, which is an obvious hazard, especially if he starts losing his cool.

However, there are other hairy mischief makers which live with him in water (as well as soil and inside our own bodies) which are very small indeed, don't need tridents to cause trouble, and so are easily overlooked. Let me introduce you to pseudomas aeroginosa. They generally co-exist fairly peacefully with us, kept under control by our immune systems, until one day they discover that our immune system is lying on its back in a stupor. Then they go rogue and try to colonise parts of our bodies.

I felt fine immediately after my first session of the new chemo treatment, but it had of course compromised my immune system. In fact it had knocked it flat. A few days later I was feeling less fine and an infection marker had gone up. After just a week I called the Marsden hotline and they told me to get in to A&E at a big hospital because I needed to be given some strong anitbiotics which could only be delivered intravenously. 'Go now' they said, firmly. By the late afternoon I was back in St Mary's in Paddington and within a few hours was up in the Intensive Care Unit again.

Pseudomonas aeruginosa was havng a field day. After going on a wild rampage like a bunch of Hell's Angels, the gang had settled in my right lung and was taking over the town. A bit of googling revealed the less than comforting news that it is one of the bacteria which has developed the greatest resistance to antibiotics.

Comfort finally came from a portly senior registrar with a delightful Irish accent, who wandered in one evening to say 'Hi'. He had no notes and clasped his hands behind his back with an air of confident authority. 'Ah yes,', he said, 'we're familiar with these crafty little buggers and their sneaky ways. But they're not going to like what we're chucking at them one bit.' I think 'crafty little buggers' captures their essence better than any fancy Latin name.

He was right. Sneaky though they were, a few days later they were gone, and a day or two later I was back home.

It leaves the question of the chemo. I got the feeling that in their desire to hit the resurgent lymphoma as hard as they could, the team had been a bit over-zealous and had knocked my immune system on its back. The chemo was clobbering my red blood cells as well, leaving me anaemic, feeling very tired and weak. So we had a chat and decided to do a PET scan to see what was happening inside, reduce the dosage of the drugs in the next session and give me a transfusion in the meantime to boost my red blood cell count.

So the twists and turns continue in what is turning out to be an Odyssey indeed.