(This article by Simon Thompson was published in the New Zealand Listener in December 2022 – it is based on personal experience. Other patients names have been changed)
The vampires arrive every day about 4am. You can hear their trolley wheels rattling on the hard floor as they come into the ward. At least they check the vital signs are good before they take our blood. We know vampire is a harsh term for hard working nurses but it isn’t exactly a social hour of the day. The blood samples will dictate today’s medications and infusions. What will be the magic recipe for each of us today I wonder?
I am one of four blood cancer patients in Motutapu Ward room 3, or Red Cell 3 as we like to call it, thinking our double meaning very clever. Call us patients or inmates, it doesn’t matter, we were total strangers before we arrived but in 3 days we have formed an alliance of sorts, Jim, Steve, Gary and myself. Blood brothers if you like. This is unusual. Hospital wards are not social places and privacy, such as it can be in close confines, must be respected. Most people just want to be left alone.
My new mate Jim, lying in the next bed to mine, is soon to be a transformed man. Today his blood type is O positive, next week it will be B negative. And he will become French, well in part. He is getting new stem cells, couriered from a donor in France, and because these cells create his new blood he will inherit the blood type of his donor once the procedure is finished. Of course I can’t help but tease him about his new French connection. Will his personality change as well? Will he be a better lover now? Will he become a gourmet chef, cooking garden snails and frogs legs on the barbecue? Oh la la! He smiles for a while then tires of it and uses some local vernacular to keep me quiet.
Steve in Bed C had a pretty regular life until a few weeks ago when a testing nurse spotted a lump under his neck while doing a routine drive-through Covid test. Soon after he was diagnosed with a very rapid and quite rare form of non Hodgkins lymphoma, spent a week in ICU that he can’t remember and has plenty of battles still ahead.
Gary is a regular here, having had multiple Leukaemia treatments and is on a new pilot drug trial. He was an outpatient when he collapsed on his bedroom floor. Now he has a good sized lump on his head to keep company with the usual lymphoma lumps elsewhere. None of us need more bruises on our poked and prodded bodies.
My own Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia is a common variety, the symptoms treated with chemo and targeted drugs. It normally attacks the white cells but for some reason my red cells are plummeting.
We live with the constant beeps of our drip feeders providing blood, platelets, chemo or antibiotics. There are nagging coughs, occasional vomiting, breathing problems, medical “private” discussions on topics that we do our best not to listen to. We distract ourselves with hospital stories and gossip. This week we had a murder mystery, a sleep talker calling out regret and wishing he hadn’t done it – we hope it was his dog. There was a bathroom crasher, loud and painful and a poor elderly patient tormented by his TV randomly starting and loudly playing the cartoon network – we discovered .the patient opposite’s remote was activating his TV as well by mistake.
Life in a Haematology Ward is not much fun, we are unwilling bedfellows. But through all of this closely shared experience our humour and human spirit helps us through.
We appreciate the overworked nurses ,and medical staff. Thank you to the cleaners, the admin staff, the porters and the kitchen team. Well done to all of you, but I still hope I don’t see Red Cell 3 for a while again.
End.