Yuk!

Some of you must have read the 'Daisy' books to your kids? They used to be a firm favourite with Jessica when she was younger, and we often used to read 'Yuk!' before bedtime.

As I spent Friday and Saturday night with Adam at the hospital, Alison took over parental duties last night. And oh how she must have wished she hadn't. For not only is Adam still feverish and his throat more painful than ever, on top of that he now has raging diarrhoea. We'd been told to expect it, but overnight it took hold with a vengeance. So much so that Alison informed me this morning that Adam has worked his way through all of his spare pyjamas and the race is now on to get some washed and dried before the next 'incident'.

As Daisy's Mum says to her at the end of the aforementioned book ... "Yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk!"

Whilst I might be making a joke about certain things, I'm not trying to belittle the fact that Adam feels as rotten as can be. At the same time, whilst the side-effects of the high-dose are confined to these common, transitory, ones we know they will pass and he'll be back on an upward trend again. Our biggest concern is the lack of food; Adam hasn't eaten for days now. With the benefit of hindsight we should have accepted a feeding tube, although we didn't expect him to be so sick after the Melphalan and Stem Cell infusions. The fever and mucositis we had prepared ourselves for, but not for him being sick like that. We've speculated that as well as the chemo he may have been suffering from the bug that both Alison and I had, though we'll never know for sure one way or the other. And even if we'd had an Ng tube put in, the timing would have had to be very precise as he was sick for five straight days. If he'd had a feeding tube in anytime he was sick it would have come straight back out. And that's also yuk - one end of a feeding tube hanging out of the mouth, and the other end out of the nose. Yuk, yuk, yuk, yuk. yuk!