Then at the end of August 2000 I had yet another bowel blockage and was taken into hospital as an emergency and the bowel was rested again. Each time I started gently on solid food the thing would happen again. I also had various tests to see if there was anything in my bowel or in my stomach, which I found very trying. In fact the last lot made me so ill that I thought that the sedatives or whatever they had given me must have caused that.

But I think the people at the cancer hospital then decided that things had gone far enough and that I should have a bowel bypass operation. And that was a great shock because for the last 2 years before that when Id gone for clinics and so on theyd mentioned about this operation and theyd present it, it as something extremely life-threatening which they definitely didn’t want to do. So it was a sudden shock to find that it was going to happen in a few days time. But I suppose I was in a life-threatening position anyhow at that stage so they felt that the risk was worth it.

And why do you need the transfusions now?

Well we think that it’s the tumour that’s bleeding and in fact it’s, in a way, encouraging that it isn’t happening as often as it did before, that Im still not back to that stage that I was last year before I had the Taxol treatment, cos at that, at that point, no, before I had the bypass I was having to have it every 4-5 weeks, which was pretty frequent, and now Im having it sort of 9, at 9 week intervals, something like that.

And as measured yesterday, again it, the haemoglobin wasn’t terribly low. The first time we were actually on holiday and I don’t know how I somehow got around. My husband didn’t want me to go to clinic because he didn’t want the holiday to be cancelled, but when I got back the oncologist took one look at me and he said You look awfully pale. It got down to 6.5 whereas a normal reading is 10 plus, and I sort of felt peculiar and I thought Well maybe this is how it’s going to be from now on in not realising that it was, you know, acute anaemia.

It was pleural effusions I had and they drain a certain amount and when they decide theyre empty they take the drain out. But my pleura was filling up again all the time, and even the morning I came out of hospital they took the drains out that day. But what they did is they filled my pleura this last time with tetracycline, which is a sticky antibiotic, and they said it does tend to stick the pleura together to stop it filling up. But I Don’t think it’s something they do very often because when I asked how long it would last nobody could tell me. And from that day I came out of hospital, touch wood, to this day, it’s never happened again.

What had happened was that the fluid had built up again very suddenly. It was not only collapsing the lung, which was causing the breathlessness again, but the fluid had also built up around the heart. I think it must have been the pressure of all that on the diaphragm that was stopping me from eating;

Anyway they rushed me across to another hospital to operate on the left lung and created also a pericardial window. Apparently around the heart there is a sac which had also filled with the fluid. The operation was pretty dramatic because when the surgeon cut into the sac, apparently it went off like a geyser and the heart arrested. Fortunately I’ve a strong heart so they got it going again quickly. The surgeon told me afterwards, which was a bit frightening, ‘If I hadn’t operated on you last night, you would have been dead in twenty-four hours.