Tuesday 13th May

No more news. Test results STILL not back. Very frustrating. I'm running about a bit yesterday and today doing messages for my mum and hospital visiting.

I'm back from visiting my dad (who was in good shape this afternoon - they have him on steroids and so he's really bucked up).

I am about to decide what to eat. I feel a cheese omelette coming on.

Email to Trish:We are being told by the hosp that the lab results from the fluid they took last week aren't back yet. We were expecting that they'd be ready today. They told my dad yesterday that he would be going to Liverpool for more tests (camera down and biopsies I think)... but when I asked the nurse said "that depends on the histology from the fluid, it isn't definite". Today I rang - nurse said, no results yet they can take 5-7 days. We got there at 3 for visiting and he told us that Mr Ty (his main man) said "we're still waiting for results....." and also that "the the growth we've seen on the CT scan might be an infection".

So now he thinks he's coming home on antibiotics soon. I am pretty sure they're just saying this to stall him. I'm getting pretty wound up now... when I phone in the morning I am going to ask to see a doc again tomorrow. Meantime he is looking pretty well (the wonders of steroids) but you can see he gets tired easily. He is eating a bit more, but still not going to the loo properly. They have taken the stomach drain out at the moment as all the fluid is gone for now.

Confused and Frustrated of Leeds (or make that Widnes)

Comment added in May:
Today was supposed to be the day they got the clinical diagnosis of dad's cancer and told him all about it (with us there). So you can imagine we'd been gearing up for it, and dreading it. So it'd been a very tense weekend and Monday. However, the method of diagnosis was to see if they could find some cancer cells in and amongst the 8 litres of fluid they drained from Dad's stomach (ascites) and as Dr Samid put it - it was like looking for needle in a haystack.

Throughout this period we were paranoid that they'd get a result back and tell dad (without us being there) and so we spent a lot of time phoning to check, and giving my mobile number to various nurses!