There are patients and there are patients.

Did a locum shift at BOC today. All I really did was clerk-in the patients being admitted in the morning and when I'd finished, I started preparing the casenotes for the next day.
Basically, everyone on the ward was receiving chemotherapy... the flavour of the week seems to be 5FU.

Do people ever wonder what a ward full of cancer patients receiving chemotherapy- some curative, some palliative is actually like? Do people have their own preconceptions of the mood in the place?

Well, I'll tell you what it isn't... It isn't a dreary, place full of sad patients resigned to their diagnosis. Perhaps by the time a patient gets chemotherapy, he/she would have come to terms with the diagnosis and simply makes the decision to move on in life... in some cases, remaining "life" may only span weeks or months... Or perhaps he/she, when faced with the stark reality of death learns to appreciate life even more. I can only guess.

There was the jovial man in the second bed with 'radiation burns' across his face and neck, who laughed heartily at my attempt to cart away a pile of casenotes suspended between my arms and my chin... then there was the sweet man in the bed next to the nursing station who was thanking me profusely for simply clerking him in and offering to try my best to improve his symptom management. (He was suffering from such severe mucositis from his treatment that he could hardly swallow without wincing in discomfort)

It's people like these that make my vocation worthwhile. It's so easy to become cynical and disillusioned when faced with the likes of aggressive, ungrateful patients who shout profanities at you for trying to site an intravenous cannula in them so they can receive antibiotics for the cellulitis secondary to their intravenous drug use. And yet, the ones who simply seem to have drawn the short straw in life express only gratitude for every ounce of care that is delivered.

Hmm... in my next job in A&E, I can be assured of an excess of the former category of patients...