I convalesced at home, it was a bit sore for quite a while, spent a lot of time in bed. Wed get up and sort of strut around but each day I was getting that little bit stronger. Our house has stairs and I started off more or less crawling up the stairs after the operation and then I got to being able to walk up a couple of them. There are 13 steps, or 13 treads on the stairs and my goal was as quickly as possible to be able to walk up all 13. And then once I’d achieved that, and I achieved that quite quickly it was to be able to do it twice in a day and then three times and then to be able to go up them and come back down again and go up again. And that took a while, but we got to it. It was being aware of the fact that you were breathing.

We never, if you think consciously you never think about breath but when you’ve had the sort of operation, a complete lung taken out you actually start being aware of your breath and each breath you take. That feeling dies eventually but you know I was trying to get myself off the drugs, I felt like I’d been taking too many for too long so I was cutting them out as quickly as possible, I was taking fewer and fewer painkillers and getting the type of painkillers reduced so that eventually I was only taking paracetamol and I was then only taking that when I needed it.

Did you have stitches to remove?

Yes I had to get the stitches removed. My district nurse came in a couple of weeks after the op and removed these.

In my case the other thing that they do, there was two things they did, they did a, and I don’t remember the name of this one, but they more or less they used ultrasound on my back to gauge where the liquid was in my lungs because they were wanting to get a sample of the liquid to see if there was any cancer agents in the liquid. So they pass a very fine needle through the wall of your back using the ultrasound as a guide and extract some of the liquid for pathology and so that they can have a look at it and see what the liquid contains. So they did that on me and that was; I was lulled into a false sense of security in that in as much as it was a very pretty young doctor and she said it wouldn’t hurt and it did (laughs). So my advice would be take a local anaesthetic on that, which was offered but she said it wouldn’t hurt and I believed her (laughs) she got me.

The CT scan again it’s a totally painless operation, or not an operation it’s not an operation, procedure I should say, where you lie on a flat bed, they sort of prep you by putting a shunt into your vein. And then what they do is they project the bed that you’re lying on into this tunnel and it’s a confined area and I could see if you were claustrophobic it could be a wee bit worrisome but it shouldn’t really affect you because I mean you can see either end of the it you can see through it, you can raise your eyes back and you see the ceiling at the other end. Theres, you know theres no real need to be concerned about it, and then at one point of the procedure or when they’re taking x-rays they pump a dye into you to give you a resolution on the x-ray so that they can differentiate between the different bits of tissue that they’re seeing. The dye itself is totally harmless, I’m diabetic it had no impact on me whatsoever other than to make you feel like you’d peed yourself. You get a warm glow round about your waterworks, but I can assure you haven’t peed yourself, it’s just a feeling you know. And it’s, as I say totally painless, and really neat slides you get from it, it’s quite something when you see them after the event. It’s almost worth having it done just to get a look at the pictures you know it’s quite phenomenal the human body.

But the other thing that I had happen to me was that they decided that more or less prior to the operation, because this was towards the end when they were deciding that they were going to operate, they decided that what they really needed to know was whether the cancer has got into my lymphs. So they did a mediastinoscopy which is where they cut your throat down here, you’re under a complete anaesthetic at this point, they cut your throat about here and they peel it back and go down inside the chest wall to have a look with a camera. Not dissimilar to the bronchoscopy one but slightly bigger and brighter lights and then have a look around in the area on the outside of the lung etc to find out if there is any cancer cells present. They can also, theres a grab, a snip thing that they can take some samples for pathology and check that, whether theres any cancer agents or cancer present in the samples that they’ve taken. That in itself is not discomfort, you just end up with a, depending on how good the stitches are just a very little scar and it’s tender for a couple of days but not anything to write home about, very simple really.