And then they said, Well tomorrow you’re going to have to go to another hospital, it’s a larger hospital, to have a leukapheresis, which is basically to harvest off all these extra white cells because treatment alone isn’t going to reduce it because there’s so many white cells.

So the next day we went to the larger hospital and I really thought, I think what my coping mechanism was is this is all going to be a mistake, but you just kind of go through it in a bit of a dream and you’ve just got to try and cope with it, try to cope with what’s in front of you. So we went to the larger hospital, I had the procedure, which takes about four hours, and it entails you having to lie still. You can’t move your arm because there’s a very large needle in your arm taking out the blood and then harvesting off the white cells.

So it is a pretty tedious procedure but it gives you a lot of time to kind of reflect on what’s going on and everything, and I still was kind of keeping it together quite well.

I mean at the end of my chemotherapy I was even giving myself injections in the tummy, so it was fine.

What did you need those for?

That was really to build up the blood chemistry after the chemo just to give you a boost because sometimes it takes longer than others to get your neutrophils back up to a level where you can actually come out of isolation. And my last dose of chemotherapy – my husband, who had never ever been ill before, but that same summer had felt a little bit breathless and he thought, ‘Well this is a little bit odd’, so he went to the doctor, had a check up and went through some tests and ended up having a triple bypass – so he was in one hospital, I was in another and the only way we could talk to each other was through our staff nurses. So he was having this heart operation, I was having my last lot of chemotherapy, and I felt I needed to get out earlier because he was coming home. He was bed-ridden and in a terrible state. So I asked if the hospital could do something to help me get rid of my neutropenia quicker so I could be home and look after him for a few days. And he was a terrible patient he really was. So they were the injections in the tummy just to bring you back up to normal chemistry quicker.

Is that the stuff called G-CSF?

Yes I believe it is, yes.

Anyway, I wondered what advice there was. I was very pleased that they didn’t offer any treatment. It seemed to me that the treatments were going to be much worse than the complaint. But the main advice was caution over not getting too tired. Well, that was, I was by then widowed and was living on my own, yes, I think the last of the boys had, no, he was here. And I had one son at home for a little while more. But the other caution, apart from not getting too tired, was that any infection should be dealt with with antibiotics and not allowed to let rip, and even intravenously and come straight into hospital. Well, very soon through seeing my GP, whos also been most helpful and quick to respond, we realised we could do most of this with oral antibiotics and we didn’t need to go through panic stations each time.

So have you had any kind of treatment at all for it?

Hurray. No, nothing. Nothing, except of course antibiotics, but no not intravenously except, oh, during the hip operations they have done intravenous antibiotics, certainly where the infection risk was probably at its peak. But in between times, even those wounds healed up remarkably well, they really did. And I managed to get out of hospital on the fifth or sixth day, which is not bad, especially as they were not cement jobs but sort of grow together ones on crutches.

The pain from the mouth ulcers was something I’d not experienced before, so they put me on the, oh Christ what was it? morphine. But they gave it to me in tablet form and I couldn’t get to grips with it. It was because of the – and being somebody whos fairly anti-drugs anyway – it was the highs and the lows. When it worked, fantastic. But when you came off it the pain came back with a vengeance. So I got to the point after two days, or a day or two days and said, Look. Forget the morphine. I’d prefer to be in constant pain which I can manage rather than the highs and lows.

And the nurse specialist came and said, You can’t do this. This is ridiculous. And I was introduced to the syringe driver. And if you don’t know about it and you have pain it’s worth investigating because it was a 24 hour supply of morphine. And it was great because it then made me able to manage that side of it.

And they got me kind of set off to go down into critical care and I was absolutely shattered, and there’s this amazing Irish nurse, one of them, who all are quite amazing in their own ways, and I said, Righ – when I was in and out of consciousness – I said, I can sleep now And she said, No I said, But itrdquo; I didn’t know what time it was because again in hospital time becomes completely disorientating, and I said, I want to sleep now and you can sort out what you’re going to do in the morning And she said, We don’t work like this here And I said, But I have got to go to sleep And she said, Gilly, we’re saving your life So I remember going down and my eyes were always covered because the light was so so strong. And I entered the critical care unit and this team arrived. And I remember lying really still as femur lines went in, central lines went in, intravenous lines went in. And that was my life for about three or four weeks with twenty-four seven care.

And I have many recollections. I mean I’ve written two journals of actually being and of becoming more and more ill but also realising I couldn’t leave, I couldn’t do anything. And there used to be great times when they couldn’t get all the drugs into me. It was a bit like you know when you’re over an airport and you have to fly around the airport, it was like stacking, so you had to wait. And the first lot of chemo drugs arrived and I remember lying there thinking, I wonder if I’ll be sick. This should be interesting And I wasn’t. So that was fine. But eventually after a few days they had to stop that because I was dying. And I think the other thing I realised was that they just totally cared for me. They just did everything for me.

And by this point I was on full oxygen and I could only breathe for eight seconds at a time without oxygen. And my world, my external world had gone completely and all my world was just this group of people who, the professors, the consultants would come in, the doctors, whatever. And there was such gentleness. And friends would arrive and I really wasn’t quite aware of what was going on and I seemed to sleep. And I invented this land called the land of Anaconda where I’d go off and take all my friends and we’d have wonderful times and then I’d come back. And I just came back to my yoga practice because the sound of the, intensity of the oxygen mask was such that I didn’t really sleep. So for about nine days I didn’t sleep. So I would just chant and I’d go back to all my practices and then I’d wake up.

And I always remember the rhythm of the cleaners coming in. And they were cleaning everything and then they’d leave. And then somebody else would come in. And all I can say at that point I had absolutely no fear of dying. I can remember when, the day they set everything up to say that they knew that that was it, that there was nothing else they could do. And I remember being propped up and I had cannulas and lines everywhere. And my wonderful professor came in, and the level of exhaustion is just, one is just sitting there. I’d become mute because I realised that if I stopped talking it would save more energy, because that way I wouldn’t have to talk. So we’d write. But by this point I could hardly see, so we’d have a little white writing board and I’d write, say, two or three words or something.

And I remember this day as I sat there and they’d propped me up and I remember him coming in and he said, What do you want And I remember just putting my