So we ended up in a London hospital. And Ann was in hospital in London for two or three days and the Professor changed the stent, and I met him after he had carried out the surgery and he was like a cat with two tails, he was so delighted he had managed to do it. That reduced a lot of the problems but unfortunately it wasn’t long-lasting.
About a month or so later Ann started to get severe abdominal pain, and poor body temperature, dizziness, headaches, all manner of other problems and she’d then again stopped, stopped working, she couldn’t, she couldn’t cope any more on bits and pieces like that. We then through sort of October went through a, a whole series of ultra scans, x-rays, blood tests, seen by various people. They talked in terms that she may have also now contracted pancreatitis, that ultimately proved not to be the case but it was just something else that was sort of added to it.
Over the next, next month or so Ann was then put on to morphine and she started to have to have more and more morphine to kill the pain, and that really was the only medication she was then on. The Ellenor nurses used to come in from time to time, on a, on a couple of occasions when Ann didn’t seem to be too well at all they even stayed the night, and that’s an enormous support that we got from them, very good indeed.
As we, as we moved into November unfortunately Ann deteriorated. If we were, we weren’t really able to go out anywhere, I did manage to take her shopping a few times, but she was very short of breath and it was a, it was an enormous effort. And eventually we even, even accepted that she would have to be in a wheelchair, so we, she had a wheelchair and we went to, we went shopping, and that did help. And I think it’s important that you’ve got to still maintain the relationship with the rest of the world. You can’t just sit at home and deteriorate, I think you need to see what is happening out there.
And we then, we then had a, had another problem in sort of mid-November in that Ann had severe chest pains and both arms, I phoned the local GP, and his recommendation was that we phone 999. That I did, and she was again taken to the local hospital. They diagnosed that she’d got a, probably a loss of blood from her intestine which was creating shock and all manner of other problems. The surgeons reviewed the notes, because they managed to lay their hands on them all very quickly, they filled her up with liquids, she was completely disorientated, [coughs], and eventually they tucked her up in bed, and a surgeon I hadn’t seen before came and talked to me, and he explained to me that we were very close to the end. And we agreed and he put a note on the notes, ‘no resuscitation’.
That was fine and Ann stayed in hospital that night, by eight o’clock in the morning she’s up and about again. So [laughs] we just get completely lost as to what’s happening and what’s not happening. The Ellenor nurses, I don’t know how they did it, but they turned up at about eight o’clock on the morning, so they had got a, they had obviously got a system of knowing who the, who had been admitted overnight. They organised bits and pieces and within, oh, twenty-four hours of having been taken into hospital by ambulance and the surgeon telling me that we wouldn’t go through resuscitation Ann’s back home again, which is quite a shock, because I had both the, both the children with me by then, they had both travelled to get, to get to us. And although Ann wasn’t feeling very well, she was still a little bit disorientated, she was back home and, and feeling better, I think the morphine had kicked in by then and, you know, that was it. The local GP called in and everything seemed to be going well and that was the end of November.