Time for a medical update:
The good news from last week's face-to-face appointment with my haematology consultant, Dr. Elshazly, is that the blood numbers are still looking good on the four-weekly Dara instead of weekly as it used to be. So everything there is fine. We continue as it was.
We also talked about the problem of the fatigue, or tiredness, or sleepiness, or exhaustion, or whatever you call it, that is part and parcel of the package with many cancers, and certainly with myeloma. It does lead to me falling asleep too much during the daytime when I should be doing other things.
She raised the subject of the sleep apnoea and the CPAP machine. I said that while I have been aware for a while that it doesn't seem to be working quite as well as it used to, the numbers that come through from the machine aren't as good as they used to be, and that any effect on improving daytime sleepiness was never very great. It was never dramatic, but it was there in the early days and I don't think it is now at all. Something's not working right, whether it's the machine, the mask fit, something about the way I'm responding, I don't know. Quite often I wake up in the morning and find that sometime overnight I've actually taken the mask off or it's come off, come loose, or the push-fit joint that connects it up to the hose from the CPAP machine has come undone. So it's doing no good to me at all.
One way or another, I was getting close to the point of contacting the respiratory people at Broomfield anyway to ask them to review the situation with this. She independently said that that seemed like a good idea and said I should contact my GP to ask for a review. I said, "Well, wouldn't it be simpler if you just contacted my respiratory consultant and asked straight away?" She said, "No, got to be through your GP."
So I did that. I reported to the GP and the GP texted me to say he was passing me on to somebody at the new Beaulieu Health Center on the other side of Chelmsford in the big new housing estate over there.
So I was there this afternoon and saw another GP, told the whole story all over again, and she wrote a letter to the respiratory consultant requesting that they have me in for a review.
All very well, but it does seem a bit of a farce that this has involved the time and paperwork of two GPs, not to mention me driving about all over the town, all for something that could have been done by a quick internal email in Broomfield. But it's the system. I suppose we have to keep the GPs in the loop at every stage. It's the way it works. It's a small drop in the ocean of NHS waste and inefficiency, but it does seem to me to be an unnecessarily complicated way of doing things.
Anyhow, I now await a contact from Broomfield for them to call me in to have the whole thing reviewed by the people who know about these things. As to how long that will take, we wait and see.
And I think that's all for now.
N.B. This post was written with the assistance of the AI speech to text recognition app Letterly.
