Back home after five days and four nights in hospital

Paul is back home tonight.

He is happy to be done with one of the three drugs, the Cisplatin, which is the one giving the strongest nausea. The rest of the treatment till August will consist of Doxorubicin and Methotrexate.

Because of nausea, he ate next to nothing over the last two days.

Cisplatin made him also lethargic so he went straight to bed upon arrival.

Anne-Marie spent all of today with him.

Yesterday we had a fun episode when Anne-Marie arrived for the night shift and summoned the nurse to give some extra nausea medication to Paul to relieve him. As more than one hour was not enough for the nurse to get hold of the doctors to approve it, Anne-Marie (a very active nephrologist for those who don't know her) tried herself to bleep the doctor on call from the nurse desk. The nurse threatened to call Security to have her expelled from the hospital. Paul found that very entertaining. The ladies finally reached a consensus late in the evening as Paul finally got the extra medication.

Amid the excellent care Paul has generally been getting, we can't help but notice the general under-staffing of the ward, either because hospital management recognized beforehand that kids would anyway never be left alone by their parents or because parents are just present, making extra staff redundant.

But sometimes parents may have things to do and in this case, patients can be left alone for some time, often quite sick and in dire need of help. One Saturday three weeks ago (one notoriously understaffed day as patients somehow always seem to get better for the weekend), Jon's mother had to go on an errand and Jon was not feeling great. Mabel, the otherwise excellent nurse, was busy elsewhere and it is basically us, with Philippe, Corinne and Clara who took care of him as best we could.

So at least Paul is at home for the weekend. This is good for Clara too as she has been too often left to her own devices since the beginning of Paul's treatment. She is doing well at school, she appears to be doing fine generally but it is important for her and for everybody that we get back to some normalcy from time to time, around the dinner table, in front of the TV screen and the Wii, in the morning when Paul is in a playful mood ...

Have a nice weekend!