The cat was possibly right in her diagnosis yesterday evening because this morning my seroma well, burst.
*Spoiler Alert – slightly unpleasant content to follow*
A seroma, for those who have not had one, which will hopefully be most of you, is a swelling of lymphatic fluid that builds up under certain surgical incisions. I mentioned this a couple of days ago when I had to go back to QA to get the scar under my arm checked out. They decided it wasn’t infected but I’d had an allergic reaction to something. (Er, that would be wheat, let’s check those allergy bands in future eh medical professionals?)
It’s got bigger and tighter and generally more uncomfortable all week, until this morning, at the size of a golf ball, it started leaking. And leaking. And leaking some more. There was a lot of fluid in there as it turns out. I rang the Breast Care Clinic at QA but as it’s Friday there’s no one in. They don’t work Fridays. What, because no one ever gets ill on a Friday? If the Wanking Tories do actually bring in 24/7 NHS services it’ll be possibly the only decent thing they do in their entire time in office.
The receptionist suggested my GP. My GP is lovely, I really like her. And let’s not forget it was her who found the tumour in the first place, so she’s kind of like my hero at the moment. But her receptionists are not lovely. Her receptionists were trained by an ex-teacher of the Hitler Youth, who snuck out of Germany after the war and set up a secret programme for doctor’s surgery receptionists where they are trained to be compassionless and monotonous. You know it’s pointless when you ask a rational question and you get a repeated reply starting with ‘Our protocol says…’ Our protocol says if you need to see a doctor you need to phone before half ten in the morning (because it goes without saying you will definitely not have any problems after that time) and go on the triage list. As it is after half ten, you can either wait til Monday, and phone before half ten, or go to the Walk In at St Mary’s.
Okey dokey thanks.
So I did that, through the snow, up to St Mary’s. And you can’t walk in the back way anymore because they’ve closed it off, so all the way around. I was seen immediately too, there only being one other person in the waiting room – a geeky student with an elbow/snowball/snowfall type injury. And the nurse was lovely, and extremely apologetic that she couldn’t even look at my wound because I’m under consultant care, so it has to be seen either at QA or by my GP. I explained that particular situation to her, and she went off to ring my doctor’s surgery. Luckily she has top trumps over the receptionist and was able to order her to give me an appointment this afternoon with a specialist dressing nurse, and with a doctor on hand to rule out possible infection and prescribe the correct antibiotics if required.
She then ordered me a taxi home and put it on the NHS account, on account of me having trudged up there for no reason, and advised me to stop going wandering about for long walks like that for at least another week. So I’m going to watch some more Breaking Bad while my armpit slowly leaks out lymphatic fluid that my body doesn’t want to process because it’s a bit lost without some of its lymph nodes, and then I’m going to go to the doctor’s and make them drain the rest of the fluid out, and then I’m going to come home and have a nice big glass of wine because I suspect I may need to replace some bodily fluids, and I haven’t had a drink for 2 weeks. And wine is healthy because it’s made from grapes. So vitamins and that.