Way back in January this year, Alex developed a cough that just wouldn't go away. Two different doctors were perplexed and our new local doctor was kept busy doing the initial tests. 'It' wasn't a lot of things, but we never seemed to get the answer to what 'it' really was. Endless scripts were provided but the cough was persistent.
At the end of May, Alex flew to Amsterdam and I met him there. I'd been in Africa for the previous month. He still wasn't well but he didn't want to miss his family reunion just outside Amsterdam. We had also intended on spending a few weeks in France. We thought we'd hire a car in Amsterdam and head to Brittany and stay a couple of nights with really very good friends and then keep touring, ending up with some time in Paris and then back to Amsterdam. But the cough was stubborn and the new pains we thought were associated with it had the effect of changing our plans. We got as far as our friends' home in Brittany and just stayed there. The silver lining of this was that we had a great time with them and obviously saw them for longer than we'd initially thought.
We had two days in Hong Kong for business and arrived back in Sydney at the end of June. Visits to the local doctor continued for the next 7 weeks and finally she sent him to a specialist for an ECG. So on Friday morning 17th August he rode off for the ECG. At the end of this, the specialist had Alex admitted to the Coronary section of RPA. He does need open heart surgery due to an aortic heart murmur. This apparently is quite rare in patients so young, and so the student doctors all came to "have a listen" over the next week. His heart is very enlarged, there's some fluid and the valve doesn't really work properly.
Rather than have the surgery immediately, the doctors were trying to find out why he had such severe back pain. His 25kg weight loss would also have raised alarm bells. They found the cancer in the spine first and then more tests located the primary cancer in the lung. Metastatic adenocarcinoma of unknown origin, soft tissue mass with bony metastases - in medical speak.
This new diagnosis took precendence over the heart surgery, so Alex was moved to the Oncology ward. He had, thankfully, a private room in the Cardiac section, but once in the Oncology, had to share a room with 4 men and so it was quite a shock in many ways.
The support given by visits from family and friends, phone calls and tex messages was very much appreciated and certainly it is at times like this when you realise just how fortunate you are to have such good friends.
After 13 days in hospital, we were both thankful that Alex came home.
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