I was disappointed to have been rejected for the clinical trial because I saw conventional treatment, chemotherapy followed by a standard dose of radiation, as having the greater danger of reducing me to the status of a witless vegetable. For me, the key point about the clinical trial was that it would have involved less radiation.
        However.
        Conventional treatment, with chemotherapy as the first step, was better than nothing, and, by the time chemotherapy had finally been organized, I was ready to start.
        I had originally flown to New Zealand with my wife and baby daughter for what was intended to be a short Christmas holiday, with the original plan being to return to Japan on December 28th. However, my health broke down, and my wife elected to stay with me in New Zealand until Monday January 17th, the day of my brain biopsy operation, at which point she returned to Japan with our daughter to see to the vital matter of applying for daycare starting in April 2005.
        Later, my wife returned to New Zealand, arriving on February 9th and returning to Japan on March 11th, meaning she was on hand for the start of my chemotherapy treatment. This was a major plus as she could see that I was being properly looked after. She was very impressed by the care I was receiving at Auckland Hospital, and, in particular, by the seamless team work, the natural and efficient cooperation of the various people involved with the management of my case.
        It was very nice for me to have her on hand during this period, particularly since she was able to bring me Chinese takeaways while I was marooned in my hospital bed. The downside was that my energy levels were pretty low and there were limits to the extent to which I could handle the stress of interacting with my baby daughter.
        The date on which I finally got admitted for the first of my six chemotherapy cycles at Auckland Hospital was Wednesday February 16th. The first cycle ultimately lasted for seven days, so I was not discharged until Tuesday 22nd. Cycles two through six took five days each, and I was also twice admitted on one day only to be discharged prematurely on the next day, no chemo having been administered, because of blood count problems.
        My first chemotherapy cycle ended up taking place in the hematology department rather than the oncology department. To cut oncology waiting lists, some of the resources of the hematology department were used for treating cancer patients, and I ended up receiving all my chemotherapy in the hematology department, where I was well looked after by people who always seemed to know what they were doing.
        During each chemo cycle, I stayed in one of a number of four-bedded wards. These were fairly big with plenty of room round each bed. Each ward had one separate room holding a toilet and wash basin, and a second separate room holding a shower room. The rooms were extremely white, with views out to interior courtyards, the walls of which were also white. There were the usual hospital curtains which could be used to screen off beds, and I found these unobjectionable, though my mother decided she really did not like them.
        My bed was a standard hospital bed, fully adjustable, with a personal light, a nurse call button and, on the wall, just in case, a range of emergency tubes for suctioning and so forth. I had my own locker which contained a brown paper bag where I could dispose of apple cores and other trash, and there was usually at least one chair beside the bed. When visitors came, it was always possible to find enough spare chairs in the ward to seat them all.
        For the first chemo cycle, and for subsequent cycles, I routinely brought two bags to hospital, these containing large print library books (I was having difficulty reading), notebooks, pens, biscuits, fruit, tea bags, thongs, spare underpants, spare T-shirts, toiletries and my own water bottle (safer than a water jug, since I was perfectly capable of accidentally overturning a water jug). Each time, I just parked the bags alongside the wall and put onto or into my hospital locker just the bare minimum of stuff.
        The system could have provided me with hospital pajamas, but I chose to wear underpants, short trousers, a T-shirt and, over the T-shirt, an American-made cotton sweatshirt to give me just that extra bit of warmth that I needed in the air-conditioned hospital. I stayed dressed like that twenty-four hours a day, usually lying on the bed with a sheet over me.
        If I had IV fluids running, and on each admission I ended up having IV fluids running for about five days at a stretch, then if I wanted a shower I could ask for the line to be disconnected from the lure, the lure being the short piece of tubing running into the cannula sitting in the vein.
        I have to confess that I got extremely lazy about having showers, and only had between one and two during each hospital admission.
        The cannulas generally ended up going in the back of my right forearm or the back of my right hand. During the first chemo cycle I had two cannulas implanted, one being used exclusively for a sodium bicarbonate solution, but, on subsequent admissions, I only ever had one cannula in at a time, this cannula being connected to a short piece of tubing which had two ports so two separate IV lines could be hooked up to it.
        I found it perfectly possible to write with my right hand while hooked up to an IV, and the main problem that the IV lines represented to me was that of imprisonment, pure and simple: you're physically tethered to the drip stand, and you're not going anywhere unless the drip stand goes with you.
        My overall impression of the hospital ward, at first glance and subsequently, was one of spaciousness. It was built of a very generous standard. The one thing other patients tended to complain about was the view, and more than one remarked that it was a pity that women who were in to deliver children, and who would typically only be spending a few days in hospital, had the great views from the windows which overlooked the Waitemata Harbor and the Hauraki Gulf.
        Outside the ward, a corridor gave access to the nurses' station, where there was one phone marked "patient's phone", the existence of which I didn't discover until about the third chemo cycle, simply because I never asked "Can I make a phone call?" (Instead, initially I bought a phone card and used a public phone inside the building near the entrance to the hematology department.)
        The corridor also gave access to the "whanau room" (family room), which doubled as a TV room, offering one TV (with no remote) giving access to all the free-to-air channels. And also gave access to the kitchen, used by both staff and patients -- a couple of refrigerators, a microwave oven, an unlimited supply of boiling water available from a special boiling water tap, and a supply of styrofoam cups, paper cups, tea bags, coffee, Milo and plastic sticks of the kind used to stir drinks.
        If you were game enough to go on an expedition, pushing your unwieldy and not entirely stable computerized drip stand with you (the battery keeping the thing running while you were away from the mains power supply) then you could go down an elevator and along to the shopping area, where there were coffee bars, a bookshop, a pharmacy and a couple of other retail outlets, but this was such a hassle that I only did it two or three times in the course of my six chemo cycles.
        Monday to Friday, a Red Cross trolley visited the ward in the morning, selling a whole range of things, everything from chocolate bars to the daily newspaper. There was also a vending machine near the hematology ward, a machine which sold an amusingly unhealthy range of snack foods, things heavy on sugar or salt.
        In the hematology ward, there was no "you must sleep now" curfew and you could sit up reading and writing all night if you wanted to. Sometimes, when a nurse wanted to check something or administer something in the small hours of the morning, she would find me in the TV room, where I would have plugged my computerized drip stand into a wall socket.
        The only two hospital rules of which I was consciously aware were "No smoking" and "No drinking", neither of which applied to me. On arrival at the hospital, I would sometimes see a miserable congregation of smokers, few in number, braving the elements near the sidewalk in a location which was physically off the hospital premises, and so immune to the "no smoking" rule.
        The "no smoking" rule was identical for patients, visitors and staff. Want to smoke? Then leave the hospital grounds.
        The hospital I used to visit in Japan had a rigid "cellphones off" rule, but Auckland Hospital appeared to have no rules on cellphones, and, in practice, patients felt free to use them at any time of day or night, one thing that certainly would have changed if I'd ruled the world.
        So much for the physical conditions of my hospital admissions.