On the right trache...

Dave Whaley: fighting back

The Chron’s managing editor continues the story of his battle with throat cancer

I HAVE always maintained along this cancer journey that I have been lucky.

Lucky that the discovery of the tumour on my vocal cord was early and treatable (I will forever be in the debt of my wife Wendy and sister Chris for making me go to the GP with a croaky voice).

And fortunate that Professor Jarrod Homer and his team saw my case as suitable for their special attention when a stark choice - voice or eating - seemed likely.

Now post-op and following a few days on the high dependancy unit, I find the head and neck speciality is moving to a new home in a short-stay ward - and the first tracheostomy patient is none other than, well, me.

Disappointingly, there was no red ribbon to cut and as I parked up in Bay 13 I was told I was about to become a guinea pig.

Over the next few nights Barbara Farrimond, the head and neck oncology lead nurse, brought the senior nurses on the ward up to speed with the processes and protocols concerning my type of surgery.

Payback for me, as I lay there and Barbara went through her training, was that any of the practical tips I managed to pick up I could do for myself.

Within minutes I was changing my own inner tube, within hours was administering my own medications through my feeding tube and would even be able to control my overnight drip feed unit. Surprised myself there...

It was when I got up in the night to stretch my legs that I got the chance to talk to Barbara.

The formidable woman with the heart of a pussycat was empowering. She talked about how some patients’ lives are taken over by the “trache”, while others are able to push on with little or no impact. I want to be one of the latter.

So whether I was a guinea pig, porcupine — they do stick a lot of needles in you in these places — or just a cheeky monkey, I was on the way.

Cheeky? Well I couldn’t resist, when registrar Alexandra Roper was bedside after an “episode”, telling her I’d be fine once I had a cool glass of water through my feeding tube. I left a very, very long pause between the words water and through and Alex’s face got redder at the thought of a “nil by mouth” patient having a normal drink. But I winked as I completed the sentence... and she departed, no doubt thinking of new places to stick needles as she went!

And so the days tick by. I finally lost the temporary tracheostomy on day 11, but I have good and bad days as “secretion management” - feeding; coughing and sickness - become issues not helped by sleep deprivation on a monumental scale. So much so that I have been prescribed anti-depressants.

If anyone had told me I would need these I would have laughed - but if this lot tell me to jump I merely ask “how high”.

Being on the neat four-bed sub ward does have one big bonus — visitors.

A healthy mix of family, friends and work are a real pick-me-up. I had to laugh when, on consecutive afternoons, I was visited by Steve Kilroy (Bae Systems, chair of Oldham Business Awards, ambassador, lifelong friend and all round good ’un) and Martyn Torr (the legend that is Torry) and both had to be reminded they didn’t have to whisper.

And an old footballing friend from my 15 years in Birmingham timed his visit rather badly — he didn’t call especially, he was killing time for a meeting in Warrington (well that’s what he said).

Just before he arrived I was sick and the nurses inflated the trache balloon for safety reasons (meaning I couldn’t talk) and gave me an anti-sickness drug that made me really light-headed.

I was getting frustrated with my visitor as he failed to respond to my writing. It was only afterwards that I realised what I was writing was gibberish. Thankfully he returned last weekend with three other ex-players from that half-decent team — the older we got the better we were — and we laughed over the scribblings.

One of the quartet, Pete, is 50 this year and they brought an invite to his birthday weekend at the Paddy Power meeting at Cheltenham racecourse in November.

Wonder if there will be a Keep Smiling-linked winner running that weekend?

KEEP SMILING