A long, long, long day. We tell Rose casually this morning that oops we need another scan isn't that annoying but hey, we can have McDonalds on the way home... she's fed up to be missing Friday afternoon golden time at school and very worried that she might miss the popcorn machine being brought in. I wish so much she didn't have to come with us. Simon is coming with me - we have made a policy decision. Scans and appointments I will do alone but anything with results we will do together.
We have fallen back into our old Marsden routine as if it were yesterday. It was. The car parking, the coffee, the anaesthetic cream in daycare on all Rose's veins before the canula can go in, the playroom... we stare at the playroom walls where they are filling up with themed Christmas decorations. Is it a year since Rose and I made snowmen, red robins and decorated stockings? Am I seriously sitting here watching her enter the Marsden Christmas card competition for the second year running? 'New' parents are entering into it all with the enthusiasm of desperation that I remember so well - I am suddenly envious of them. Their children may be bald and have central lines in their chests but they are first-timers - their futures so much more full of hope than Rose's.
We go to CT and sit in a huge waiting room full of people with cancer. They all look pityingly at Rose with her bandaged arm and canula - they are mostly old. Rose sings, listens to her ipod, reads the Worst Witch and eventually we are in and going through the whole CT protocol all over again. Four scans in less than two weeks - please, please let this be conclusive.
Toni, the upbeat Australian registrar, tells us that even on rush the radiologist and a consultant need to review the CT and it will be a couple of hours. While Simon sticks and glues with Rose she shows me the results of every scan we've had in the last two weeks - we look at the plain film of her tibia (nothing) and the bone scan of her tibia (clearly something) and the heartbreaking chest x-ray with two little Trebor mints sitting in the middle of her right lung. It is inconceivable to me that something so tiny can be so unstoppable - that Rose is on a train now that all the advances in modern medicine can do nothing about. The best on offer is the same poison that didn't work the first time - and even that will only buy time not cure. Suddenly I can't wait - I need to get Rose out of this place. Toni agrees to phone us within an hour.
And finally at 7 o clock she phones - they are happy that the CT hasn't found anything in her tibia. Kathy was wrong. I resist the urge to drive down there and stab Kathy through the heart with her own letter opener for what she has put me through this week. She wrote my daughter off without it transpires even having looked at the bone scan herself. Toni quickly points out to cut me off that Rose still has secondary lung metastases but that she may now be a candidate for thoracic surgery. Her case will go into the video conference with the Brompton on Monday night. She tells me to have a really great weekend. I tell her to fuck off. In my head.
