So each fresh hell makes the one before look like cancer for beginners.
Just as the radiotherapy starts to show some improvement in Rose's arm pain from nowhere comes leg pain that makes all her other pain so far look like a twinge. In her good leg comes pain from the hip to the shin which leaves her screaming, sweating, crying and begging us for help. It is the most mind-splitting agony we have ever been in to watch her and hold her and stroke her and be able to do nothing - nothing at all - except double and then triple the morphine doses. We have to close the windows and doors in the house because her screaming is so loud. When each attack subsides or the morphine finally takes the edge off it Simon and I are left shaking - and frantically creating a diversion for Felix to get him out of the house and away from her.
The Marsden speak to the community team on the island and an angel in uniform immediately drives out to the house and sticks painkilling patches all over her. We can give morphine on top and there is no upper limit. And do you know what the sick sick sick irony of this is - it's not even the bone pain that's going to kill her. Her chest tumours are still totally non-symptomatic - not a wheeze, not a cough - yet that is what will slowly occlude her lungs and end this hell. If it hadn't come back in her bones she would still be out on a sailing boat, riding her bike round the island and running on the beach and her prognosis would be just the same. In Disney movies no one dies of osteosarcoma - they fade away gently while having long intense conversations with loved ones not in a sweaty, hair-tangled mess of vomit and morphine.
Bad day.
