The leaflet given out about surgery is hideously stereotypical. e.g. "Avoid lifting anything heavy (including children and shopping)" - really? Is that ALL a woman might be lifting? What about my beloved bass guitar?
"Continue with gentle activities such as making drinks, light dusting and washing up, gradually increasing your level of activity." Wow. Get excited about gradually being able to do more cleaning? Can't wait!
The entire brochure has me riled. It needs to be de-gender-roled immediately. If you wouldn't write this to a man, do not write it towards women.
There's no targeted advice about exactly what muscle groups are worth working on to make your recovery easier (*provided this is possible, but it's certainly worth knowing!). For example, I can raise myself from a squat using only my thigh muscles - this is marvelous right now and means I have quite a range of safe mobility.
I believe there should be a substantial kind of ward handbook written for patients. You may not need all of it, you may not need any of it, but there should be sufficient detail about ward life, ward layout, ward routines, emergency routes, emergency procedures and so on - e.g. at one point a loud alarm went off. No-one said anything. I asked, "Should I be worried?" "Oh, it's just a fire alarm from over the other side," I was told. Splendid. It might as well have been the break-out klaxon from Wormwood Scrubs next door! There should be all sorts of stuff that may become useful to you at sometime during your stay, or may never be.
Like the fact that if you are sent to ITU, your old bed is forfeit. Your stuff is bundled up and put securely away (so securely they could find hide nor hair of my brand new Samsung wall charger unit), and you'll end up in one of either the isolation rooms or the "red team" beds on either side of the nurses' station.
The ordering of meals is heavily manual and haphazard, and I completely missed out on dinner one night. They refused to give me anything but a tiny tub of low-fat unsweetened yoghurt to replace it, when I had been told to start building myself up. Surely they could have a small stash of emergency supplies which they roll through on a daily basis, so nothing is actually wasted?
And the discharge process! It was blatantly obvious that there was a terrible bed shortage, and they need us out as soon as, so why not streamline it as much as possible by modelling the workflow and automatically triggering off everything that needs to done? If I didn't know I had to agitate to keep everything on target, I might not have. I was galvanised 3 years ago when the staff seemed to wander around all day saying to one another, "Bed 3/2 needs to be discharged," but nobody actively started doing anything. Hours later, she was presumably still lying there, waiting for someone to tell her what she needed to do, and what they would do for her.
<yep, there's probably more to come>
just home after the debulking surgery… 
Cancer does not like oxygen but loves sugar.
How do you get a whole town helping raise funds?
