Bill Heine, writer, broadcaster, and the man behind Headington’s iconic Shark House on his battle with leukaemia

The story so far...I have leukaemia and have been given nine to 15 months to live, but at the last minute I was enrolled in a medical trial testing a new drug to treat this illness...

MONDAY, October 9, 2017: I woke up with a sense of heavenly bliss and relief that the first two cycles of my cancer treatment were over.

All I had to do today was have a blood test at 10am.

How difficult can that be? I weighed up my options. This should take 10 minutes to draw the nine vials of blood and an extra one for the miracle machine at the Churchill Hospital that can give you a detailed profile of yourself in five minutes to alert staff if you need a blood transfusion tomorrow, which they had already booked, just in case. All very efficient!

That’s the drill: 15 minutes, in and out, so I could park my car in the ‘drop-off-and-run’ short-stay, 20-minute bay just outside the entrance to my treatment centre; but I had a premonition and didn’t.

Twenty minutes turned into two hours.

I’m petrified of needles. When the trainee nurse put the cannula in my left arm I looked away at the far end of the treatment hall to study the black, green and red headdress worn by the white North Oxford woman who gave off signals saying ‘I’m going to beat this’.

The trainee nurse said I had “great veins”. That chat-up line conjured an image of Dracula’s daughter, as she tightened the tourniquet and spent the next 45 minutes poking around trying to coax a few drops of blood from my veins.

Little things mean a lot – the beads of sweat on her face, the flush of red blotches on her neck and, after half an hour, the unmistakable trembling of her thumb and forefinger.

She abandoned the left arm half an hour later and shifted the onslaught to my right which already had so many needle marks it looked like the arm of a heroin addict.

She found another big vein and delved in with the help of a support nurse; 45 minutes later they were in worse shape than I was, and I wanted to give them some encouragement. So instead of saying ‘have you ever had this much trouble with anyone else?’, I asked if they had ‘helped any other patient who was as difficult as I was’. Both nurses were well past the state where irony made any difference and unselfconsciously shook their heads vigorously. They didn’t look up or smile and just said ‘no’.

Shortly they gave up and asked the head nurse to draw my blood, which she did in two minutes. But this vein catcher had an unexpected twist in her sobriety.

I discovered this when I enquired of the head nurse if she had had any unpleasant childhood memory of needles, like I had when my whole school was getting vaccinated against polio and the boy in front of me in the queue turned brilliant green white and collapsed completely during the experience. He hit the gym floor with a thud that resonated around the room.

I had a front row seat and I could see exactly what happened. When the nurse pulled the syringe out of this 14-year-old boy’s upper arm, the needle was bent at a 45-degree angle. With the enthusiasm, abandonment and showmanship of a novice cricket bowler, the American nurse had hit the bone. I was supposed to be next, but they weren’t able to catch me.

Fortunately I had this conversation after the head nurse had drawn my blood. This story obviously hit a nerve with her. She froze and kept saying OMG…OMG…OMG: and then her story came tumbling out: “I was seven years old when my school also had a mass vaccination programme. I too ran away but the nurse snagged me by the arm and dragged me back. I’ll never forget it. I guess I was traumatised.”

That’s when I discovered the head nurse was not only a devout Catholic who could not bring herself to say the word ‘God’ in public and in anger, hence the OMG…OMG. She was fiendishly afraid of needles herself, and she also had a huge shopping list of other items fraught with fear.

In the run-up to Halloween the top prize on her list went to ghosts and haunted houses. I know a few Oxfordshire villages where locals tell stories of the supernatural, but this woman lived through the tales and bought into them. Yes, ghosts were real and houses were haunted.

She would never wear anything red to a funeral because that would show joy and happiness at the death. And you must not let your tears fall on the casket because that would unleash evil spirits

What gives the carer the courage to dig deep into these very private areas? The relationship between two people in this intimate act of caring during this dance macabre when life unfolds and finishes is unexpected, quirky and strangely direct.

Great! If you re going to go to hell in a handcart, it’s probably better to have someone at the helm who not only shares your fears and phobias but who has travelled this bumpy road before and knows some of the potholes.

And I’ll have a few things to say about pot in the future…