The innate ability of a hospital to create depression is obviously caused by the varied collection of sick people who attend it. Upon stimulating the automatic entrance doors, the effect was always the same.

Luckily my mother was regularly with me in the first year to give me support and act as a cheering influence. The waiting room never helped the situation, as much time was spent waiting for the call to the "slaughter house", surrounded by people who were obviously ill.

This was even more pronounced at Peter MacCallum Hospital, in Melbourne, where everyone seemed so very sick. I was to go there later for radiotherapy. Thinking back, during that time, I was bald, pale and skinny, so I guess I looked fairly average too.
The city skyline flanked by the magnificent greenery of parklands greeted me, as I moved to the window of my private room at the Alfred Hospital. For two weeks in March 1976, this was
to be my home. The fifth-floor window has a northerly aspect overlooking Fawkner Park with its numerous playing fields ringed by a variety of trees.
I was in the "Leukaemia Ward", where those suffering from the various forms of the disease could be grouped together to allow constant attention by trained personnel. The room was quite large, but bland, so the view was treasured. I was now hopeful that my stay would be closer to six weeks than the twelve proposed by my doctor.
Common sense would dictate that the sooner the treatment began the better would be my chances of recovery, so the decision to start chemotherapy that very day was agreed to by all. It was only three days after my initial diagnosis. Some very toxic new drugs were to be supplemented with carefully directed radiation to my skull. This with lumbar punctures to hit cells hiding in my spinal fluid was the plan to achieve a total eradication of the offending cells. I was told the treatment was new – experimental. Others had suffered relapses from cells that had migrated to the central nervous system where the drugs could not easily penetrate. It made sense.
It worked.

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