The lesson I took from my brother's Hodgkin Lymphoma treatment was that the quality of your local A&E/Emergency Room matters a lot. It's easy to get focused on the cancer treatment (and that is of course extremely important). But in the UK, at least, if you become seriously ill at home during your treatment you will end up in the Accident and Emergency department, not the cancer ward.

Treatment for cancers such as lymphoma unavoidably result in the immune system being basically destroyed... so patients are, at times, unbelievably vulnerable. My brother ended up in A&E several times. Sometimes it was a false alarm - just nasty but normal side-effects from the treatment. But, several times, he had caught an infection that required IV antibiotics to resolve. He ended up on PipTaz several times and Vancomycin at least once.

You would think an immunocompromised cancer patient would go to the front of the line. But this was absolutely not his experience. Even though his wife repeatedly told anybody who would listen about his situation, he was nevertheless subject to huge delays in diagnosis on multiple occasions.

And - this is the point of my post - delay in treatment for an infection on one occasion resulted in sepsis that was only diagnosed when his wife eventually persuaded a doctor from the cancer ward to come down and look at him herself.

Absent his wife's borderline aggressive/hysterical advocacy for him he would be dead.

My takeaway was that the 'best' situation, therefore, is one where your cancer hospital is a genuine specialist centre AND your local emergency department is highly rated and sees a lot of cancer patients and so knows what to look for. If the latter is not the case, you will need an extremely effective and tenacious advocate to fight on your behalf.