Another box ticked.

Hello again.

It’s July! How did that happen? The first six months of this year have gone by in a blur for me and I see I haven’t posted anything here since May. I’m sure loads of things have happened in your life since then and a few things have happened in mine too.

Since the last post I’ve done two rounds (of six!) of this new adjuvant (also known as additional) chemotherapy, but I’ll tell you about that later.  More importantly I’ve also completed my course of Radiotherapy, also known as radiation oncology.  So that’s another box, in this long line of boxes, ticked.

As usual, Nurse Mary had me well prepared and informed as to the process and requirements etc. for my course of therapy.  I had 19 sessions to do.  They are done Monday to Friday, no weekends or bank holidays, so that meant just about 4 weeks of treatment for me.  Well that’s no so bad.  Or so I thought...

Of course there were rules that go with with therapy, you can’t use perfume, or anything that has perfume in it.  You have to wash with a special soap, funnily enough one with no soap in it, and you have to moisturize the treated area day and night to avoid burning and to help reduce the risk of damaging your skin.  This was no problem, especially as a very kind friend from Germany sent me some special cream that a friend of hers has used for the same therapy.  And luckily, having rigorously stuck to the regime, I had no damage or burning to my skin.  NM also talked about the fatigue that goes with a course of radiotherapy, nobody in the medical profession can explain why you get so tired, but you do.  I’ve been constantly tired for the last eight months so how bad can this be?  Well it was so bad that after three sessions I couldn’t drive myself to and from the hospital as I found myself falling asleep at the wheel.  So once again my very good family and friends helped out with lifts.  One good thing about this was that we got to have coffee and cake afterwards, or lunch on a few occasions.

Well you deserve a treat after lying on a bed, that you had to climb up onto, in a darkened room, surrounded by very big very scary machines, with what looked like far too young people who couldn’t possibly know what they were doing, calling out numbers and coordinates to line up your body with the virtual image they had taken of you at the start of this process, and then they leave the room leaving you alone so that the machine can rotate round you and you can have your body zapped with very high density X-Rays for all of 15 seconds. Repeat by 19 and your done!

Well the fatigue hit home hard.  It was like somebody put a lead coat on me and I had to drag it round with me wherever I went.  Try getting up of the couch with a lead coat on you, it’s impossible!  Try going upstairs, takes forever!  I never felt tiredness like it.  It was a struggle to stay awake long enough to make dinner.  My brother had a cat once that they found asleep with it’s face in it’s dinner (after a trip to the vet and an anesthetic, but that’s another story).  Well I now know how that cat felt, although luckily nobody found me asleep with my head in the spaghetti.  (By the way, just because nobody found me, doesn’t meant that it didn’t happen!!)

Two weeks on and I'm still dragging that damned lead coat around with me.  Will I ever shake it off? 

Anyway, unfortunately for me I had the double whammy of the chemotherapy with the radiotherapy, so the fatigue was doubled!  As I said earlier, I’ve done two rounds of this chemo (a round is where I take tablets twice a day for 14 days, then I have 7 days off during which I have my bloods checked etc. to see if I’m able for the next round), and I start the next today, Friday.  I hate taking these tablets, even tho I know they are for my own good, they really are a bitter pill to swallow.  Literally, actually and metaphorically!  I wont be finished with this lot of treatment until the 26th September.  I know I shouldn’t be wishing my life away, but I’m counting the days.  And as Tall Kevin will be in Las Vegas on that date, and another friend will be in Perth, Australia, and most of my family are not in this country, the celebrations will be have to global!  I’ll write to you the day before so that you can all join in whoever you are in the world (any excuse!).

In other, very good, news, I’ve managed to grow some hair! And in every better news, much to all my friends who have to color their hair’s annoyance, there’s no grey in it!! Small mercies...

And here's me and Rusty both looking happy, but only one of us needs a hair cut!

Lastly, I’m not sure if this is good or bad news, but I’m starting back to work on Monday.  I’m only going to do a few hours a day until my treatment is finished (on 26th September, did I mention that?) so it’s not so bad.  It will also get me back to normal as I have been living somewhat in the twilight zone since January when I stopped working.

To do something with my brain to get it back into ‘work’ mode, I thought I’d start to play the piano again.  To do this I had to have it tuned as it was so out of tune it sounded horrible and some of the keys were sticking.  A quick Google found a very nice young man who came along armed with a bag of tools and software on his iPhone (how did anyone tune a piano before we had phones?) to sort out the sound.  To my dismay, horror, shame and downright disgust, when he took the cover off the front to get at the strings, the piano was full of, wait for it, and if you’re anyway squeamish look away now, eh... mice droppings. OMG!!!  Needless to say I was horrified.  He on the other hand wasn’t a bit concerned and assured me that this wasn’t the worst he had seen and on several occasions he has had to remove mice carcasses from very old pianos. OMG again!!!  Thank god there were none of those in my piano.  The very thought.  Apparently pianos are the perfect hiding place for mice, so here's some very good advice from the tuner for anyone out there that has a piano: Get a cat!!

After (a lot of hovering and) several hours of tuning I now have a very pleasant sounding piano on which I can, after several hours of practice, play the first eight bars of a tune without it sounding like next doors cat is being strangled, although Tall Kevin might have a different opinion on that.

And while I’m on the subject of things that invade your house, as it’s the summer and every time I open the back door a fly comes in, I’m going to share with you a poem (what I wrote!) about those pesky yokes that buzz around my kitchen like they own the place and end up dead on all my window ledges.

Ode to a fly!

Could somebody please tell me why,
at the end of the short life of a fly,
when they can go here or there
or in fact anywhere,
that they land on my window ledge when they die?

They really are such a pest,
when on my ledges they get laid to rest.
And they bring all their friends
the procession never ends,
and they really put my nerves to the test!

So a solution to this problem I must find.
And, I already have something in mind!
I'll try employing a spider,
to make my ledges tidier,
then my problem will be an eight legged kind....

See you on the 26th September!!