Cancer 170

How many emotions and viewpoints can a person hold at one go? I am both optimistic about life and pessimistic. I feel my health is reasonably good and terribly bad. I am in pain and I am not in pain. I look forward to the future and there is no future. Orwell was right in 1984 about holding several views at the same time. I just sneezed and I am expecting my stomach to burst with the hernia, as it pokes out from below my ribs and the hernia belt I wear is not a very good one – the so-called better ones crush the stoma bag and lead to leaks, so which is worse, a growing hernia or a stomach smeared with shit? I would say you get used to these things after two years, but….

Two years. That is not bad. I am very happy I have managed to get to two years post-diagnosis. My next target is another birthday, and that is not far away (27 February, let me know if you need my address for the parcels). I will, if I make it, be 62. Not a great age, but I will look forward to 63, and that would be an achievement because I was born in 1963. Why do numbers equal achievements?

I haven’t blogged for a little while because we have been on holiday in the Netherlands. Not the first place people think of going on holiday but I am restricted. I haven’t managed to brave flying yet (I am working on it), so the Netherlands is a good alternative, especially as I don;t know the place very well. I went to the Airborne Museum in Arnhem – an excellent museum, Utrecht, Leiden, etc. Leiden has led to a commissioned article on the siege of Leiden in 1573-74. I will become a genuine historian.

We got back from the Netherlands last Wednesday. It is now Sunday and we are on holiday again, this time in North Yorkshire, at a very nice country hotel. We have a suite with four rooms and an open fire, and we are looking forward to good food this evening. I have to balance eating and stoma production – except I dont balance it. I just eat and put up with the stoma production. I like food and a little hole in my stomach is not going to stop me.

I am still reading War and Peace. It is 1812 and Napoleon’s army has reached Smolensk.

Back to my optimist/pessimist viewpoints. Even now the optimist generally wins (unlike Napoleon in Russia in 1812). I suppose I can’t help it. Always look on the bright side of life as Monty Python had it. I don’t know about always, but 90% of the time is not too bad. After all, things could be worse. I am not a Gazan or a Sudanese.