Cancer 148
Posted on October 19, 2024 Leave a Comment
I am back to normal now after a scary few days. I don’t like being ill. While it is usually just a little illness I worry that it is something much worse. In any case, I have a compromised immune system so who knows what the consequences of a tiny bug will be?
My frustration today is not being able to walk. The wife was going out with a friend, and I offered advice on where to walk. As I did so, I realised that I may never see some of these places again, even though they are very close to home. I struggle to walk any distance. Half a mile is often an achievement, though occasionally I manage more. We are visiting Castle Howard on Monday, and I wonder whether I will get around the house, let alone the gardens. As an ex-footpath officer for the parish council (ahem), it is difficult. I think back to the days when I decided not to go for a walk because it was raining or muddy or I just couldn’t be bothered. Thoughts like this are dangerous. They might lead to regret, and I regret nothing. Choices are made in life, and you live (or die) by them. We all make mistakes in our choices, but there is no going back and changing them. Regret is the consequence of focusing on decisions made in the past and is negative and so undesirable. Like many people, I like to think that I learn from mistakes, though I am not convinced I do.
I decided I too would go for a walk, alone so I don’t limit their walking, but realised that as I am just recovering from a fever and it is wet and miserable that might not be a good idea. Instead I decided to write this blog. This afternoon we are off to buy a toilet seat as I broke it while mending the plug in the sink. One step forward, one step back.
Cancer 147
Posted on October 18, 2024 Leave a Comment
I had a bad night last night. A fever came on in the evening after a rotten day, with abdominal pains. The fever broke in the night so paracetamols did the trick. I ate very little yesterday which should be good for my diet. I still don’t want to eat. That isn’t a good sign for me, but it should help my hernia.
When I get a temperature I am supposed to ring the hospital, which would no doubt drag me in, keep me there and test me for Covid among other things. I may have mentioned before that while I can cope with most of the procedures I have suffered due to bowel cancer, Covid testing is a step too far. Rather a tube up my bottom (though there is nowhere to go now) than 6 foot of unplaned 4×2 shoved violently up my delicate nose, where it is twirled around my brain for 10 minutes. Awful. I much prefer to deal with my illnesses myself – though this time I nearly succumbed.
I need to be fit for Sunday morning when I have my latest CT scan, and Monday, when we go to Yorkshire for a two nighter – The Feathers near Helmesley as you are asking.
I am feeling a bit better now, though it is 0838 and I am still in bed, not even reading.
Cancer 146
Posted on September 30, 2024 Leave a Comment
We are sitting in the Grand Hotel, Amsterdam, having a cup of tea. Tomorrow we go home to England. Three weeks abroad and I am having my first decent cup of tea (excluding in the rental house where I used my own teabags) since I left home. Real English tea, real milk, made with boiling water so it is properly mashed. Excellent!
We are in the library of the hotel. It is very comfortable and pleasant. The building itself is a reminder of working in Helsinki, Judenstil, similar to so many Helsinki buildings such as the railway station.
I am very tired and a little stressed. Two days of driving wearies me far more than it used to. We are staying in a hotel just outside Amsterdam and I was/am worried about coming into the city. So much can go wrong when you have a stoma (eg leaks, filling and needing changing quickly). My heart drugs mean I need to urinate often and there are not toilets everywhere. My body is intensely aching so I can’t walk far. My operation wound leaked yesterday, wetting my trousers – at the front so it looks like I have wazzed myself. I didn’t, honest. All in all going into a city is very stressful and unpleasant. Fortunately this hotel is relaxing.
I only came in to go to the American Book Centre (sorry, I can’t type US spellings), which looks like it had an eclectic selection of books, a little like the Helsinki Academic Bookshop.
Still, if I give up rising to the challenge of something like entering a city (even though I have never liked entering cities) I might as well give up on life. Keep putting the effort in, even if it is painful. A general rule for life.
Cancer 145
Posted on September 24, 2024 Leave a Comment
Margaret Thatcher did get something right.
Now I have your attention I would like to admit I have done something I haven’t done for years, I have been on a bus. OK it was a shuttle bus going about 2km from a car park to the Konigstuhl on Rugen Island in Germany, but it was a bus. I had to wait forever, and when it finally came – not at the time specified on the timetable even though this is Germany – I had to get on, interact with the driver to buy a ticket, sit in a seat, and eventually I was driven to the destination. But, and it is a big but, there were other people on the bus! I don’t mind driving my car with other people in it, I know these people, but going in a tin can with people I don’t know. I am not sure this is acceptable. Apparently it is quite normal for buses to transport people who don’t know each other from one place to another. Good grief, it is worse than a taxi, and that is bad enough when you don’t know the driver and they don’t drive correctly (ie, like me).
Thatcher suggested that only young people and failures go in buses. I tend to agree. I did used to travel in buses when I was young. My record is home to Austria when I was 15 and then again when I was 16 (school trips), but I am older now, and as I have travelled in a bus I must be a failure.
The Konigstuhl itself is quite impressive, 118 metres of chalk cliff above the Baltic, with a skywalk looping over it. Well worth a visit, unlike the accompanying exhibition. It was one of those technological exhibitions, with audio support, things to touch, buttons to press, and very little of interest to see. It was also designed for children.
I don’t think technological exhibitions have much value. The children just press buttons, run around and probably don’t learn anything, while adults dont even bother pressing buttons. The only thing I learned was the German for centipede, which is hundertfussler – obvious really. At the start of the exhibition we were shoved through a set of doors and harangued by someone in German, and then shoved through further doors and harangued by our audio systems, which had been fitted by expert personnel, who knew exactly how to put the headphones on our ears. We weren’t to touch!
This is a serious point. With a technological approach the person doesn’t have to do anything, so they don’t learn. With a traditional approach the person has to focus on an object, a painting, a machine whatever, perhaps read a small blurb, and try to understand something about the object. At the end they have learned something because they have put some effort in. This exhibition can be contrasted with the exhibition we recently saw at Peenemunde, where there were artefacts from the war period which had short explanations. There were photographs from both the war and recently which showed how the facility functioned and what remains. I came out of Peenemunde having learned something. I came out of the Konigstuhl exhibition only having learned about a hundertfussler and that technological exhibitions tend to be crap.
Finally, being shoved through doors into small rooms with large crowds and harangued in a language I don’t understand reminded me that we were in Germany and some things never change. There must be something in the genes of nations that make them behave in certain ways. For the British in Germany it seems to be rule breaking. Don’t tell anyone but we queue jumped…..
Cancer 144
Posted on September 22, 2024 Leave a Comment
I sometimes think I am the fattest cancer patient around. All this talk of how people with cancer lose their appetite just passes me by. I don’t think I am following the rules. Even though my cancer is food-related, or at least food-processing-relating, ie bowel cancer, I still want to eat continually. If I am going to die at 61 or 62 then I am missing out 20 odd years of eating then I am making up for it by eating several times the amount of food I need.
It doesn’t help being in Germany, where they have some of the finest food in the world. Forget Italy or the Mediterranean diet, this is proper food. I detest fish in the Mediterranean but here on the Baltic it is delicious, either fried or smoked. Germany has the best sausages, a great love of pork, excellent cakes, and a good idea of portion size, ie not some pathetic attempt at making the plate look pretty by leaving most of it bare, but filling it with fried potatoes cooked with pieces of bacon, along with several chunks of fired fish and a spoonful of salad. If you think cake portions are a good size in the UK think again, the Germans must have a knife shortage because their cakes are only cut into a few portions.
Eating too much isn’t a problem if one gets enough exercise, but unfortunately a good walk for me is about a kilometre, then I need a good rest. Everyone around here is biking around, which I would love to do but I would struggle even with an electric bike. Most of my exercise consists of pressing the pedals of my car, and even there it is problematic beause it is an automatic (don’t get me on automatics. A dreadful invention, meaning poorer control and a less smooth ride. I have no idea why they are popular because it takes more effort to drive them well than a real car with three pedals).
My other excuse for over-eating is that many of my pleasures in life have been taken away, by which I mean alcohol. If I can’t drink alcohol, which I can’t, then I will overindulge in chocolate and cake, and meat, and fried potatoes, and bacon (which is meat acceptable to a vegetarian, like ham), and so on.
I have been supported in my diet-free attitude by the nurses in hospital who have encouraged me not to diet – another of the many advantages of having cancer – because in the end I will lose my appetite and having a few extra kilograms will keep me alive longer – the inevitability of death being one of the many disadvantages of cancer.
Never mind, I have nothing to lose. I have just eaten a very good three course breakfast, consisting of sausage and scrambled egg with bread, yoghurt and fruit, a sort of sausage croissant thing and half a chocolate croissant, with tea and orange juice. We are now going to have a ‘long’ walk and later we have neck cutlets of pork with potatoes and cabbage. Perhaps while we are out we might indulge in cake or perhaps a fish cob, who knows?
Dr Nigel Hunt 