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?
Cancer 143
Posted on September 15, 2024 Leave a Comment
I grew up never thinking it would be possible to travel beyond the Iron Curtain. I have been lucky enough to have visited most of the countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact, and very much enjoyed my experiences, epecially finding out that life in the East was nothing like as horrific as was portrayed, but often the standards of housing, etc were as high or higher than in the west.
Currently we are in former East Germany, the Democratic Republic of Germany. My first visit to this region involved a trip to Colditz, including breaking into the castle and finding things relating to the war. I knew my way around because the map from the board game was pretty accurate, but that is another story, one I tell all the time because it was one of the best experiences of my life (I know, I am that trivial – it is on a level with a US chappy wearing a 10 gallon hat saying ‘howdy’ to me as we walked down a gulch in Death Valley)/
We are on Rugen, the largest island in Germany, in a holiday cottage in a forest in Baabe in the eastern part of the Island. It is modern, peaceful, economically thriving, and has the threat from the AfD as in other parts of Germany. It is on 25%, the leading party. Enough of modern politics. We only arrived yesterday so I am looking forward to visiting Prora, the biggest hoilday complex built but unfinished as part of the Strength through Joy movement in the 1930s. It is massive, 4km long, and has been used for a variety of purposes, including refugees from Hamburg and from the east during the war, the East German Army after the war (there is a military museum I am looking forward to), and is now the subject of much debate about whether it is appropriate to use a Nazi-era building complex for modern purposes. End of argument, of course it is, it is just a building complex, it doesn’t do Nazi salutes or open concentration camps.
It is a symbol of how we make simple judgements about things, rather than consider nuances. We say Nazism was a bad thing (which it was), without recognising that it also did some good things, such as cheap holidays for working people and, erm….. Please don’t say autobahns, they were started before Hitley came to power.
The other place I am looking forward to visiting, which is a bit further away, is Peenemunde, the site for the development of rocketry during the war, where the V2 was developed, built and tested before reigning terror on London and Antwerp. There is also a U-Boat museum and the remains of a concentration camp at the site.
The food around here is good. At the moment I seem to live on fish, which makes sense as we are on the Baltic Sea, but I will increase my consumption of pork products over the next few days. They have decent portiojn sizes too.
We are here for two weeks. I managed to drive here OK, though I arrived a little tired. We have not seen a single British car in the area. I asked the information officer about whether they get many British visitors here and he said they don’t. That is fine by me.
Cancer 142
Posted on September 13, 2024 Leave a Comment
I read all sorts of stuff, from the extremely interesting to the downright nonsensical. I sometimes get so confused I cannot separate the useful from the dross. I get caught up in those spirals of internet bollocks, where the truth is never as close as a bullet to Trump’s brain. I do read about death as it is something close to my heart (and lungs, and bowels, and abdomen).
Recently I read something about the four stages of dying. Please yourself regarding whether there is truth in this and where that truth might lie
- Slowing down (6 months before death). The person becomes tired and lethargic. They slow down, they are less social and they eat less. I am all those things apart from eating less. I try but I don’t succeed. I am always tired and lethargic, I can walk less, I am less social. These things are true but hae been since my diagnosis 20 months ago, so perhaps I am a slow learner.
- Declining strength (3 months before death). The person becomes debilitated, sleeps more, leave the house less, and again is eating less. Ignoring the eating, I sleep a lot less, 4-5 hours is a good night. As for leaving the house I am writing this from the Baltic coast in eastern Germany.
- Transitioning (1 month before death). The person has hallucinations, seeing dead family members and friends. This one is slightly weird. It is claimed that it might be about the dead letting the dying know that death is ok. I can understand halucinations, though the person suggested most people have them. Unlikely I think. This perhaps arises from the religious beliefs of some people, those who – it is hard to believe folks – genuinely think that there is life after death. They must be on the magic mushrooms.
- Actively dying (Days before death). This is when the person may be unconscious, eats no food, is incontinent, has breathing difficulties. There are metabolic changes, eg skin colour and body temperature. Eats no food? I will believe that when I see it.
It seems that I am on the first stage, but then I would be anyway. I have always been a miserable old fart who doesn’t like people.
There is a final stage, after death. Here there is the suggestion that the brain knows the heart has stopped, that it knows you are dead, perhaps for several seconds or even minutes. It would be good to test this properly but it would be difficult as no one returns from the dead, except perhaps Vincent Price. It fits with the anecdotal evidence that people who have been decapitated may move their eyes or their mouth. It does make sense. Why shoud the entire body should down at the same time? Imagine it though. You know you are dead . What do you think? Damn, I’ve had it now.
Last night, while eating at our excellent hotel here in Ahrenshoop, I saw a quotation that, if I was to have a headstone, might be a suitable epitaph. It is a quotation by Theodor Fontane, the Nineteenth Century realist German author
“…if one has the choice between Champagne and oysters – one usually chooses both.”
And therein lies the problem….
Dr Nigel Hunt 