Dr Nigel Hunt

Cancer 31

Posted on March 26, 2023     Leave a Comment

I have now been in hospital for about ten days after my setback. Hopefully I will be out tomorrow. I am being released. I have reached that point where medical science has done its job and now the home environment will complete the recovery, as fr as it goes. I will still be on oodles of medication, but it can all be taken orally. I will still be limited in how far I can walk, but at least it will be to look at the garden rather than the entrance to the ward. I will still be limited on how much food I can eat, but it will not be hospital food.

One sign of being ready to leave hospital is attitude towards hospital food. Earlier, I thought there was a good menu and the food was pretty good. Now I can’t bear it. The food is not good. It is hospital food. Another sign is the view. I am lucky enough to have a bed by a window. I can see the sky and I can see boxy hospital buildings. There are no trees or grass. It is good to see the sky, watch its changes, enjoy the sun, the clouds and the rain. But now I want more. I want to see my garden. I want to see hills. I want to see trees. I want to be in nature.

One final sign that I am ready to leave is that I have started work on my book again. I don’t have far to go but I have struggled to get going. If I am out tomorrow I want it finished and sent to the publishers (CUP) by the end of the week. I still not live to see it completed but I can be more confident it will be completed.

The next 24 hours are critical. Nothing must go wrong. I must exercise, eat a little, and try to deal with my gout. Of course, if something does go wrong I will stay here, but I am beginning to go stir crazy. I know I have not been in long compared to many people, but I can only feel for my own experience. Back to the book.

Cancer 30

Posted on March 25, 2023     Leave a Comment

In my last post I talked about the family which changed my life. In this post I am going to talk about somene who had a profound influence on me, an influence that began when I was a teenager and has lasted to this day.

Andy Barlow was a year ahead of me at school. I didn’t really know him when we are young even though we lived in the same village. It wasn’t until we started catching the school bus at the same bus stop that I started to get to know him vaguely, and it wasn’t until I was about 14 when I started to hang around on the rec in the evening, classic adolescent style, and he was there as well (I think he encouraged me to go). It was at this point he began to be my mentor.

Up to that point I had not really been interested in music. My exposure was largely through Top of The Pops, which my sister enjoyed watching. I got to know many of the pop songs of the early to mid 1970s with little thought to their (often poor) quality. I was a slow learner. I was only just getting over treehouses, dens and damming streams. I still had my shed in our field – though that was an ideal place for a disconsolate teenager to get away from his parents and I kept it for years. But that is another story.

Going to the rec was a key stage in transitioning from childhood friends to adolescent friends, from childhood activities to adolescent activities, from not being interested in girls to being slightly more interested in girls, from not knowing Andy to knowing Andy.

Andy was interested in music, not just any old music, but punk. He talked about the groups and their music, he sang their songs, he went to gigs. It wasn’t long before I was heading to his house to listen to the latest single or album by somebody or other and I really enjoyed it. I took it in, and the thing about punk was that it was not just about the music, it was about the attitude, anarchy in the UK, Clash City Rockers, protesting about the government (No Maggie Thatcher aint no Government), protesting about the way things were, wanting change, often for change’s sake; not really knowing what to replace things with. It was about disorder, dressing to upset people, chaos – though I think those of us from villages probably didn’t really understand the city mentality that drove a lot of what punk stood for.

I started going to gigs with Andy. I was still at school so I had my paper round money (£1.70 a week for an hour a day six days a week) and what I could scrounge from my parents to get to Derby or Nottingham to see bands. My first gig was the Buzzcocks. It was so exciting, learning to pogo (if you have to learn that dance), spit flying around; but I think my political conscious started with my next gig, The Clash. This was a tour to coincide with their second album, Give ’em Enough Rope. This band meant something. They were angry. They knew society was flawed and wanted to change it. They had ideas. I was transformed.

While we went to many gigs one of the most important was Stiff Little Fingers’ first tour of the UK, timed to coincide with their first album, Inflammable Material (Perhaps the best punk album ever?). Andy and I couldn’t get in to the Ajanta (a rather seedy but brilliant venue). It was packed. People were climbing in through the toilets. We hung around the side door and the group arrived in a car. We informed them of our predicament and they invited us in. We sat with them in the dressing room until they went on, and somehow we were pushed into the main theatre. That was a group that understood society’s problems. They were from Belfast during the worst part of the Troubles.

There was a lot of entertainment at that time, good groups, poor groups, drinking beer. Forming a punk group of our own, playing a few gigs. I even got a job with the same firm as Andy when I left school. That meant I could afford gigs and beer (the 18 yr drinking age limit didn’t really apply then). Good times.

We all grow up, we have good times and bad, we drift apart, and within a few years Andy and I rarely saw each other. We went our own ways. He stayed in the building trade, I did what I did. I do remember saying to him as we listened to music in his house that my main ambition in life was to write a book. I managed that.

The punk that Andy helped me become is still within me. I am still unhappy with society. I still want to change things. I still want to do things differently to the way other people do them. This has applied across my life and I am not sure I would have been able to do this as effectively without that early important mentor of mine, Andy Barlow.

Cancer 29

Posted on March 24, 2023     Leave a Comment

Inevitably through all this I am reflecting on so many aspects of my life, looking back at what I have done, the good things, the mistakes. I make no claims to have lived a perfect life. I know I have upset people badly at times and I am sorry that has happened, but I suppose being someone who has generally been honest in life (again with some serious exceptions) that is going to be the cut and thrust of life itself.

Looking back I inevitably think about some of the people who have influenced me, who have, for some reason, changed my life. I don’t usually mention names in this blog, but I am going to make an exception here. I hope I am not upsetting anyone by doing so.

As an adolescent we are influenced by many people, our parents, other members of the family, friends, workmates, and so on. I was enormously influenced by an individual, and by a family.

The family is the Ferozes. Throughout my adolescence I spent a lot of time being with and living with the Ferozes, mother, father, three girls and grandma. My family was working class. They were middle class. They were middle class in a special way. Looking back they acted more like the upper classes. They behaved in ways they thought was right regardess of what others might think. Their large house always smelled of dogs and horses, everyone was – to my eyes – both posh and very laid back. I didn’t realise that posh people could be so normal. I was a friend of the girls so I was made very welcome by the parents. As I got older I started to have meals there, sleep there, I even had my own key – which I once forgot so I crawled in through the dog flap (dog flap? How posh and not posh is that?) after a few beers, went to the toilet and when I emerged there was a policeman in the hall. The neighbours thought there was a burglar.

It was here that I learned that you coud be well-mannered and keep your elbows on the table. It was more important to have something interesting to say. I secretly admired the Dad. I wanted to be like him – indeed later, after he sadly died of cancer I was given some of his clothes which I wore for years. He was a GP who was (quite rightly) incredibly proud of his daughters. He also sat in a large leather chair. His chair. You could sit in it when he wasn’t there, but not if he was. Then we leaned over his shoulder, helping him with the Telegraph crossword, answering the clues in the wrong order which really annoyed him (not really, he rarely got annoyed. He would just smile indulgently at his beloved daughters whatever they did wrong).

The Mum was a second mum to me. That is not to denigrate my own mum, why shouldn’t I have two? She would fuss around, offering advice, coffee and food, asking me to help out with this or that.

Grandma’s biggest contribution was language. When I decided to leave the building site and move into academia she made it very clear that I could not move into the bigger world with my broad Derbyshire accent, that I had to learn to speak ‘properly’. She was right. I did tone down my accent, and in later years I would test some of my foreign students. When I spoke the new normal they understood me fine, but if I put on my earlier accent they would just look at me in a bewildered fashion. Good old Ivy.

The girls had a huge influence on me. We were never lovers, more like brother and sisters. Why did we never become lovers? I have no idea, perhaps it was because from the start we were friends who drifted towards family and it would be a little odd to go out with your sister. It was probably a good thing. We went out, we shared music, we went to gigs, we did the normal things young folk do.

There is no way I could have achieved any of the things I have in my life without the Ferozes. It is difficult to say exactly what it was, but it was the putting elbows on the table, it was speaking in a way that is intelligible to others, but on the grander scale it showed me how to be middle class in a good way, no posing, no looking down on other people, doing what you want to do within the constraints of not hurting others, trying to do a little good, and definitely not posh. Of course others helped with these things, but the Ferozes are an essential component of what I am today. Their influence is immeasurable and I am so grateful to them.

Cancer 28

Posted on March 23, 2023     1 Comment

I am writing fewer posts at the moment partly because I need something to say and partly because I have been, and still am, fairly ill. A couple of days ago the medical staff were worried about me but large scale projectile vomitting improved things considerably.

While I don’t have a tube to my stomach and can officially eat I don’t feel like eating, which does show I am ill. As a postwar baby with wartime parents I was brought up not to leave anything on my plate, and that food will always make you better. Not now. Part of it is that I dare not eat for fear of throwing up again and being forced to go through things which, to me at this point, are almost Auschwitzian medical procedures, simply because I don’t think I can endure much more.

I can endure the patience required to get my gut working properly. At the moment it seems what I do eat is being blocked somewhere in the small intestine, building up, and then being thrust backwards out of my mouth. But some material is getting through because my stoma does get some action. Sometimes ot is liquid, but there are solids too. My theory is that with patience, little food, and no medical interference, the gut will start working properly.

If there is medical intervention in the form of tubes, operations, etc, then this will set me right back and I may never get home to enjoy home, garden, family and sunshine.

Cancer 27

Posted on March 20, 2023     Leave a Comment

It has been a while since I blogged. This mainly because I have not had a functioning brain for the last few days. This illness has rather taken over in the last few days but I am hoping for a little respite from the worst of it, though I am likely to be here for many days yet. I do feel a spark of strength and positivity at the moment.

I have read nothing, listened to nothing, and my existence consists of myself, this part of the hospital, and those around me, both physically and across the ether. What is important to me now is whether I can make myself more comfortable in bed, whether the new chap across the way snores (he does, very loudly), and how I am going to get through this period of no eating. It is now Monday evening. I have not eaten anything since Thursday evening, and it is likely to be several days at least before I can have this tube out of my stomach and eat something. It is not as though I want a bacon sandwich or a roast dinner, I am looking forward to a simple biscuit – though not too much as I can’t become obsessed with food.

I get to hear the stories of others, whether they mean me to or not. One chap was asking me for advice on his sex life with his wife. Apparently he had slowed a little due to his four heart attacks. No idea why he asked me. Perhaps after his first question he thought I was the fount of wisdom – his first question was how to spell ‘bored’. He then got dressed and ran away. Another chap is telling his health stories continually over the phone. The snorer, when not sleeping, just sits. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t play on his phone. The Polish chap could speak little English. He kept getting up and walking away. He kept bottles of pickles on his shelf to improve his hospital diet. On a quiet evening he started playing loud Polish music on his phone. It was quite good really.

It is also difficult having these tubes in various places on and in my body, but there is no point in worrying about it because they are going to be there for days.

Hospitals teach patience in a way it is not learned elsewhere. A prison may be similar. You put up with things because you have to. You become the ultimate stoic.