Twenty Years Coming Up

 How utterly crazy is that?  It will be 20 years this July that I presented with Bladder Cancer and so close to 30% of my life I've lived with that although of course, in reality it was probably 2 or 3 years of treatment and operations followed with regular check ups until about three or four years ago when I finally got the nod and was discharged.

I find my mind turning to mortality more these days.  I suppose as you start losing your friends more often and your Christmas and Birthday card lists get smaller you tend to reflect on it.  I've got my Lasting Power of Attorneys sorted out and I must sit down and finish the wishes sections which are missing some final in depth details that I need to add.  This to make it easy to erase me from Social Media and to close down my civilian and social media lives!  

I might get wobbly around July it's always bad as so many things happened at the same time and in the same year and across the years it's been a funny old period of time.  My friend and I diagnosed around the same time,. certainly in Hospital around the same time might grab our traditional breakfast meeting and perhaps react like Samuel Pepys may have done when he yearly celebrated the "Cutting of Ye Stone"

Samuel Pepys' "cutting of the stone" refers to his successful, but agonizing, bladder stone surgery (lithotomy) in 1658, performed without anaesthetic by barber-surgeon Thomas Hollier, a notoriously risky procedure where he was strapped down as a surgeon made an incision in the perineum to remove the stone, a deeply traumatic event he celebrated annually for the rest of his life. 

I believe the stone itself was displayed during the festivities!  This was the surgeon who operated on my ancestor for the same problem.  We think that by the time he was operated on the surgeon's operating tools were septic and it eventually killed our man.  You cannot even begin to imagine the painful procedure - thank goodness most of my procedures were with anaesthetic (not all).

Anyway, not that I kept any souvenirs of my procedures so they will not be produced at the breakfast in question.