2 hours to go

And the countdown is well and truly on. I had a good night's sleep and got up at 6 for a light breakfast and a coffee. I packed down two large glasses of water and I am allowed to drink (although I will only sip) water up until the time I go in.

I'm surprised that I am quite as calm about this as I am. Sure, there is a little apprehension, I don't know anyone who actually enjoys the experience after all.

I managed to sleep after breakfast - had the strangest dream about the cruise we had been on (or part of it). I've woken, had a shower and I'm about to upload some MP3s to my player to take in with me. Going through my head is the Antony & the Johnsons track that was playing just before the first operation - not the brightest of tracks but one that is now connected to the whole experience.

So 15 months (well it will be tomorrow) since discovering this I'll be having my 4th General Anaesthetic and 3rd set of biopsies. So far (touches wood) each has shown an improvement in fortune and so I am quietly confident that this will continue that trend and things will get better.

I am also convinced that this will be a change in emphasis this time and that I can get back to running my life and not having it run for me. Sure there will be deadlines and milestones for this as treatments and peek & Poke sessions will be needed and followed.

I am going to get this over and done with now and I feel better than I did last week going for pre-assessment. The back of my wrist is beginning to twinge a bit as I know the Cannula is going in there but other than that and I can feel some anxiety, I'm OK - I know the drill now, I know how it works, what is expected of me and what will happen (so there is no need to worry about what they are going to do). I know to ask for my water when I wake and to take it easy so as not to pass out like the first time :-)

Curiously I can feel the slight churn in my stomach but that will pass and now it is 1 1/2 hours before I go in.

Fingers crossed that they find nothing this time. If that is so, then we can crack open the "Internet champagne" - if not - it may take some getting used to, but I'll have to re-plan accordingly.

The art of distraction

Going away for the weekend was useful and has distracted me from going in tomorrow. I plan to try and be as busy as I can be tomorrow morning before going in. I'm getting better at actually going in these days and I hope that I'll sleep tonight - never did before. I hope to do something constructive rather than playing endless games of Tetris or solitaire whilst waiting.

No doubt I'll be my quiet self tomorrow avoiding any eye contact and plugged in to my MP3 player.

I had a good weekend albeit the M25 was up to its tricks which delayed getting to the Hotel until late.

The one thing that strikes me is how tired I was when I got back, further proof of the general lack of stamina I have been complaining about.

Getting ready

To go away for the weekend with a few buddies. We did this a couple of years ago and had an interesting few evenings at a well known seaside resort. Of course, we are getting a little old to go charging around and clubbing.

However, it will be very therapeutic for me as I am with a very old friend and we will get some quality time together and chat about lots of things I'm sure.

Anyway, as usual for the UK will have to pack for sun or tropical storms so I'll be taking a rather large suitcase covering either eventuality

The Art of Catching Lobsters

If you ever get the chance to watch this film - do so. http://www.cornwallfilm.com/Article80.htm - it premiered this evening and I was gripped as soon as I started watching it. the "emotional baggage" that goes with cancer isn't all about yourself. The people around you, friends and family and more so your partner and your children go through a life changing event themselves.

You know that they are going through it but you can only watch and if you are rubbish at saying things (like I am) you don't let on you just beat yourself up that you - through your thoughtless actions of getting cancer - have upset everyone nearest and dearest to you. This IS what it feels like and you get a guilt complex about that too. Such is the grip of a nasty disease that not only are you fighting to get well you are also fighting the fact that you are making other people's lives a misery. That is how you feel - I don't think that is the reality.

I so have to choke back the tears when I see my daughter's first photography project around cancer and smoking - set in grainy black and white and half - way through the words "My Dad has Cancer" - there - I'm having trouble writing it.

The film deals with the affect a stroke followed by cancer has on the family and the aftermath of the terminal nature of the disease. It is heart wrenching stuff and, as you would expect, evokes the sort of response these films normally do until you realise that it was the wife who made this film and bares her soul for us to see the pain and solitude of the situation. Time heals all someone said. I just enjoyed the honesty of the film and as you can imagine I was hit many times over with the fears that we all with cancer feel in our hearts and minds. See it if you can.

Now - where's the Kleenex?

Sense of Humour needed

It is difficult to make a blog "sound" the way you meant it to. For example the last one was some of my sense of humour which is oblique to say the least.

:-) You can prefix or suffix stuff with a smiley I suppose :-) either that or I need to word things a little more carefully and not as they spill out of my head and onto the blog.

Anyone who knows me can understand that some of the stuff I can come out with can take a while for everyone to get and so please do read this blog with the realisation that not all of it is serious. In fact, the best thing you can have when you have any sort of ailment is to combat it with humour if you can.

Wow - Magic Day

Fantastic - massive progress in where I am heading and a big leap forward in my attitude. I am so confident and so assured and I feel really good about myself.

I'm flying at the moment and I'm in demand. I'm useful and I'm helping people and I am doing all the things that I am really good at.

Tonight - work wise - I am on top of the world.

And yet. Deep inside myself, there is that nagging feeling that there is still more collateral damage to come.

I am a Myers Briggs INTJ personality. That is very rare - perhaps 1 in 100 at best. We tend to be visionaries and what worries me is I can see two outcomes. They are binary outcomes. Armageddon or I turn out to be Bill Gate's benefactor!!! Oh go on - I'm allowed to dream.

The New Me

Well it isn't really the new me at all of course. It is the more positive me. A more aggressive outlook and a more focused use of my effort and attentions.

I am determined to claw my way back to being me and trying not to concern myself too much about the past and concentrate on the future whatever that may hold.

I've made a conscious decision to really tackle my weight and exercise regime in such a way that I can mix work and exercise and not have one cancel the other out. I am also determined to get fit and to re-commence my eating regime. For all sorts of reasons and rightly or wrongly I haven't really done anything in a routine since the BCG treatments. First it was the party then the holiday and then full on with the job and other things and all else went by the wayside.

It is easy to get out of a routine. It is far more difficult to get into one. To do the things you are comfortable with is a human trait. It is doing things because they are outside of that zone which will be setting me my challenges - John F Kennedy's We Choose to Go to the Moon speech pops into my head to do things because they are hard, because they are a challenge and because they push the boundaries. Without setting goals and then achieving them are key elements in the fight back to normality and stopping the roller coaster.

My mate K was there tonight and I have to thank him again as it was his idea that I start this blog. It is everything and more I wanted it to be and it allows me to get stuff off my chest, tell people that it is normal to have whatever is happening to you in your cancer journey and it allows me to look back and realise just how far I have come in 11 months since the blog started and 15 months since I was diagnosed.

So I've had a good day and good evening and I hope that I can just build on that over the next few weeks. I'm used to being the manager and getting my own way and having everything just so - because it isn't has thrown me quite a bit - to get back to "old" (although I don't want old for the sake of it) ways is important as it is my baseline.

Out With the Lads

Went rather well - a bit of a bizarre evening as the sat nav took me to Rochester High Street and Not Chatham High Street. Eventually got where we needed to go and went to the pub and found our mate from Canada already there.

"What beer have you got?" "Sorry we haven't got ANY beer!" "Umm OK what about Guinness then?" - I think they squeezed one out. They had no Cider and some of the lagers were off and the lights in the toilet didn't work. However, that broke the ice and there was plenty of banter going on which was fun. One of the lads had a Video that was 27 years old!! It was made at our old school and is a very early black and white video recording. It is - well - rubbish but has some priceless moments in it, especially a thunder flash that exploded taking the camera off its tripod, deafening the cast, breaking two lamps and two windows in the process. How no lasting damage was done to people we do not know to this day. So the pub sat aghast whilst the lads reminisced about the play, the video, the damage and so on. The guy from Canada and I looked on blankly as we were not in it and were sitting open mouthed at the production quality. We are deciding whether to put it on You tube - it could be the only negatively rated video I feel.

We had a great time and were almost in tears reminiscing. Some hadn't seen each other for 35 years and so it was amazing how we all jelled back together, laughed like drains about the school days and forgot our standard stories or exaggerated them or both!

What a great evening and I thoroughly enjoyed myself - I didn't drink as I gave a lift to one of the guys and it was just a good crack with a nice curry and all for £20 a piece beer and food - not bad.

YOU have control

That is what they say to pilots taking over the controls (especially learners).

The previous blog touched on something that I really hadn't considered recently but did early on. That is that you have no real control over what is happening to you after you are diagnosed. You have Yes/No choices (there aren't many maybes that I was aware of).

So consider that ride - I called it the Roller Coaster that you couldn't get off. As a cancer patient - you are in the hands of a series of people - you have no control over them saving you, your ongoing treatment as, unless you happen to be an Oncologist or Urologist, what would you know about it? The only things you can do are PMA (positive mental attitude), do what you are told and take your medicine and treatment. You can do other things as well, within your power to do, life style changes in diet and exercise and so on, you can get other bits fixed (heart in my case) and so on but these are minor things when compared with everything else.

Now, it has dawned on me that my life was entirely in the hands of other people and that is a bit scary. I had no choice but to do what they said, I took a kick in with losing my job and had the anxious wait for insurances and the like to be reviewed.

All these things are not the way you live day to day - I suppose we all know that we really aren't (if the truth be known) entirely in charge of our own lives but we like to think that we are free and can make our own choice and are in control of our lives.

Well - I haven't been for 15 months now and I think that I'm just beginning to realise that. It is time for me to take charge now. I cannot second guess the outcome of next week's tests but if it is good then life takes a new path. If bad it takes another path but whatever it does, I am aware of what I need to do, I am educated about my condition. I know what effects it has on me physically and what I need to do now is to step up to the plate (as our cousins say).

Step up to what? Well - how about leaving behind the baggage of cancer and making another path for myself? How about stop thinking too hard about it and getting on with it. Stop worrying about what a decision may lead to and go and find out? Lots of things like that perhaps - get control back over my life and live with the knowledge that I have survived a very serious illness and I may never (or I might) fully recover from that. So it isn't that bad. I still have all my limbs, I still feel good, I have my brains (some would argue that), my wit, my eyesight and so on so really there are a lot of people far worse off than me and it doesn't stop them doing things.

I'm not sure how I am going to be "this" positive about this all the time, I feel that I have to break this "victim/survivors syndrome" and get on with life. All the time I stay introverted is time missed from what is left of time here.

Grinding away

Today is one of those days were I am getting stuff done but it is a progression of small mainly boring things that need doing. Each on their own is hardly worth the effort but taken together they will get rid of this pile of junk around my desk and a backlog of things that - unlike me - I have just left on one side of the desk.

I will have to get into serious time management mode once I get out of Hospital next week. There is a part in that which no one likes particularly and that is to throw stuff out that isn't important. I used to be good at that and for some reason, recently, I am putting stuff into piles to "look at later". That pile is driving me nuts and when I look at it now - I could have binned most of it.

The worry is that these things just get left and build up and really I could be so much more efficient, like I used to be. My friend also has the same problem with getting things done - perhaps it was the weeks off work or perhaps something else, certainly the body goes out of equilibrium and perhaps that may account for it.

I need to get some control back again. Up until the illness I was in control and then I got on the Roller Coaster. It probably isn't going slow enough to jump off yet but perhaps I can start to exert some control over this whole thing - perhaps that is it?

The week ahead

It is amazing how quickly all these things creep up on you and how your emotions ebb and flow. I was a little better than I have been at these assessments but even so - the stress was obvious in the raised heart beat and high blood pressure. I'm OK now but feel a bit strange. That is most probably to do with this detachment defence mechanism that I use. This works by saying these things aren't really happening to you.

Now in the main this worked last year because everything was traumatic and pretty horrible and (please let this be so) what I am about to have - if the same as last time isn't quite so bad. Not nice (could it ever be?) but you get used to it. Anyway, I tend to go very quiet and become very inward and yet I was putting on a very brave face and laughing and joking in the assessment clinic.

I don't know - I'm OK - I am preparing myself for next week and tomorrow I'll be all bouncy and my normal self - tonight - I'm a little subdued and a little thoughtful which is no bad thing either.

With that - to bed - goodnight.

Well that's over

Phew!

It took ages this morning as the Doctor was held up in the torrential rain and I arrived soaked.

Blood pressure was high but settled down. I must tell them to take the blood test first and then I'll calm down :-) Everything OK and due in 1st October. At least this time the time is right (checked that) and I have permission to drink so keeping myself hydrated after the awful time I had before. I was suitably impressed that I had remembered to bring a urine sample with a test kit they gave me 3 months ago - I followed the instructions to the letter and you have to make it the 2nd pee of the day. So I was somewhat amused when I got there that they wanted another one. As luck would have it - the delay allowed me to brew one up for them after all :-)

I'm getting an old hand at this - unfortunately.

I am just going to dry out a bit and then dash off to the Post Office. I think I also deserve a small bag of Wine Gums or perhaps Pontefract Cakes.

Assessment looms

Yes - so it does and I'm OK with that - a tad nervous if the truth be known but I should be OK. I won't make the mistake I made last time of almost running there and then wondering why I was in a bit of a state :-)

It is at 9 a.m. so that will give me plenty of time to walk home and take the rest of the day off quietly calming down.

I actually - again - have a lot of work to do and I have procrastinated all weekend. Mind you I was out most of Saturday and got on with a fair bit today so perhaps I'm being a little bit hard on myself with that. But I do need to hit some targets as I am out Monday night, Tuesday up in town, back here, out with some old school chums - some I haven't seen for 5 or more years and then I have some more work kicking off later in the week. Phew - so much to do before 1st October! I'm away for part of the weekend as well.

Oh well - no good rattling on here about it - I ought to be asleep and be up early to get assessed!

A Year Ago

I was not too clever of course and I was a bit of a wounded soldier and was curled up for quite a while not exactly feeling great. Wasn't to drive the car for 4 weeks and all that so I missed going to my Friend's installation meeting. Well a year later and I was able to this time and I met up with a friend who I hadn't seen for some time. He had a heart attack the time before I was meant to meet him and so it was great to meet up and catch up with our "conditions", diets and medication - see I'm getting good at this stuff now. We are like a bunch of kids although I'm not sure if having a bigger dosage of a tablet actually means that your condition is more serious than the next?

On a sadder note my cousin is in hospital with heart problems and another Friend is awaiting some tests as he isn't well either. So I wish them well.

Another old friend was telling me about his recent bladder infection (and later kidney infection) and what they had to do to him - a flexible cystoscopy - when I explained what I had done to me and quite how the treatement is instilled regularly and that I'll probably be getting a couple of them a year for the rest of my life I reckoned I'd made my point..

Finally I saw that Marcel Marceau died this morning - the web site isn't reporting his last words though.

Thoughts on just another step

You can understand when people say that they no longer want to have treatment. I can see that it can get to that point. They just want to say that is enough, I've had enough and that is it.

I feel that way now in a way - but I know that actually I need to do what it takes to get well. I'm young enough and mercifully fit enough to keep doing what needs to be done. However it is the stress for me more than anything else - and I hate Hospitals. I'm quite good in that I can now rationalise about this or be philosophical but it isn't nice and it isn't how people imagine it.

When you talk to someone who has been in Hospital all the "yuk" bits are skipped over - we talk about the food the cleanliness the nurses anything but that there was some bugger shoving a lump of plastic into my hand or worse.

Oh well that is a week and a few days away if I get through pre-assessment - just to think last time I went I had to have blood tests, pills and lord alone knows what... Fingers crossed that it doesn't happen again.

Middle Aged Rage

I am still fuming over this idiots e-mail to me. I thoroughly dislike being set up , I hate someone firing rhetoric at me. Now that it is found that it has absolutely nothing to do with me - have I got an apology? Nah!

Some people in high places - as my friend said - have no stature. Perhaps he is right. Maybe I have to hold the high ground and see how I shape up against him.

Life is too short already for this nonsense.

Anyway, I am off out tomorrow and I am looking forward to that and then I can have Sunday at home and Monday in for pre-assessment - yuk!

Oh well, that is just "another step" as someone told me. Each of these things are...

The Return of the Black Dog

My friend and I had a long chat this morning he calmed me down when the Numpty in the previous post had quite simply called my integrity into question. Probably the one thing you should never do to me is to question that.

Anyway, I was telling him that the Black Dog had a visit last night - no doubt caused by all of this and for the first time in a long while it occurred to me that I might not get the answers or result I want out of this next lot of biopsies. That was a shock moment and one that I hadn't got to thinking about recently. Last year - well it was all about survival, if I'd have had to lose my bladder well that was it but now, we have come so far, it would be a shock if things hadn't moved in the right direction.

To combat that, I thought the good thought - that it was clear and I wondered how I'd react to that news. I wasn't expecting to feel quite as emotional about that either. Of course, I can't predict the future or the outcome or indeed my reaction and so it was a bit of a waste of brain power really but that is the Black Dog for you. When you least expect it up it pops and the brain runs riot.

I like talking to my friend - we understand each other when we talk about our mood swings and our hopes and fears. It is really good to hear that it "isn't just me" going through this sort of stuff. The physical side of things is really the thing I can't quite take in. I am no where near as fit as I used to be and it transpires that the body reacts differently in the way it handles this and you handle it. I am intrigued and I will learn more about this but - basically - what used to happen before when your body was "in balance" isn't happening now and there are a number of things that need to happen to get everything functioning the same way as it used to.

More when I know more about it - it does sound intriguing though.

It isn't meant to sound like this but if you have had cancer, it is often difficult to explain some of the more subtle things that have happened to you. Having someone to talk to who has had the same - and is having the same - experiences as you is really helpful.

The Man's a blithering idiot

I have just spent 6 hours trying to respond politely to an e-mail from some blithering idiot who has near as damn it accused me of being some sort of Muppet. I'm not best pleased, I had other things planned for my time and this utter drivel and unsubstantiated accusations have not only upset me but left a very bitter taste as I have been trying to sort out a problem not of my making and suddenly it is my problem and my fault it happened in the first place.

Some people - anyway they have an offer to retract the e-mail by the morning now as I have written a War and Peace response.

Okey Cokey Internet

Has been driving me mad overnight. In, out, on, off, intermittent, mail works then doesn't, web works then doesn't.

Virgin Media are to the Internet business what Enron are to Accountancy and Audit firms!

No matter how much care you take

Some amateur can undo all your hard work. Like a barrack room lawyer some dick has trashed some work I have done and all hell broke loose when I got home this evening! Strewth

Heads will get cracked and arses kicked tomorrow. The trouble with this sort of customer is that they believe everything some raving lunatic tells them and I end up having to go and sort it out. If half (no make it more than that) if 90% of the people actually stopped and thought about things before shooting their mouths off and creating a crisis out of nothing things would be a hell of a lot better.