I thought I could take photos

We did the family photos - not mine just A's and L's photos. They both had a great time and L's shots of Argentina are amazing. A's Venice and Rome ones were also quite stunning. We didn't have time for mine but as my photos amount to theirs combined - over 1,800 photos and the best part of 2 hours video it would be a bit too much just for one sitting. Tomorrow maybe.

Kind of dreading this time next week - I'll no doubt be stuck in Hospital overnight - I do hope though that this time it is in the Urology ward where they actually know how to look after you!

TGIF

Just got home and will be spending quality time (as they say) with L to hear her stories of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil. I just glimpsed some of the photos and it looks to have been a brilliant trip.

Work was a bit hectic. The Boss's one day back and everyone wanted a piece of him. I got in early but he is off for 3 weeks to Canada. I have my own worries with the pre-assess on Monday and the operation this time next week. I don't feel good about this one at all and I think that I've already touched on why that should be.

Anyway, at least I can look forward to a warm weekend so they say and perhaps we can get the barbecue out and we might even drag my screen and projector outside and have an open air movie of our holiday slides and videos :-)

Plane has arrived at Heathrow

Just waiting to get the call and I will order the take away Chinese which L has ordered along with being me with a Yorkie Bar (a large UK chocolate bar advertised as "not for girls").

I got home a bit early and have set up the kitchen ready and am tracking the flight. Very much looking forward to seeing her as it has to be the longest time apart any of us have ever had.

L comes back from Argentina

In about 18 hours time. I am really looking forward to seeing her. I do miss her - she is so funny and so "off the wall" - I don't know where she gets it from.

I'm so proud/pleased etc. I just want to hear about everything she has done and to reinforce in her mind that she did this almost entirely herself - she raised almost every penny/cent and I am hoping that it will be a real life changing experience for her. We will have a big party tomorrow night and unfortunately I need to be in work the next day as it is the only day the boss is in!

I imagine she will sleep the whole of Friday anyway and so we can have a great family weekend and just listen to her adventures.

Nice night out

At the Jazz evening. Been going since 1988 so a bit of an old hand. I'm still the youngest one there though :-)

Feeling kind of maudling at the moment and just not my normal happy go lucky self. Sure it will change once all the crap is out of the way.

Guess what? My PC which was terminal I thought - is back with me and working. How cool is that? The PC man tested everything and it all worked, which is biz are as when I did that everything was dead. Anyway, glad to have that back and my car which cost a king's ransom to sort out this time. I suppose at 6 years old it needed all it brakes, tyres and bushes sorted. It is now looking like a real cat as it sits glistening on my driveway - Grrrrr!

Well there's your problem

On the way in to work it struck me that I really quite resent having my life changed and it adds to some of the reasons I'm currently unhappy.

Before BC I was on 4 times the money and every day was a challenge; I had responsibility and autonomy and status. Now I don't have any of those or, perhaps it is more accurate to say, I don't realise if I have any of those. I think I might have respect/status but the problem with taking a job lower down the food chain is that it doesn't push or challenge and it has now got to be routine - which I think is a better word than mundane. I easily exceed expectations as expectations are set for someone at the beginning of their career, not with a 1,000 year's knowledge and experience like me :-)

Getting up and going to work is mechanical and not exciting although I enjoy the people. It is funny that I'm feeling this at a time when, if everything is clear, I will be able to negotiate a permanent role. I suppose in this day and age having a permanent job can be looked on as a good thing.

Anyway, so I've pinned down one of my current issues. I know the other one is just reeling from having to go in for full biopsies again and realising that I will have to continue this sort of thing for whole of life, it isn't going away - or isn't likely to in the next several years.

Perhaps there is also the uncertainty about what they'll find - it has been 8 months since the last operation and I've had no maintenance since that time...

A combination of things then but it is all about coming back to the reality of what you have - a manageable acute disease that can recur when you least expect it.

Occasional Images of the holiday

CLICK on the image to make it much larger.

Why not I thought put a few images up. this one is pretty damn spooky. In Copenhagen we looked over by a bridge and saw these statues staring out of the water at us. I hope you can see them - oh for a filter to be at hand but, of course, A has all my lenses and filters :-)

Doom and Gloom Mood continues

Actually it was lightened a little as some more of my colleagues were in today and so that lightened me up a bit. I realised that I didn't actually tell them that I was due in next week - I'll tell them tomorrow.

We are getting ready for L to return on Thursday night. My car got serviced today and at close to £1K for the work needed I might need to start thinking about my little luxury :-) however, Mrs. F. is going off to Heathrow on Thursday to pick her and her friend up so there will be a massive welcome home for her then. I have to go to work on Friday which is a nuisance but I reckon L will sleep for 24 hours anyway so we have the whole weekend.

I can't say that I am looking forward to the next few weeks. Perhaps it may be the last invasive work on me, perhaps it wont, we will have to wait and see the results.

there was a series of programmes on last night about Cancer - very interesting and I'm getting my head back around the fact that as ordinary as I appear and as much as I'd like this all to go away, it isn't going away and it will come back at decreasing frequencies (I hope) for the rest of my life.

You don't really understand that as you hope that you'll just get discharged and that will be it. It may be with some cancers but not, it seems, with bladder cancer at the level I had anyway.

I'll see if I lighten up a bit more tomorrow. At least it is Jazz night tomorrow and I will enjoy going to that and spending some time with my friends.

Funny mood

I've been in a funny old mood for a couple of days now. I'm not sure I understand all the reasons why - I can guess that it is a combination of things and I'm sure it is coming back to "routine" and I really don't do routine at all well. I couldn't hack a job that was the same day in and day out. This job has got a bit "samey" now and I suppose from being someone that had to walk into everyday and tackle whatever turned up, this can get quite dreary and like walking through treacle to get something done that, frankly, should only take a few hours.

I'm neither one thing or the other at the moment and it isn't depression although it is close, it is perhaps coming back to normality and the day to day trudge of life. Things just go on much the same everyday and it would be nice for it to be different occasionally.

No one likes an Operation

Least of all me. Not my usual cheery self today at all at work. Was a bit grumpy and a bit annoyed with just about everything really. Annoyed with the stuff left on my desk; annoyed that I feel not so great about my holiday and annoyed that I have to go in for a full blown operation and the needles and the other baggage that goes with the territory. I can see how some people just give up and finally refuse treatments and so on.


Interestingly enough, I just haven't convinced myself this time that this is necessary. I thought that the December Operation was it and that all would be over and every time something happened to me, I convinced myself that it would be the last time that I needed to have a cannula in my hand, go to theatre, wake up from a strange sleep, argue with the nurses about my inability to walk around a ward when I was connected to the bed and all the other "fun" things that happened to me last time. At each stage, it was my defence mechanism. This is the last time you'll need to do this or that I'd tell myself.


Obviously not then!


Oh well, I'm tired and I need to get some sleep. A has heard from L that she is alright and relaxing back in Buenos Aires ready to come home later this week. Goodness she has been away a whole month.


Talking to A tonight was interesting, it appears that she was one of only a very few who got Distinction in her exam. Some only got passes and there were very few merits awarded either. She really does work very hard and just looking at her notes and research you can see how much effort went into the project at the end. Good on her. It looks as if she has got her place secured and will travel up from here every day. Good on her I say.

The wake up call

The brain is great at forgetting things and also I have that sort of personality that throws bad experiences away and moves on. Enough sh1t happens that you need to dump it and move on. I'm relatively lucky to be able to do that and once it has happened and is over and the short term disappointment or whatever other experience I had is thrown away and only referred to when needed.

I'm just feeling a bit down at the moment as I know what is coming and I just need to get over this phase which looks at the downsides of what is coming. The upside should be that the results will prove where we go next. The positive side could be that this will be the last operation and that I'll go onto the challenging but probably better flexible cystoscopy...

In the overall scheme of things, I just have to go through this operation and then see what happens next. I forget, or I quickly forget, the fact that I have had a very serious condition and this is the territory. This is all for my own good but it still isn't great and it isn't something you'd choose to do.

So there you go - it is, I suppose, the shock of coming back off of holiday and finding the letter there telling you when you are going to get done.

Feeling quite low

Probably as a result of coming back from holiday, realising that the operation is less than 2 weeks away and remembering the mess I was in last time. Then there is the perennial "what am I doing?" question coming along. I'm back on my mid life crisis stuff. You know the sort of thing, "surely there is something I should be doing?" "Why am I not happy with things the way they are?" There just seems to be a cycle to this which at the moment finds me in depressed mood. I'm also going through the everything is cancer phase again. There is a small swelling in my mouth, some of my moles look dark, I had a bit of a cough the other day, my throat feels dry. Everyone of them is cancer but probably aren't. You just react to every little thing like that and yet I'm in good enough health really. I think it is just a phase again and the pattern is much like this as I get highs and lows all the time.

I don't consider myself to be a hypochondriac but just recently I've been given to this train of thought. Of course it is now well over 3 years since the first operation and my goodness how time has flown and how things have progressed on since then. I had the funniest moment on the ship when someone mentioned getting off at Tallinn and visiting the cigar bar. I almost felt like going along and sitting there and lighting one up as if to defy the cancer gods and sneer at them. What a bizarre thought.

I do hope I snap out of my current malaise. I really don't care to want to go to work or do anything at the moment and when I'm like this I am at my most destructive as I don't tend to do what I'm good at and that is think logically and measure my thoughts and actions. I am likely to go and do something stupid like quit my job or bark at someone.

Off to bed now and hope to shake this apathy for tomorrow.

Tired from all that walking

For the second day we have laid in and got up late. No problems with that - but pretty much as we felt that the holiday was going to be quite exhausting even though they missed two ports. I note that they also managed to do that on the previous cruise too. Some can't be helped due to the weather but a mechanical breakdown meant that in reality out holiday didn't actually have an end point and so was left in limbo. Unfortunately the people at P&O don't have that sort of mindset and the poor old Captain was left without much to calm down the passengers.

Some of the dyed in the wool types who actually haven't been on any other holiday or with any other company thought this was a reasonable stance - we missing 25% of the ports we were expecting to see didn't. Some poor soul was actually due to get off at Gothenburg but ended up trapped on the ship like we were. Mind you at least they were compensated properly and were able to fly back there. We had hardly enough compensation to get us to the airport. I still await a response to my complaint that I made on board. However, given their inability to inform us of anything in a half decent manner I'm not holding my breath on that.

It makes it sound like a bad experience which it wasn't really but we were amazed that they were so unprepared for something that appears to happen quite regularly with P&O. It was that their customer service and communication stank. I thought their strap line "Everyday is different" was a load of bollocks especially when stuck on the ship for 2 days longer than you planned to be as everyday was "the same".

I can't say that I am particularly looking forward to getting back to work on Monday or to getting myself prepared for the next lot of biopsies given the awful experience I had last time. I think I'll make the point this time when I go and see the pre-assessment people.

For pity sake now the other PC

My rather swish notebook PC has died. Typical and lucky I didn't destroy the photos on my camera after I downloaded them! The thing just expired which looks like an internal power supply fault. Of course it is out of warranty and of course it is the primary PC I use. Whilst it is backed up it isn't much use to me to transfer at the moment as it uses a different operating system to everything else.

So a trip to my local store to see if they can rectify is in order. It is a damn nuisance of course as it is also the PC I use for presentations.

2 weeks today and I'll be in hospital getting my biopsies done. Please, please, please let it be the last operation I have to go through. I am beginning to loose count now of these. I can understand though that they need to do this. It is pretty aggressive and they want to make sure before going along the next route. With recurrence always a possibility I suppose I ought to also be prepared for that as a possibility - waking up with more troubles than I went in with.

The holiday already seems a long way back in the distance.

Back Home

A great time but tinged with a few disappointments about the Ship but on balance we had a great time and we are still talking to each other. I'll get around to that later I'm sure but the other news is that I have the date for my operation - yes - full biopsies once again!

The problem with that is that I have managed, even with loads of walking almost everyday to put on a fair amount of weight. Oh well - it will be a challenge to see how much I can lose in a few weeks!

I've been well all the time we have been away and actually look like I have had holiday too as it was great weather unlike the UK which appears to have suffered a washout.

Just met up with A who also had a good time in Venice and Rome. L has sent a few messages saying all is OK in Argentina.

More when I get settled back home.

Final Countdown Begins

I have my check list to fulfil including the need to go up to the shops and buy myself some reading glasses. I was repairing my spare set when Mrs. F. tried to be helpful and as I was searching out a pair of pliers she straightened one of the arms against the lens with the inevitable consequence of shattering my lens :-( As luck would have it, they are only £5 a pair reading glasses and so I'm not that upset and can wander up to the Chemist to get some more.

The cars are switched on the drive, I need to check tyre pressures, put out the rubbish, unload the dishwasher and a few other chores and then go and collect Mrs. F. from work and we can get going.

I'm looking forward to the break - the weather doesn't look great, lots of rain everywhere but let's hope that it picks up a bit for us. As ususl the BBC long range forecast of a blisteringly hot summer (the 3rd time in three years they've said it) is, like the previous years, proving to be a bit of a punt in the dark! If they say it long enough, one year they may get it right.

I'll sign off for a while unless i decide to visit the cyber cafe on board and hope everyone keeps well in the next few weeks.

Watch out Baltic here I come

Packed, just about ready and logistics are worked out so as we go A returns and this time tomorrow we will be well at sea and halfway to Norway.

I am really looking forward to this now - I really do need a break too as I am just so damn tired all the time. I have my check list ready for the morning and then I can go and pick up Mrs. F from work and we can get down to Southampton and get away.

I missed the work get together but I wouldn't have been much company as I got off early and still managed to fall asleep on the train.

I've even managed to transfer my e-mails so I can (in theory) get them on the Ship if I wanted. Not sure I do but there you go.

AndyP dropped me a line and he is doing fine which is great news. I haven't contacted the Hospital, I will do so on my return though to find out when they want me in. August is good as nothing is happening but my diary for September is getting full up already!

What is it all about?

Out tonight with old school chums - good laugh, a few beers and life is great. I wasn't on top form but close. Holiday is so near I can taste it and I am really keyed up to go now. L has contacted us from Argentina and is having the time of her life - - oh for the opportunity when I was younger to have done that trip - she really is enjoying some down to earth experiences. Best one - she washed her knickers, hung them out overnight to find a minus 10 C had frozen them by the morning - great stuff and so many anecdotes for later - I envy her but I am SO proud of her achievement - she has worked so hard for it and deserves to go for the effort alone. I've been a bit hard on her as I have made her work for the whole thing but, nasty piece of work I am, I think that if you work for it and it is all your effort then you appreciate it so much more than just us paying for her to go.

It is still strange not having either of the girls at home but reassuring that they are independent and confident travellers at just 15 and 19 years old.

A has secured her Distinction in her Art Foundation and her place at University is now assured. She is pleased. I am also delighted for her. The examiner's remarks concur with my view that she has put a massive amount of effort into her work and the subtly of her work is way beyond her years. I always thought that our family were good in terms of artistic skills - I could be good if I practised and turned my attention to it. A's work is stunning and when I saw it recently (through the pain of the cost of the reproduction photos) it stood out as an excellent work of photographic art. I feel as if she is so many years in advance of me. I am a keen amateur and I can take the same photo as A but you would look at mine and say what a nice photo and look at hers and ask "what is around the corner or off frame?" Such is her eye for composition.

I kind of look at things and wonder if "my work here is done?" Both girls are ready to go onto whatever their career path holds for them and now, it is beyond my level of expertise and knowledge. My background being useful as a first from the University of Life can probably only give sound advice. theory and usefulness to even comprehend their chosen subjects is now beyond my ability to help.

Blogging at work

Surely the slippery slope here David?

Well, to tell the truth things are a bit slow here at the moment. The bottlenecks are often those I work for and until they release a piece of work back to me after review or unblock a road block for me, I can't get on. What I have done today has been accomplished and it is the middle of the afternoon and I could easily fall asleep or just go home and still get as much work done.

The tiredness continues to bug me though and not being active makes it worse somehow. It isn't anywhere as bad as it has been but even so I find it annoying that it still happens.

Oh well only two more days at work and I can get off and enjoy a break.

Planning and anticipation

I am looking forward to finalising holiday arrangements and after clearing up the last of my "to do" list this morning I watched the German GP and then got down to some serious research as I really haven't gone into details on a couple of the cities - Gothenburg and Helsinki figuring that I have time to do that especially on board as there are plenty of briefing sessions to attend.

No word from the Hospital still - I suppose there is still time but the NHS is struggling with Swine Flu. Someone in the village has it apparently. They are talking about suspending all routine and non essential operations to deal with the "pandemic" - yeah right.

Oh well - just another 3 days at work and we can zip off to our Baltic Cruise and two bits of trivia which I'm not sure I really wanted to know are that our Ship is about the size of ...........



The Titanic



The better news is that Cruising is statistically the safest holiday type :-) - unless you happen to be off the Somali coast that is I guess.