Dogs, Chickens and Vintage China

 < Previous Helen and I weren't able to spend sunny summer days wafting around the Somerset countryside in a bike and sidecar like some modern day Darby and Joan.  Why we would be like Darby and Joan I have no idea, it just sounded apposite. Who the fuck were Darby and Joan anyway and more pertinently did they have a sidecar, I suspect not.  However nonetheless any sidecar'ing was strictly verboten due to my fairly extraordinary mechanical ineptitude. It didn't matter what I did I couldn't get the fucking sidecar attached to the bike. Day after day in glorious sunshine I would repair to the garage, haul the ridiculously large garage door open, this in itself was annoying, the garage door was electric but the mechanism had died years ago and now I had to heave it up by main strength to get the bloody thing open. To add insult to injury it was impossible to open from the outside and had a nasty habit of working it's way off of one of it's tracks and becoming im...

< Previous  - Next > I left you at the end of the last issue having introduced an astonishingly attractive oncologist whom I had never met before. She didn't remain in my life for long but she did ask all the usual questions. "Is your weight stable and are you eating more now, I see from your notes that this has been an issue" "My weight is pretty stable and I can at least eat now, if not very much so I'm not putting any weight on which is a concern for Helen but to be honest I'm quite happy to stay at 65 kilos, but I guess I won't be that lucky" "Oh, you never know", she smiled "Some people never put the weight back on after treatment" This was rather marvellous news, I like being 65 kilos despite apparently looking like Gollum when clad only in socks and boxers. "Can you tell me why are you not able to eat much, is it because you still can't taste things" "Oh, no, that's no longer a problem, my sense...

 < Previous  - Next > It has probably been seriously remiss of me not to keep you all updated with the latest exciting news from the Acheson-Crow household, well at least to tell you whether I'm going to drop precipitately from my rather precarious twig. I think what I need to do is return to late April where you last saw me throwing up rather copiously and testing multiple machines at Fowlers Motorcycle Emporium. The throwing up, thank the Lord, came to a very welcome, abrupt end not long after our last conversation and apart from a brief reappearance a couple of weeks ago has not returned. Eating however is a rather more complicated affair, it would seem that I have become, to not put too fine a point on it, a toddler. How so? I hear you ask, and thereby hangs, another tale. The specialist nurse who told me that it would be at least 3 months before I was approaching something like normality was pretty much right apart from the fact that normality is now...different. Fi...

< Previous  | Next > I started writing this nearly 5 months ago when the muse suddenly left me and I had no urge to write at all.  It would appear that I can only write whilst properly ill. Anyhow the following is the last thing I wrote back in April.... This is a bit of a turn up for the books, only two days since my last missive and I am back at the keyboard. Those of you who have been following my, for the want of a better word, progress or maybe more pertinently regress.... Doh, now I've lost my train of thought, I'm fairly sure that the last sentence has become an orphan and makes little or no sense.  Right yes, if you have been following my progress you will have been very pleased with my announcement right at the end of the last blog that I had, after five days, finally had a poo. I had eaten actual food and I can report that I went to bed that night pleasantly full and didn't throw up, not once. As I said, things may be looking up. The next day was a Monday ...

 < Previous  | Next > As I have previously averred, cancer does not play by the rules that we have assigned to it. Most people, me included, are wilfully blind to how a cancer diagnoses plays out.  Frankly, we avoid it like the plague, cancer is scary and can be avoided, especially by the male of the species, by taking ones head and burying it firmly in the sand.  We are like a small child hiding under the bedsheets, if I can't see the monster then the monster can't see me. It is six months, almost to the day since that first Spanish radiologist, or possibly sonographer, did the ultrasound on my neck and frightened the life out of me by saying, "Ah, yes, you have a lump on your lymph node". Well to be fair, he actually scared me much more by saying,  "I'll need to stick a needle in this". Things have gone rapidly downhill ever since, although, re-reading my first blog I was moaning somewhat persistently about being overweight, this, it turns out, i...

< Previous   | Next > It’s the end of week 5 of chemo and radiotherapy. Not much has happened of note. My life has distilled down to 4 distinct things, work, radiotherapy, a soupcon of television and sleep. This does not make for very scintillating blog writing.   To pick up from where we left off, Helen and I had staggered to the car overburdened with Fortisips and returned to Butcombe like medically challenged Father Christmases, laden with gifts that no bugger in his right mind would want. We had many people round for a meal on the Saturday night and I cooked a tofu and mushroom curry with coconut cream. I supplemented this with Mediterranean Rice and Lentils as the amount of people coming kept exponentially increasing until I lost count. There was a certain amount of uncertainty on my part as I couldn’t taste the curry and had to rely on other people to taste it and tell me whether it was OK.  I on the other hand was reprising Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee...