Dogs, Chickens and Vintage China

< Previous  -  Next >   Now I was freshly MRI'd and CT'd the next step would be to visit the cancer clinic.  Luckily this was the very next day and as I have explained before I now was required to have someone come in with me, cancer has it's own rules. Mind you if I was going to be informed that I had to get my affairs in order and don't buy anything online that might take a week or two to deliver then perhaps this was a good idea. Helen and I were driven into town by my niece and dropped off at the Bristol Dental Hospital, yeah, weird, I know. Both you and I were expecting oncology but hey ho. This is my actual first foray into the world of the cancer patient, let me tell you, there are bloody loads of us. The clinic was pretty much bursting at the seams with, mainly, portly men of a certain age. I fitted right in. The aforementioned NHS efficiency was obviously taking a day off as we waited nearly an hour, which made me feel right at home, before a nurse cal...

< Previous  -  Next > Limbo is annoying, it allows your brain to come up with all sorts of horrific scenarios, it also inhibits your ability for rational thought.  I had, by now ,gone past the point of gibbering to myself "Oh shit, oh shit, I'm going to die"  We are basically fairly unsophisticated animals and despite our towering intellects, or not in my case, 99.9% of our reactions to the world around us are handled by instinct. We have free will I hear you say, do we bollocks, as both prey and predator we have a very basic fight or flight response to danger. This is how the human race is still here after several million years of evolution, not nestling comfortably inside the stomach of one of the larger cats for instance. When we sense danger we will get ready to fight or flee. Our bodies drop a shit ton of adrenaline into our system and in the case of say, Mike Tyson, launches him immediately into attack mode. Alternatively if you are me, the reaction is "F...

< Previous - Next > It's Friday night, today a very nice doctor told  me I have mouth cells in my lymph node, not quite sure how this works but as far as I can tell, I have cancer, somewhere, but nobody knows where. This has caused me to have mouth cells in my lymph node, what the actual fuck?  I don't know about you but I can't help imagining a lymph node slowly developing a little mouth. This is not very helpful. My overwhelming feeling is that mouth cells should stay in my mouth where they belong and not migrate around my body and frighten the life out of people.  I'm lying in bed that evening feeling somewhat under the weather as I seemed to have picked up a cold, pondering whether I am no longer going to outlive the dog. This is actually a plus as the worst day of my life by far was when we had to have our dog Henry put down. I hate to say this but it was literally somewhat worse than when my parents died, I know, I know but what can I say, it is what it is....

Next >>  In the last few weeks my body has decided that is doesn't like me and has done everything in it's power to, frankly, piss me off. I suffer from a little known syndrome called "The Barrel of Tit's" this is described thusly, I am so lucky that if I fell into a barrel of tits I would come up sucking my own thumb. As some of you know some years ago I had an inordinately large amount of mini strokes, most people have one or two.  This was not good enough for me, not by half, oh no, I had to have roughly 30 or so. Not joking, I actually lost count after 25. These entertaining incidents were preceded by my mouth and tongue becoming numb. Well, they eventually diagnosed what the problem was, I was a fat boy with diabetes, high blood pressure and, crucially, a mid left cerebral artery that had a narrowing that was gathering up all the lovely fat in my blood and firing it into the left side of my brain. This was fourteen years ago, a fourteen years that has b...