Dogs, Chickens and Vintage China

 < Previous  | Next > I had plenty of new information to occupy my mind, I was going to be subjected to an absolute avalanche of, frankly, atrocious side effects from the radiotherapy and chemotherapy and into the bargain they wanted to pull two more of my teeth out, possibly by the end of that very week. But, by the end of the week there was a lot of deafening silence from the NHS which was a cause for some anxiety and celebration at the same time.  If they don't pull the teeth out then the ongoing Barrel of Tit's syndrome will almost certainly kick in... ooh you haven't heard of said syndrome, you'll have to return to issue one to read an explanation as I'm certainly not going over all that iredeemable pish again.  Anyhow it would definitely kick in and I would get osteoradionecrosis of the jaw and end up with no teeth and no jawbone into the bargain.  However on the up side, and let me tell you this is a considerably large upside, in the short term the...

< Previous  - Next > So the cancer has been cut out of my throat, in the discharge meeting the nurse told us that they had removed not only the left tonsil but some of the tissue around it. She also told us that my tonsil bed looked horrific.  I couldn't verify this as by the next morning I couldn't open my mouth wide enough to use an inhaler which was going to be an issue if I had an asthma attack. What?...I didn't mention that I also have asthma. I am basically a fucking wreck, if I was a dog they'd have put me down long ago. When we got home from the hospital I laid out all the drugs that they had given me, I had paracetamol and oral morphine. No ibuprofen and worse, no codeine.  This was somewhat of a problem, oral morphine has very little effect on neuropathic pain i.e. pain from damaged nerves. There were a number of nerves around my tonsil that were almost certainly quite upset if not actually damaged. The removal of the wisdom tooth on the left side had mo...

   < Previous  | Next > It's eight days before Christmas, tomorrow they will operate and the consultant had already told me that the 4 and 5th days tend to be the worst.  With any luck I will be fine to have Christmas Dinner on the 6th day after surgery.  If you are new to this exciting and entertaining ramble about a middle aged mans health issues, alright alright, can we agree on late middle aged, then you won't have a clue what I'm wittering on about and might want to go back and catch up. Sorry, Ocean, the sentence length insists on growing beyond what is reasonable. Right, where was I, sentence length, no, wittering...hmm maybe, but no I think I was about to describe what parts of me the lovely cancer team had decided to remove from the vicinity of my mouth and throat.  When I was first told that the cancer was a tumour that was hiding under my left tonsil this had seemed tolerably good news. Having your tonsils removed is a routine operation it ...

  < Previous  -  Next >  Limbo has returned with a vengeance, I have no clue what is going on and nobody seems particularly inclined to tell me. An interesting side effect of the endoscopy was the nausea and stomach aches subsided and pretty much disappeared.  I hate to admit this but I'm fairly sure they were psychosomatic.  I am worried sick about having cancer so QED I feel nauseous. I am diagnosed with a mass lesion in my stomach and start having stomach aches, I am told that there is no mass lesion and the stomach aches magically disappear. Not sure why the nausea stopped but maybe the low grade terror has just abated and therefore no more nausea. What was now exercising my mind was my, frankly, enormous motorcycle.  Over the last few years as I have, frankly, got older and shorter...what the fuck...I have become more enamoured of smaller motorcycles. At one point I had a Honda 125 Grom which is about as small as you can get. I looked ridicu...

< Previous  - Next > So, to return to my previous preoccupation with our preconceptions about cancer. Cancer is discovered, surgery is scheduled, cancer is removed, patient lives happily ever after.  On the flip side surgery is cancelled or delayed cancer gets worse, patient dies. This scenario was exercising me somewhat and I was quite depressed about the whole situation. The one thing that was worrying me was the blood thinners. No one had given me any time scale as to when the surgery would happen, and no one had mentioned stopping the blood thinners.   The first thing I did was stop taking the blood thinners the very next day and substituted aspirin, I've been on low dose aspirin for the last 14 years and so far the brain has remained intact so it must have been doing some good.  The only issue was I had no idea whether the aspirin would be allowed before the surgery and I had no contact details, I couldn't ring the cancer clinic as it did not appear t...

< Previous  -  Next > We have many preconceptions about cancer, these are fed by a deluge of slightly inaccurate information from books, magazines, television and most of all these days, bloody wellness influencers.  I am starting to come to to the conclusion that there is a Darwinian imperative lurking in the pernicious trend of believing every fucking thing that is on the internet rather than a proper scientific double blind trial conducted by people who have been studying their field for years. The conclusion is this, we should encourage this trend as much as we can as it will thin out the herd for the rest of us. Apologies, cynical grumpy old man came to the fore a bit there, lets get back to cancerous inaccuracies, watch any series on the TV and a protaganist will get cancer, they will be rushed to a hospital that is the only one willing to try a new procedure, the cancer will be removed and then we will see them celebrating with their tearful relatives.  ...