The Force Awakens

Do you see what I did there? Straight on the bandwagon! However in my case space travel and light sabres seem unlikely. There is probably plenty of the dark side lurking in my head and chest to require quite an impressive force.
The force I will put my faith in is our NHS. Science, commitment, hard work and limitless goodwill are powerful allies and I have seen all of these things in abundance since I started this process.

Before I go on. There was a story in yesterday's news that more and more NHS trusts are falling into deficit. What is actually happening is that they are underfunded. Our nation, one of the wealthiest on the planet, is choosing to put possibly the greatest health service in the world at risk in the name of some dubious 'austerity' budgeting.
Look around. We are spending money in huge quantity. Bomb Syrian civilians, no problem here is a blank cheque (and look, armaments shares have risen, result!)
£167 billion to put nuclear weapons in submarines. No problem, national prestige demands it.
No, it won't actually help fight terrorism and no, if Trump becomes US president and we can no longer look for friends in the west neither can we point the things west. Or probably anywhere without US permission.
Enough of a rant, but if someone tries to tell you that what the NHS needs to improve is less money please don't believe them. The task of government is to calculate how much money their public services need and to find that money. If efficiency savings can be made, brilliant but you can't find efficiency savings by imposing blanket 3% per annum cuts. And if your policy relies on driving the incomes of medical and other staff to poverty levels. Think again.

Some slightly better news this week. We had an appointment with an oncologist, Dr Lord at Ninewells hospital. This came with the result of a final test.
In lung cancer patients who have never smoked there is an increased chance that the cancer is caused by a specific genetic change. This was the final test whose results we got on Tuesday. My cancer is in this category.
What this means in practical terms is that the outcome may be a little better but that the drug I need to take, Afatinib, strictly speaking a biological control rather than chemotherapy, is taken as a daily tablet rather than intravenously. The side effects while still present are less severe. Scoots and plooks basically. Not necessarily much longer life but hopefully more of that in decent health.
Next appointment is on Christmas Eve when we will get the drugs. Then the process begins...

Pip and Great Expectations came back into my life this morning. Not in this case the much read and much loved classic. PIP in this case is a Personal Independence Payment and my expectations are limited to £82 per week. But all in all not a bad first step into our nations Benefit system.

After my last post I have done a bit of thinking about bravery. I think true bravery needs a choice to be made to risk life or limb. Fire fighters going into burning buildings, police officers confronting armed criminals or military personnel putting themseloves in harms way all rely on training and bravery to carry out their duties.
I can give another example of courage from my own family.
When we were small mum and dad had a photograph of a little girl hanging on the wall of their bedroom. I don't remember being told but we knew that she was our big sister and that she had died as a young child.
Over the years we learned more detail but very little of it from mum and dad.
Alison was 3 when she was killed in a hay fire in a shed at Ratho Mains in Midlothian on Easter Sunday 1957. By one of the coincidences that happen so often the farm is now owned by close friends of mine. In 1957 it was owned by equally close friends of mum and dad. Alison was outside with a slightly older child. A fire started and she was killed.
So far so tragic. The bravery came later.
I think the death almost broke mum, dad dealt with the decision by throwing himself into work. I don't doubt his bravery but it is mum's I want to talk about.
She was left with a gaping hole in her life and an eleven month old son, Donald.
Her bravery lay in the decision she now made. She and dad had three more children. But they barely shared their sadness with us. We knew she hated us playing with fire but not why.
And she filled Coal Farm with love. Having lost her daughter she made it a special place for her nieces of about the same age. As we boys grew older she chose to give us childhoods completely unburdened with her tragedy.
For my 40th birthday she gave me a wee photo album among all the fading photos of a gawky boy growing up was one little black and white picture of a toddler, a wee girl, about the age Daisy is now. She is looking into a pram containing a baby. The caption reads "you and your sister, who loved you".
True unselfish courage over most of a life.