On deadlines

Aye, it has been a while.
I have posted all these blogs on facebook and now facebook comes up with each posting as a memory, I was much more productive at the end of 2015 than I have been this autumn.
Part of the answer, of course, is deadlines.
I have had two spells as a student. Way back in the seventies as a science undergraduate (well, really an Agric but they eventually gave me a BSc) then again across the millennium as a humanities student (after many years of reasonably successful study I retired without  a degree). In both of these spells of study I was unable, or unwilling to write anything until the last possible moment before the deadline, or after if I thought I could get away with it.
And so it is with my blog.
Last winter I was confronted with the ultimate deadline, as looming death stood in front of me (there I go with the inept metaphors again. )
Not only did I have a deadline but I had something to say. Something that may have helped others but certainly helped me to absorb the reality of my situation.
And there was an audience. As a student the average, perhaps the maximum audience for anything I wrote was one. Two if you count myself, although I have never been very committed to rereading and revision.
Suddenly I was writing to an audience of several hundred, over a thousand according to google, but many of those, I suspect are readers coming back looking for the next instalment and rereading the old ones in the hope that they may have changed. Not only reading but providing positive feedback (although who would find fault with a tumour bearer's output. It may not be done well but we are surprised it is done at all, as one of the larger British brains of the last three centuries nearly said).

Anyway to my health. From day to day I feel very fit. I cough a bit, hardly surprising with several lumps of me/notme lurking in my lungs. Side effects are negligible at present; to the extent that I ponder whether the lack of symptoms mean that the benefial effects are also waning.
I have of course had a further scan and a meeting with Dr Lord. The scans showed that almost everything in lungs and brain was stable except that some of the smaller nodules (apparently the medical term for something not quite big enough to be called a tumour) in my lungs have grown a little; from around 3mm to almost 4mm.
In my fevered mind this is almost certainly caused by my uncharacteristic air of optimism in my last posting. To compensate I have adopted a more pessimistic attitude this trimester. My next scan  is at the end of January with an oncology meeting in early February. I will wait with my usual mixture of hope and fear.

Purely by coincidence my latest appointment with Dr Lord took place exactly a year after my accident which altered our lives almost as much as it altered Ben's wee Fiesta. Since then anniversaries have rushed by of scans and biopsies, of trips to Kirkcaldy and Dundee and on Christmas Eve  of my introduction to Afatinib.

It has been hard to choose which of these echoes of the tsunami of emotion which threatened to overwhelm our lives last winter should I commemorate with a blog?
In the end of course I have chosen 'none of the above'. It is the second of January. For the last 2 weeks the house has been a true family home. The hall has echoed with laughter and tears from grandchildren and nieces and nephews while adults enjoy the delicious meals that have flowed from the kitchen thanks to the efforts of Clare and her helpers. Alcohol has flowed in complete defiance of government recommendations.
But today I am alone in the house with time to reflect on  my predicament.

I find myself completely accepting that the little beggars I carry will kill me; maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but soon and... (but there my attempt to shoehorn Casablanca into my oeuvre grinds to a halt). At the same time I am in something very like denial. Like a Schrodingers grandfather I occupy two contradictory states of being at the same time.
Of course New Year is a time to look to the future not really to reflect on the past. So unless or until my rebellious non-small cells force a change I will continue to live life as I always have.  I will enjoy the achievements of my children and grandchildren. I will carry on my missionary work on behalf of locally produced free range eggs. It is entirely possible that there will be times when I shall drink to much and laugh almost enough.

 I have tried to avoid politics but I can't entirely. It seems highly likely that I will die while in Britain and America the nastiest right wing governments that I have known are in power. Both give strength to xenophobic and racist views and seem to be based on greed and hatred of the other.

Positivity and pessimism

In my earlier middle age I did a few arts courses at the Open University. This led to a degree of familiarity (no degree, alas, but that is a completely different story) with the dark arts of close textual analysis. I hesitate to try to define this technique for fear that some may read this who actually know what I am talking about, but I take it to mean the microscopic examination of words and combinations of words to try to divine the author's meaning or to prove a pet theory of the student or some combination of the above. 

This technique slipped unbidden into my mind after a nurse practitioner at Ninewells used the word "stable".

Now this wasn't as you might imagine a conversation about horses and their housing. 

A lovely, sympathetic nurse practitioner in the chemo day unit had noticed that the gap between my last CT scan and it's interpretation with my oncologist was much longer than usual (6 weeks). She took pity on my state of doubt and ran through a rough summary of the results. 

Her summary was positive as she was able to confirm that all the lung tumours were still shrinking and that the larger brain tumour was stable.

This was the moment when my memory of close textual analysis twitched into action.

Certainly stable is not overtly threatening but a large tumour which has been shrinking but is now stable has stopped shrinking and might still be a problem.

Before I spread alarm and despondency I should jump a couple of weeks to that long awaited meeting with Dr Lord, the consultant oncologist.

As usual we looked at 2 sets of scans.

The lung, which at the end of last year resembled the Indonesian archipelago now resembles (and here my quest for geographical analogy stumbles. A group of much smaller and fewer islands?).

And as for that worrisome brain tumour? 

It turns out that "stable" in this instance means so small as to be hard to locate precisely. More calcified remnant than active tumour.

The side effects too are minimal at the moment, and I came away from that oncology meeting with the interesting news that longer eyelashes might also be a side effect of the glorious Afatinib. I don't know the practical implications of this yet. 

So the news really couldn't be much better, so good in fact that, while out delivering eggs last week, I twice (I hope only twice) announced myself as "back from the dead". Tasteless I know and rather premature but a symptom of how I am feeling at the moment.

Throughout this novel experience I have balanced my natural pessimism (which means only that I prefer nice surprises to unpleasant ones) with a consistent positivity and determination that I will keep my sense of humour as long as humanly possible.

As someone quite famous once said: this is not the end, nor even the beginning of the end, but it may be the end of the beginning. Hope has fledged although expectation is some way off.

Hello to Jason Isaacs

Well, it's been a while.

Before I start to talk about myself I need to reintroduce Elton. Elt to friends and family of whom I am proud to be one.
If I had started to draw up an identikit picture of a son in law it would have looked very like Elt. Loves craft beer, malt whisky and Nikki (although not in that order). He has a comprehensive toolkit and knows how to use it. He also has a comprehensive collection of the most appalling jokes and isn't afraid to use them.
I mention him not to say how much I admire him (although I do) or to make him blush (although he may) but to tell you about his fundraising efforts this year.
He has set himself the task of raising at least £1000 for Macmillan Cancer Support. To do this he is going to try to run 1000km in 2016. He is going to achieve this while holding down a full time job, fully enjoying his family life and helping his father in law to develope his beer and malt tasting skills.
I saw at first hand the wonderful work Macmillan do, and the great people that do the work, when dad was in his last illness.  They need all the support we can give.
I will share his link on Facebook when I post this there. I hope anyone else who shares the blog will also share the just giving link.

Anyway to me. An endlessly fascinating subject.
You may have noticed that I haven't added to this blog for weeks. This is partly because there is little news about my health and because my not terribly interesting normal life has taken up a huge amount of time this summer.
I had pictures taken at the end of July of my lungs and brain. I haven't had the full oncologist debriefing yet (Sept 15) but they show no tumour growth and shrinkage in most of them.

Apart from the tumours, which cause me very littlet trouble I have side effects from Afatinib. These are still there but well controlled by the small but well endowed collection of drugs and creams I take (mostly Imodium I confess).

For someone who can't work the egg business has taken up an indecent amount of my energy this summer. Finding holiday relief is always a little tricky but it is controllable. The rule that I try to stick to is one at a time. This doesn't allow for the possibility of a driver injuring himself while a colleague is on holiday. This of course is what happened. Graham gets his plaster off on Monday and we hope will be able to resume duties in a week or two.

And my holiday is nigh. A few days on Skye with a weather permitting  boat ride to St Kilda (the rocky outcrop in the North Atlantic, not the suburb of Melbourne, Australia.
St Kilda is just about Clare's favourite place on the planet but I have never been. Really looking forward to it.

Live long and prosper

There's still a light at the end of the tunnel.

Quite a bit has happened but nothing that threatens my hope.
There was a moment when we did honestly think that light was a bloody big train. But it turned out to be work related and faded long before it got to us revealing that glorious light still shining.

There has been another scan. I am not a connoisseur of CT scans but to me this one seemed unusual. I was led out of the hospital and into a well appointed artic trailer by a guy from the north of England. Not I hasten to add a Geordie, the mistake I made, but from Sunderland. I guess the former can easily be recognised by their lack of Premier league football next season.
Such is the demand for CT scanning at present that Ninewells is bringing in a Larry and radiographers at £3000 per day to keep up with the backlog.

Anyway, despite being privately supplied, both the scan and its pictures went well. The tumours are still shrinking if not quite so quickly.
I was sent away for another 3 months, feeling fine and with growing hope.

I met a friend at a bus stop in St Andrews a few days ago. He broke the news that his wife had been diagnosed with a different form of lung cancer, had had an operation to remove half a lung and was now having chemo (or radio) therapy. The comment he made that made me think was that they had had a similar initial appointment with an oncologist as Clare and I. They had been given quite a lot of information about likely survival including the statistic that their cancer had a likely  5 year survival rate of 30%.
We had nothing like this which made me curious. I have studiously avoided such statistics but this meeting led me to look up my non-small cell stage 4 illness on Google.
I rather regret doing it and I quite understand why we didn't get the numbers chat. The figure for my illness at 5 years was 1%
I hasten to add, before I am accused of spreading alarm and despondency throughout the realm, that these figures don't include the effect that Afatinib has had. I mention this only to remind myself that the tumour generator I am harbouring was a pure bastard and that I was very fortunate to present myself to the NHS after this brilliant new drug became available.
It also reminds me not to turn hope too quickly to expectation and how much I have to thank the NHS for.
In the meantime there is a party to look forward to. The 21/60 which will jointly celebrate my 60th and Ben's 21st (see what we did there?). Our closest friends and family will eat, drink and dance the night away. Moderation may be postponed for a few hours.
Slainte

Just another Thursday: An interval. With tumbleweed

Just another Thursday: An interval. With tumbleweed: It is surprisingly easy to forget you are ill. Well at least it is easy if you have as few symptoms as I have. The good news is that for ...

An interval. With tumbleweed

It is surprisingly easy to forget you are ill. Well at least it is easy if you have as few symptoms as I have.

The good news is that for the last couple of weeks my side effects have receded. My visits to the lavvy are much less eventful; in fact I worry as much about visiting too rarely as I worry about earth shittering events. Even the rash is healing under the tender ministrations of Clare and the Diprobase cream she rubs into my spotty bits every evening. The bottles are not an elegant addition to our dressing table, but then again neither is the array of pills which festoon the bookshelves next to my bed. Adapt and survive so they say.

Anyway the pills are balanced by one of my most treasured possessions. Treasured both because of what it contains and for who it came from. 

It is an as yet unopened bottle of Port Ellen malt. There is a bit of controversy in the family whether this sort of whisky should be sipped or kept as an investment. I come down on the sipping side, and I know who I hope to sip it with.

So, I was talking about the progress of my medication. All good, as I said, but there is a vein of pessimism that runs though me, the thought that every silver lining must have a cloud; the light that I see at the end of this dark tunnel I find myself in is probably the 11.15 to Edinburgh Waverley. Thus the thought lurks at the back of my mind that the lack of side effects probably means that dear, dear Afatinib has stopped working altogether.

I hasten to add that nothing but my innate pessimism supports these thoughts. Anyway my latest CT scan is arranged for 29th April and within a couple of weeks of that date I will have another meeting with my Oncologist and a fuller idea of what the next few months have in store for the tumour rich Peddie corpus.

There is of course a party coming up. Obviously the coincidence that Ben would be 21 a couple of weeks after I turned 60 was planned for from the very beginning (NOT). Ben has been thinking about and planning for his party for round about 2 years. We had a shed at Kilduncan chosen and had even started to clear it out for the celebration when THURSDAY happened. 

This is the time for a confession. Ben had planned a slightly larger party but as soon as we heard about my diagnosis he instantly agreed to the joint party, but sacrificed almost half of the friends he had hoped to invite. (perhaps a poor choice of word, clearly the sacrifice didn't include ritual slaughter on a graven altar, merely a reduction of the number of names on a list). If you are one of those friends please accept my gratitude. I will drink to you at the party, quite possibly more than once.

There is another thorny issue concerning the party.

Presents. 

When I think about what I want for my birthday I immediately slip back to early November when my hopes and expectations so suddenly changed. It seemed all too possible that I wouldn't make it to 60. To be able to celebrate in my brothers shed on the farm my father bought and a few yards from the house where my grandparents lived is the greatest gift I have ever had.

And I owe it to all of you. Without the NHS my fears might have been realised and everyone who has ever paid tax in this country or who has ever taken a job where you didn't earn enough to pay tax has contributed to my treatment. The chance to spend a happy evening with my closest friends and to meet Ben's friends is more than enough for me.

Ben's case is slightly different. If you ask him what he wants he may well gibber something about giving money to a cause which I will come up with.  On this occasion (and only this occasion) please ignore him.

He is about to be 21 and one of the pleasures of that milestone is opening the presents that your friends have chosen. Don't deprive him of this. Please give him exactly what you would have done, no more and no less.

(Oh, and if I make it to 70 I will expect handsome gifts.)

Sensible warm motion

Somewhere in the large amount I have read over the last half century I recall that someone (and it may well have been George Eliot in Middlemarch; her writings are essentially distilled wisdom) wrote that if you correspond every day then there is always plenty to say but if you leave your writing for a couple of months then there is too little to say.
Well I have left this for a little over 3 weeks so lets hope my muse hasn't buggered off to the pub without me.

You will be as relieved as I am to hear that my afatinib has been restored to me. After the dramatic effect it had in its first 2 months of service i would hate to contemplate life without it. Although I should warn you that this is no recreational drug. Well at least not unless anyone particularly enjoys the feeling of arse on porcelain and the sensation of the world falling out of your bottom, fast.
I watched a documentary on Brewdog last night. Part of their mission statement is 'we blow stuff up'. That is the essence of my visits to the smallest room at present. Not entirely fun, but a long long way from miserable.
My other symptom (apart from shrinking tumours, as I keep reminding myself) is dry and intermittently itchy skin. This has its compensations. Each evening as we retire Clare rubs cream into the itchiest parts of my anatomy. Back, chest and head; before any smutty thoughts take root.

 Quite a large proportion of my thought are in Chamberlain St, St Andrews tonight.
Ben has decided to stand for the sabbatical post of Athletic Union President. For the past week he has been campaigning hard and as I type the on-line  voting process is under way. Unfortunately for Ben what should have been one of the greatest weeks of his life has been spoilt by a persistent earache. By this time tomorrow he will know how many have voted for him. Hopefully the earache will subside in time for him to really make his mark as he spends his first year in elected office.
I should mention that he is the only candidate. But a large vote will give his presidency added legitimacy.
I am rather in awe of his self assuredness and focus. Pride doesn't really do justice to my feelings, although he didn't have to get elected to make me feel that way, and neither do Nikki and James. My pride is in their essence not in their achievements.

As you may notice it has been a few days since I have visited my blog. In the few days since I wrote the beginning of this Ben has been so ill with tonsilitis that he came home and slept in his old bed for a couple of nights. And Scotland won a resounding victory over France at Murrayfield. 

That put me to thinking about the future.
Pleasant though it is to contemplate past campaigns (and if you are reading this on 17th March which, from where am sitting, is tomorrow; it will be 26 years precisely since Scotland last won a 5 nations Grand Slam) it is next Saturday's match against Ireland where all the interest lies.

This short contemplation of the past and future in rugby allows me to slip in a sweeping generalisation (sorry).
The past is essentially just stories. Some of them make us wince, others give a warm glow. We can choose to learn from them, or not.
The future is life. All our plans and expectations are there. Enjoy. I intend to. (I confess that as I type this I am watching last Sundays rugby against France. Consistency never my strong point)