Below, note from Kathy Lette, chum of Kylie...so, one step closer...hurrah!
> Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2006 09:03:42 +0100
> Subject: Hi
>>
> Hi. Have passed this onto Kylie's P.|A. It's such a
> wonderful project.
> Congrats.
> Cheers, K
A Kylie endorsement, says crack agent Tracy, will make even Simon and Schuster "run with the book" - despite very long fax from them on Friday explaining yet again just how low in the pecking order I am...
This is really good. Take Off Your Party Dress (proceeds of which, you won't need reminding, to cancer trials research at Mount Vernon Cancer Centre) has an Amazon sales ranking already - somewhere in the low billions, but never mind - even though it hasn't been published yet. That, everybody who's pre-ordered, is thanks to you, and very crack agent Tracy tells me it is amazing!! Thank you everybody.
P.S. Still training though Sunday morning, Chany....and that goes for you too, Tracy.
To everybody who's arrived via the Guardian, hello, and the reason it's running shoes is here
My crocs are cancer-related. The reason I wear them is because one of the - so far, undocumented - side effects of herceptin is that it shreds your nails, and I am repeatedly having to have (look away now, non cancer-sufferers) whole toe-nails removed, wear huge bandages, and consequently...crocs.
When I mentioned this side-effect to my doctors they said they didn't think it was herceptin, that it was probably caused by taxotere. However, the nail-shredding started nearly a year after my last dose of taxotere, but pretty quickly after I started herceptin. When I told a nurse who'd given a lot of herceptin to patients about the nail shredding she said she'd had other women showing the same symptoms. So I told Dr Ostler again, who said: "well, it's all down to the way these things are reported back from the patients". Anybody else experiencing the same on herceptin, do say...or, indeed, vice versa.
P.S. For all - most of whom I have given birth to - who say there is not much fund-raising going on so far on this blog, and I'd better start upping the intensity of my weekly runs, herewith possibly the most dull picture ever to appear on a blog. One cheque, made out to the Mount Vernon CTRT appeal, amounting to the sum of the money I've received so far for Take Off Your Party Dress:
Meanwhile, Tracy, very crack agent, is off to Frankfurt Book Fair next week to sell, let us hope, many rights.Download Dina_Rabinovitch.tif
The best comment ever about crocs is that they make you look like Shrek's mother, but, as it happens, Flavius Josephus also had them down absolutely pat, when he said: "as for ourselves, we neither inhabit a maritime country, nor do we delight in merchandise".
I'd only ever seen them in Israel but apparently you can get them here too and needless to say there is a pink ribbon one for breast cancer awareness month.
Interesting facts about the blogosphere. This is an infant blog, still in its first, trial, free month with Typepad. This means that if you type this blog's name into Google, you will not find it for some time. But, if, on the other hand, you type the phrase "famous people wearing crocs" into the Google search engine, why, then, this blog comes up on the first page.
Found this on Lowebrow. He's right, it is a striking photograph.
Taxotere, the drug which cuts the risk of breast cancer returning by a third, is finally going to be available on the National Health Service. This is good news; taxotere was my first introduction to the idea of "trial drugs", to finding out that here in England (taxotere has been approved for use for nearly a year in Scotland, and in America they've been using it for years) if you want the best available drugs you probably have to join a trial. I had four doses of taxotere as part of the TAC trial at the end of 2004.
But what they don't tell you in the headlines - like this one in today's Daily Mail reporting the news about taxotere: "NHS breast cancer drug can save 600 every year" - is that the other huge problem is not just the availability of drugs: it's the acute shortage of chemotherapy nurses qualified to put those drugs into us, the patients, a problem I hear about all the time from the oncologists at Mount Vernon. Treating cancer successfully is partly about treating it fast, and women are having to wait too long to receive even the readily available drugs because of the nursing shortage. You can have all the drugs in the world, but if there's nobody trained to give them to you it's about as much use as that other frequently used headline, the one that tells us that the cure for cancer is "within reach".
Our sukkah is up. Sukkot is the one where Jews go and live outside for a week. Our wooden booth is up now, and in ten days we'll be eating outside in coats and wellington boots, probably. Which is fine because like practically every other journalist in London we spent time this summer camping in tipis in Cornwall. For other, hardier types, the tipi experience with its wooden shower and loo units, cleaned daily by a hardworking team, was not quite the edge of civilisation, but for my lawyer husband – climbing ever further up coastal paths, deeply engaged in surreal conversations about ex-Beatles while attempting to stop losing mobile phone contact with his divorcing client Heather McCartney – and our brood of teenage girls and their hair straighteners, it was quite as far as anybody wanted to get.
At the same time I was mid-talks with my doctors about how much further out I could go in search of a cure for cancer. I thought I'd have to go to New York for the latest, hottest, newest drug, 17 AAG, but it turns out they are experimenting on people here too. Very reassuring. And my first appointment is next week, just as Sukkot begins. How much further on the edge is it possible to live?
This is a past sukka, and this, is the sukka so far this year
in its lovely, tranquil, non-overlooked edge-of-civilisation setting.
We have, in the past, done gaudy, although last year we went minimalist on decorations. No decisions reached about this year yet.
P.S Still no word from Kylie - still fair enough - but my phone was on top of the washing machine.
