Take Off Your Running Shoes

Living experiment

Well, this is what tykerb looks like, bright orange, five of them a day, and I'm Mount Vernon's first tykerb customer. By the way I keep meaning to say - having got ill and never followed up my last "experiment" postings - that I didn't make myself sick by stopping the capecitabine; the symptoms I had were the sign that the cancer had returned, although to start with the doctors thought it was the drugs causing the symptoms. But anyhow, here we go with the latest...

You take the tykerb with capecitabine - synergy is cancer doctors' current buzzword, they're looking for the drugs that working together do the trick - and this is what my kitchen counter looks like these days: awash with medicines, of which I have to say that my favourite by far is the morphine they've given me to counter tumour back-ache. They tell me it's not addictive, but I am certainly growing very attached to it. I have morphine tablets, two a day, and then they've also given me a bottle of the stuff in a liquid form that I can just swig at will...you are probably all getting quite jealous now.

This reminds me so much of grandparents' kitchens, that sense of seeing lots of medicine packets on the side by the kettle. I didn't realise until I read this - with its sentence "enough already with the renal stents" - that Roth describes stents in Everyman (even though I read Everyman twice last year), but I'm glad to know it, and am searching through the novel as I write to find the stent descriptions, because if they're good enough for Philip Roth, then I'll take half a dozen...

Another recipe

Maybe it's my background, but I keep thinking as long as I eat, I will be alright. For the past weeks, I've lost weight no matter how much food I force down - apparently there's a word for this, catabolic, which means tumours consume calories voraciously. A lot of the time it has been hard to eat, but following the stent operation, and as I have started to get better from the "yellow peril" the following has been my food of choice. It's Anthony's mother's Myrna's recipe, via her good friend Gloria, I think, and here it is:

Fruitcake

1/2 lb butter/Tomor
1/2 lb caster sugar
1/2 lb plain flour
4 eggs slightly beaten

and here comes the good bit: 500 grms fruit mix, made up from dried: dates (chopped), mango, pineapple, apricots, sour cherrries, cranberries and also one third of a bar of good, dark chocolate chopped into not too small pieces.

Oven 150 degrees centigrade

Cream butter and sugar; add egg and flour alternately, then the fruit which has been thoroughly mixed

bake one and a half hours, or until skewer comes out clean

Take it from me, this is good food.

The recipe

I made it to Jewish Book Week, and people said, "you look so well, it must be some consolation to you." And this is funny, because last week, my oncologist was away, and so in the midst of last week's medical crisis I was seen by another oncologist who said, "goodness, you look absolutely fine, you don't need any of this urgent medical treatment." Then, later that day, they called me to say the operation was being scheduled "immediately".

"Oh, why the turnaround?" I said.

"Your blood counts," they answered grimly.

Yesterday I saw my oncologist again, back from his week's holiday - most of which, I have to say, he spent reassuring me down a crackly phone line - and I asked him again, what had changed everybody's mind, after the stand-in oncologist pronounced me fit and healthy-looking. "The count had jumped 40 points, which is a lot," he said.

So, for the record, allow me to tell you how it's done. I did - by the way - tell the stand-in oncologist this; I said, 'you know, I'm wearing make-up'....

It's like this: Creme de la Mer the treatment fluid foundation (expensive but worth every penny); Rimmel Volume Flash instant thickening mascara; Mac Illusionary Burning Ambition eyeshadow (that's green/gold in non-makeup speak), and Boots No 7 Moisture Drench lipstick on lips and cheeks.

And before I went out to JBW I had to lie on my bed without moving for a full forty-five minutes, and when I came home from doing the talk I shook and shook for about thirty minutes. But for a while there in the middle of the day, I was fine, and it's nice to be reminded what normal is like. Tomorrow I start the tykerb/lapatinib cure...

Changing colour

Well, the stent is doing its job apparently because people have started saying "you look less yellow..." But it's like when you change your hair colour, you never can tell on yourself...

I did though, meet the kindest nurse during the latest of my tours of the local hospitals. This hospital was called Chase Farm, and it's another random collection of buildings, a bit like Mount Vernon. In the Surgi Centre, where I was admitted, you have no rooms, just cubicles which are closed off with red curtains. The nurse came in to get me changed for the operation, and was looking at me to check what clothes I needed to have off before putting on one of those excellent hospital gowns. She's studying my multi-layered tops, and then she says, "What? surely not? you've had a mastectomy?" Yes, I said. It was just nice, the straightforward, and shocked way she said it - quite often the nurses look at you and make no comment, but she was just so direct and sympathetic. When you meet a nurse like that, you realise just what a valuable profession nursing is.

The surgeon was great too, wielding his pethidine with great "you'll like this" flourishes, and so, having now spent so many, many days in bed I am definitely going to be normal-coloured for this.

My daughters' school

Not to be outdone by the fantastic generosity of Guardian readers (scroll down), my daughters' school is entering the fund-raising:

HASMONEAN HIGH SCHOOL
JEWISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS MOVEMENT

Executive Headteacher: Mr. Martin Clark


Dear Parents,

Following the success of last years performance in aid of Cancer Research UK, Hasmonean Girls’ Tzedaka Society are proud to present the 'Hasmo Showcase 2', in aid of the Mount Vernon Hospital Cancer centre.

Mount Vernon is launching a £1 million appeal this year, which will enable it to build a new research centre and expand its research team in order to continue its important work in finding desperately needed cures for cancer.

Please see the attachment for details about the showcase, we really need your support in order to help this very worthy cause. We look forward to seeing you there!,

Thanking you in advance.

The Hasmonean Girls’ Tzedaka Society

They're putting on a talent show next Wednesday...

What's everybody doing???

I'm going to hospital tomorrow to have something called a stent put in, and meanwhile what's everybody in my house doing? Cooking, helping me pack?? No, they're all reading - cos hurrah! we've got the first two copies of the book!!!!!

Yoga skills and fireworks

How bizarre. Another bad news evening - more cancer spread, so what else is new - preceded by a gruelling day of scans: a CT scan where they couldn't get the needle in at all, so went for 'option 2', a new one on me, but it's a CT scan without needles, followed by an MRI scan where, also new to me, they put you in this casing, like a suit of armour, before wheeling you back into the machine, and this guy barks at you: breathe in, breathe out, then, 'stop breathing!'. If I had the energy I could have told him he needs lessons with yoga teacher Ayala. Basic yoga lesson no. 1: shouting 'stop breathing!' at someone down a microphone is not the way to make someone hold their breath.

But this is the bizarre part. There are fireworks outside my window now, and I love fireworks.

Paucity of posting

I'm sick again, as you can probably tell from the lack of posts on this blog. The crippling fatigue, the range of symptoms you don't want to hear about - though, ever fashionable, flourescent yellow, amazingly, comes into it - are slowing me down a lot...apologies. The children are calling, "Mum, America's Next Top Model" and I'm not sure I'll make it off this bed to watch...so, a week of scans ahead, the CT, the bone, the Muga, the takings of many bloods, and then the new medicine next week or thereabouts - onwards to Tykerb.

When it hits, it slows you down.

Guardian readers respond

Look at the Justgiving page today and you can see the fantastically immediate response from Guardian readers to this. Instant and generous. This is life-giving stuff.

Fugitive from The Sun

Never let it be said that the life of a new author is all champagne and book launches. This new author is in hiding from The Sun newspaper, not one to let its prey escape.

It's like this. As you know, the Mail on Sunday's You magazine paid sensible money for what's called "first interview" rights over TOYPD. That piece will appear on 11th March. This is good, because that money goes to the CTRT appeal.

However, the only problem with that is that I also did an interview with The Sun's very lovely and potentially BFFE reporter Emma Shrimsley. And now the Sun want their photos so they can use the interview asap. Only they can't - they have to wait until 11th March at least. Knowing the ways of tabloid newspapers the only way I can stop them running their piece is not to let them have the photos....yet. You see, if the Sun piece runs before the Mail's, I won't get the money from the Mail - it's as simple and cut-throat as that. But if I annoy the Sun, I lose the potential donations from their billions of readers...

Luckily I've been in Israel all week, so didn't get the message from The Sun about photos until midnight last night. And perhaps equally luckily, my oncologist is now insisting on putting me in hospital for a few days because for some reason I've done nothing but lose weight this past week. (I will post later on whether this is because of 'the experiment' or not....) Normally I'm quite resistant to suggestions that I go to hospital for any length of time at all, but under these circumstances, on the run from Britain's finest tabloid reporters, I'm leaping at the chance. So that's the next few days taken care of, but where will I hide after that? What would Tyra do?