Take Off Your Running Shoes

Puts my morphine troubles into context...

This gives you a graphic sense of how morphine is regarded in other parts of the world.

Up here in Northwood, where I have my chemotherapy, the rigmarole is like this. Take last Tuesday. "I've run out of all the drugs," I told the oncologist, who duly sent the prescription down to the pharmacy. Within minutes, as I knew it would, the phone call came from the pharmacist. "About your morphine..." the pharmacist said. "Yes..." I said. "You've just had a month's prescription," she said, "we can't give you any more."

"I really haven't," I said. "Last week I had to leave in a rush to get back home and I told the nurse I would take the drugs this week instead."

"No, it says here the medicine was dispensed," the pharmacist insisted.

"It may have been dispensed, but I didn't take it home with me," I said.

I text the oncologist who says "can't you get a prescription from your GP? It might be easier if they're going to be like this. I know, they've already been on the phone to me, and I guess I was a bit short with them."

"But," I said, "they query it every time. Really, I'm not dealing morphine in North West London."

Anyhow, cut a long story short, I get back to Hendon to another phone call from the Northwood drugs regulators to say, "oh many apologies, we've just found your TTAs (pharmacist code for morphine apparently) - it seems like it was dispensed last week but you didn't actually take it home. Well, one of our staff lives near you, and can drop it in..."

Do they think we crave pain, and the painkillers that go with it?

Me and Richard Dawkins

Not sure how I missed this by Barbara Ehrenreich, but so many people have sent it on to me I guess it's clear I agree with every word, and certainly that we really need to find the cause of this plague - and there is a cause.

Meanwhile, reiki turns out to have nothing to do with hot stones, and is just a waste of an hour and £30, a la Richard Dawkins here. All I wanted was some kind of massage to ease the pain in my back - brought on, apparently, but the tumour leaning on a nerve - which is now racking up 120 mg of morphine a day, plus two paracetamol every four hours, plus another painkiller I'd never even heard of before called diclofenac. According to the doctors, mixing the painkillers is the key, because the different ones work in different ways, but - like everybody I guess - I'm uneasy about taking all these drugs, particularly as the doses keep getting higher, and so I think there must be something else that will help...Hence my search for a massage.

But Reiki is the kind of witch doctor alternative treatment Dawkins makes fun of, and I'm with him. I had to lie on my bed, while a very short-of-breath woman sat on some kind of tripod next to the bed, handed me a three-dimensional silver magen david on a stick, and said, "it's like a wand, no? do whatever you want with it - it has a crystal, hold it, or wave it or whatever" and then for a never-ending forty five minutes, this woman moved her hands incredibly slowly over my body. Over my body, not on my body - she hovered, like the scariest kind of wasp.

Actually, I did feel something; towards the end I was hot all over, like having a temperature. I don't know what caused that, and I'm sure the reiki practitioner would say it was a "healing effect" or "an effect" anyway, but I also experienced intence annoyance and irritation at the waste of time and money. Although, and maybe I don't say this enough, it's always worth lying very still in bed for an hour in the middle of the day. I just prefer doing it without hoverers.

Good things about home versus hospital

1. wireless access so can look up all the stuff on the Guardian quick crossword and it's done by ten or eleven in the morning.

On the other hand....certain satisfaction in hospital about not looking everything up, and then getting it done by eight in the evening, but - you know - without automated help...

2. own supply of morphine. In hospital they take your "controlled drugs" away - very infantilising, as they say, "it's not you dear, but we have other people staying here" - which makes one (me) very self-conscious about dosing the morphine, as directed I should emphasise, "as and when needed".

On the other hand...no, no other hand to this one.

Erev Shabbat

Walking - 20 minutes

Not long till Shabbat, children have their Harry Potters, and after weeks and weeks of getting the whole Guardian quick crossword most days, and thinking I'm ready for the cryptic, I'm stuck on about nine clues of today's Quick...Economic theory favouring state control 12 letters...oh no, Anthony's just got that, collectivism, hurrah!; Join strands together - six letters; leader - knob on shield - four letters; and very puzzling Flower also called Star of David - eight letters and four letters. Anybody heard of a flower also called Star of David???? All I could find out on Google was that there is a flower in Israel whose cells under a telescope, amazingly, form a Star of David - but the letters don't fit the space. Persian buttercup?

Hair that moves

Walking: 20 minutes...and...

Magdalenka, our local Polish hairdresser's, i.e. just an empty storefront one weekend, followed by a few days very hard work by team of Poles, the arrival of the orange and red IKEA sofa, and open for business. The tragedy is I don't have a digital camera at the moment, so cannot post these wash and blow-dry photos, but for those who are following the plot so far I'm spicing up my daily walking quota by testing out all the local hair salons, in search of that elusive grail, the natural looking blow-dry. No cutting, no colouring, just washing and drying, and attempting to come out of the hairdresser's looking better than when I went in.

Not easy in Hendon. Definitely not a success today. I thought I'd give the hard-working Polish girls a try; there seem to be about five of them running the place, and every day they add a new inducement: henna, sun-beds, manicures etc etc.

I have come out looking like I just left mittelEurope. My hair has been loaded with mousse and pulled tight strand by strand around a tightly curled brush, then, if that wasn't enough, little pink rollers came out and six choice locks were wound round the little pink rollers. My head was then inserted into a rain-kerchief and popped under huge old-fashioned hairdryer. The hairspray followed, and follows me still an hour later. £18, one pound cheaper than last week's attempt.

I think the simple difference between suburban hair, and "good" hair is just this: movement. Suburban hair has no movement, no lustre, no swing. Will I ever find it in Hendon? The search - and the walking - goes on. (And on...there are at least another eight hairdressers within my walking range - more than any other single type of shop.)

Crossword Obsession

It's not even the Cryptic Crossword, which I can only even bear to look at out of eyes shaded by fingers, just peeking round the edges of my hands at ludicrously difficult clues. No, my growing obsession is the Guardian Quick Crossword - three straight days getting the whole thing done, and then suddenly, wham, today, stuck on about eight different clues, and having to force myself not to telephone the 'solutions hotline' because it's all a problem of diminishing satisfactions...works like this: you get the maximum satisfaction from just working out the clues by yourself; you get the second most satisfaction by looking up the ones you can't get on the internet...but actually descending to phoning the hotline? I think it'll just be diminishing returns from here on in; on the other hand it's twenty-three hours until tomorrow's paper comes...how do I get through today when 13 across is "hot air" and it's _U_K_M??????

Ordinary cancer day

I did an interview this week with BBC radio (programme goes out July 11th - I'll post a link) about growing resistant to cancer drugs. The programme's editor, Deborah Cohen, came over the same afternoon Blair and Brown were changing guard, and unpacked her square bits of equipment on my dining room table while the edgy reporters on Downing Street were desperately trying to fill empty bits of space while Brown had his extra-long time with QEII.

The programme's really about herceptin and growing resistant to it, which feels kind of last-yearish to me - I'm worrying about getting resistant to tykerb now. But while we were talking, I realised that what's really new with cancer is this sense of living longer. So, for example, right now, the other mothers at school - most of whom haven't seen me for several weeks now - have no sense of what kind of illness this is. Is this cancer you die from? Recover from? And the truth is I don't know either, and none of the medical people answer these questions either. This is the unknown of now - so everybody just says, take each day as it comes.

Today, maybe because I did too much this week, I find myself unable to get out of bed again, which is a surprise after a week of getting up and getting dressed. So I do my bed things: I've started attempting the Guardian Quick Crossword, which was a stimulant for a bit, until every time I got stumped Nina said, 'just look that up on the internet' and now I do that - too tempting not to - and you get the quick fix answers, but less satisfaction! Still anybody know a famous controversy, five words and seven words - second letter A, fourth letter S, eighth letter L, tenth letter B and last letter G? (always supposing I got the other clues right...)

The difference - sorted.

A frequent Friday night discussion in this house is what is the difference between a schlemiel and a schlimazel? We have never resolved it, but in today's Guardian, novelist Michael Chabon explains: a schlemiel is the one who always spills his soup; the schlimazel is the one on whom it lands. Read the rest here.

Reasons for not posting...

This is the absolutely last sliver (as in people saying, "just the tiniest sliver for me, just a morsel") of Myrna's cheesecake, which took some hiding, I can tell you, in order to get this photograph to you, faithful readers, but I did it! It's on a plate made by Marganit, from the days when we still had a local clay cafe.

and this...

is a picture of the famous stent (not the vertebrae bits, Dr Ostler, I did know that, despite not knowing how many ribs a human being has) - the curvy, plastic shaft of light thing you can see alongside the vertebrae...which, after two days of cheese-cake eating (not because of the cheesecake, Myrna, I promise you!) has apparently, or maybe has apparently, stopped working, even thought the picture shows it is clearly still there. so I am off back to hospital tomorrow. Chase Farm this time, another one of my "locals". And, to cut a long story short, as we all know by now, you can get wireless on choo-choo trains, but no way can you get an internet connection in a hospital. Not if you're a patient anyhow.

Chocolate reprieve...

Ok, we can all breathe easily again; Debra Persey has emailed the Beth Din, and the chocolate's ok, the chocolate's ok!!! hurrah!

We have been aware for many years that whey can be a by product of cheese-making and that, even today, animal rennet can be used in its manufacture. Since whey derived from this source contains only trace amounts of rennet, it is permitted according to halacha. There is therefore no problem with any of the Materfoods products that are currently on our approved list. Kind regards, Elisheva Elisheva Wieder Kashrut Researcher London Beth Din 735 High Road London N12 OUS Tel: 020 8343 6332 www.kosher.org.uk