Take Off Your Running Shoes

Life without chocolate

The newspapers are reporting this and this as bad news for vegetarians: the makers of Mars, Snickers (how could they???) etc have now put rennet in the list of ingredients. Not just bad for vegetarians, wait till they hear the howls of pain from those who eat kosher. I really don't see how this latest piece of anti-semitism can be put down to mere anti-Zionism....

Complex female existences

This is probably more information than you want, but how have I managed to post on this blog this morning - one comment, two posts - while also oversleeping, having to rush one uniform sweatshirt through the wash, make a packed lunch and provide one breakfast on a tray, also blowdry hair because I'm selling books later today (after I do reading with Elon's class this morning), and tell one husband I absolutely cannot speak to him at all this morning, there is no time....

Well, actually, it's thanks to the cancer drugs, of which I take twelve during this pre-school set-off period, and each set of drugs requires (definitely too much info) a certain resulting time on the loo...so thank heavens for wilreless access and laptops, eh?

Because the rest of today is just too busy for blogging!

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.

Post-op, anaesthetised woman's plumber fantasies

The plumbers have arrived - man and boy - and they're already sighing, "oh, it's an all day job, you won't like this Roy, have to drain this off, and got another job up the road, don't know about this at all...oh. it's going to be a real job this one" and maybe I've mixed up too much Diclofenac Sodium Enteric with Co-dydramol (take-home party bags from hospital last night) but I'm sitting here fantasising about how much revenge I can wreak on the plumbing fraternity today, fourteen days since we last had heating in this house. Here's what I'm thinking: first of all, then, definitely, definitely not going to be offering any tea or coffee. Only no sooner do I think that then I start worrying, 'oh no, big house, Jewish name, they're going to think all Jews are like this non-tea making woman', so I adapt it slightly, to, ok, hot drinks, but definitely, definitely no ginger crunch biscuits and dried cranberries in a bowl.

Oh yes, and return of the death penalty for plumbers. Can't see that causing any anti-semtic backlash.

That's no supermodel - it's a boiler

The boiler has arrived, to replace the other boiler which is apparently burnt out (after just two years, little young for such prima donna behaviour, don't you think?). The boiler is now sitting in our hallway, despite the best efforts of the delivery man who wanted to leave it in the driveway. But he came up against Marganit, sixteen, the only one at home when the man brought the boiler and said he wouldn't bring it into the house, because his job was to deliver it to the door, not into the house. Marganit, a veteran America's Next Top Model viewer, knows Tyra Banks would never settle for such behaviour, so she said, "well, it's not my job to carry it in either." The delivery man then, wriggling, said, "it's too heavy for me." Marganit said, "oh, and it's not too heavy for me?" The man said, "what d'you suggest then?" And she said, "I suggest we bring it in together." So they did. Atta girl.

In this month's Vanity Fair there is a long profile of Tyra Banks: "America's having a Tyra moment," the magazine says.

Aaargh! no heating....

I pull the cancer card, as I get home from hospital to find out that Graham the plumber (who has just lost our very lucrative business, not that he cares, why should he, there's always plenty of plumbing emergencies) who has just made his third visit this week has once again left without fixing our heating. "You need the manufacturers, love, sorry," are the plumber's words. Wow, I think, that's the first time I've ever heard the word "sorry" from a plumber. The manufacturers of the boiler, a company called Glowworm, say they can't send anybody until next Thursday. "Please," I say, and I can hear my voice shaking, "I have cancer, and I have small children in the house, please can we not just get this fixed for the weekend."

The woman taking the call does sound genuinely sympathetic, and calls back within half an hour. "I've had a word with the supervisor," Helen tells me (cancer puts you on first name terms with everyone). "We can get someone out to you on Tuesday, instead of Thursday."

Ah, the all-powerful cancer card. Wish I had a genuinely influential illness.

Taking Offence

I have an intimate relationship with the M1, the motorway at the bottom of my road. It's how I get to Mount Vernon, the so-called "local" cancer hospital - used to take me an hour to get there, now I can do it in twenty minutes. Today's Guardian has a long special feature all about motorways, giving each of them special names - "the holiday highway," "the boring one," "the mysterious one". What does the poor old M1 get called? "The brutally functional one".

This seems unfair enough, since most days it's barely functional, so log-jammed is it with traffic and endless repairs to its surface, but what I really, really object to is this bit:

Whatever glamour the M1 once enjoyed has long gone. Today, it starts, without fanfare, in a tangle of roundabouts and narrow access roads somewhere in concrete north London....Dour. Bleak. Functional.

That's my road they're talking about. Drive to the bottom of this road, and turn left, and that is the M1. I'm sensing an anti-Hendon strain of feeling developing at the Guardian, and I don't like it.

It goes deep, apparently. Look at this, from a previous Guardian piece about the M1 (anybody else think this could be an obsession?)

It seems strange to us now, perhaps, that villagers from along those first 72 miles came to watch the construction of the M1 and marvel at its earth-moving progress. "We used to take picnics to see the last few miles completed," says Deirdre Mason, who lived near Crick at the time. The alternator of her spotless 1978 Morris Marina 1300 had packed up and she was waiting at the Dunchurch services for the emergency services to arrive when I parked alongside her. "I don't know what we were thinking, really. I suppose we all believed in progress then. You can't stop, we used to say. I can't recall anyone protesting about the loss of trees and countryside."

What's strange about packing a picnic to marvel at the building of a motorway in Hendon? I demand to know.

Capecitabine dancing shoes

Latest news from the chemo-fashion front (just to counter all the stuff in the media about who wore what to the Golden Globes). These days, come rain or shine, I'm wearing opaque tights with sandals, because my feet are so sore from the large pink tablets, and I can't possibly wear enclosed shoes, but nor can I go bare-footed in sandals because it's just too darn cold. Interestingly, this is not a look I saw on any of the red carpets.

Fridays

Well, it's Friday and this is possibly my last word on the subject, but today's radiographer gets the needle in - twice within twenty minutes, which is what she has to do - without any pain or palaver whatsoever. So I say, what is it with this needle thing? Are some people just not trained to do it, or what?

"I don't know," she said. "I think you can have all the training in the world, but still be no good at it. I had to go have a blood test myself last week - the nurse didn't get it in at all the first time. The second time she only managed to get the tiniest amount of blood. And I have big veins! I thought, she's making a real pig's ear of this."

Whatever rare quality it is that the ones who are able to accomplish this feat of inserting needles into veins, the other doctors in each hospital should know who can do it and who should never be allowed within needle's distance of their patients.

Assertiveness 101

I start this January with an email to my oncologist saying, "if at all possible, can you please make sure that the person injecting me for my scan on Thursday knows how to access the vein..." and then I get a bit rude about the person who did it last time, whom I accuse of uh, rudeness, and surliness and inability to access veins.

Then I feel guilty complaining, because I think well, they have to learn on someone, and if I say I don't want them to learn on me (and looking back it is now clear I've had inexperienced people let loose on my body several times), that means some other poor person has to put up with it. But mostly, I think doctors should learn on each other, because I think they really, really need to know what it feels like.