STARTING THE DAY WITH A FAILURE

This stopcock should now be nestling above my currently dysfunctional one. Obviously it is not, due to the discovery that the water suppliers street stopcock is not functional. So having thrust his arm deep into the pavement to no avail my plumber waved me farewell advising me to ring the water supplier, whose responsibility it is to maintain the street stopcock. I, of course, did and in fairness they replied to their free phone number quickly. What was less inspiring was the fact that they cannot come until the 27th of September, a full ten days away. So no quick fix then. Fingers crossed that the pipes hold.

Hey ho! Off to Twycross Zoo

What is there to say about a zoo apart from saying the pictures were worth it.

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I am still not sure about zoos. On the one hand there is the conservation work that they do with cooperative breeding programmes across Europe. On the other hand there was the solitary rhino and a couple of singular apes who looked bored and less than thriving. I know from the experience of going to the home of some of the big animals that given the opportunity and a full belly a lot of animals will just laze or sleep. Come to think of it so will I, so its not surprising that many zoo animals do. Having said that where and animal is a social animal being kept on its own seems perverse.

And where is cancer today?

If all goes well over the next week then this time next week I will have started cycle 2 of my chemo. Between now and then there is a blood test to do and an oncologist appointment to meet. I will not know until Monday whether my blood results will have held up well enough for me to enter into the next cycle. I also have to gamble and start my pre cycle block steriods before seeing the oncologist. All of this nags away at the backof my mind. The worst thing is that I know if I progress then I will have to begin to self inject again in about a weeks time. I hate that. I tell myself that I will get used to it, but I really do not want to get used to it. I do not want my body to become medically institutionalised. Its not normal to push a needle into yourself and push substances into it. It might keep me alive longer but its not normal.

My other issue that is nibbling away at me is that I do not know what my baseline for living was. I’ve done the research and think that chemo may give me another eight months beyond what I had, BUT I have no idea what I had. So what am I adding eight months to? My CT scan is suppossed to act as a baseline against which any progress I make can be compared. What I need is for my oncologist to be honest with me and give me an opinion of what my prospects were without this chemotherapy, so its eight months plus what? Some sort of timetable is what I need, as do those around me. It would be like having a target to beat, just like having a predicted arrival time on the satnav to beat on a journey. Of course the aim in this case would be to arrive as late as possible.