Life Patterns

I thought to plant a few bulbs down around the wildlife pond. Needless to say the cat and the kitty came too and were chasing each other around as I planted. I heard a a pair of Robins chattering and twittering away in excitement and I absent mindedly thought they were being a bit silly drawing attention to themselves and their offspring which I presumed were still in the nest.
Suddenly Filou leaped into some undergrowth and emerged carrying something in his mouth. Seeing that I was following him he tore up the garden and into the house, tail all fluffed out. I ran after him as fast as I could and caught him in the house just as he let go a small bird which I promptly managed to scoop up and protect. Gasping for breath I carried the fledgling out into the garden and sat down for a few minutes to catch my breath. I then let the little robin (which showed no sign of damage) go near where its parents were still chattering and managed to catch Filou and take him back to the house. I was worried that Sophie, a merciless hunter, would stay out there and catch it again but she must have felt very co-operative tonight as she followed me back to the house where I was able to shut both of them in.
One good thing I learned from this experience is that I can still run after a fashion and when the occasion demands it!

I would describe it as "intermittent". I have good days where i feel almost physically normal and then I have off days where my back and chest aches and I get breathless after doing what doesn't seem a lot. It's easy to get depressed on the bad days especially as they usually coincide with the damp and gloomy weather that has characterised so much of this "spring". But hey, mustn't grumble. The silly cats are often enough to cheer me up with their wrestling matches and romps around the garden.
And flowers are growing all over the place which has made the garden look colourful and very easy on the eye.
Chemotherapy will probably commence on the 25th May. i would say "fingers crossed" but I guess this is a gesture that has religious connotations. "Would you like a bet Monsieur Pascal?" I have been pondering for some time whether a belief in "luck" would be just another expression of a need for religion but without drawing any firm conclusions as yet.

..to receive a call from the hospital in Kings Lynn asking if I would be able to come for my appointment in the afternoon. i wasn't expecting to see anyone for 6 weeks after the operation so I began to wonder what nasties they had managed to turn up in the meantime. Needless to say the clerk at the other end was unable to give me any information over the phone as to what the appointment was about, so I was left to speculate for a couple of hours until we made our way to the hospital.
A new doctor - Dr W gave me the once over and said that I seemed to be making satisfactory progress. She then said that they thought it sensible for me to have a 3 month course of chemotherapy to raise my survival chances by 5 or 10%. She gave me a few sheets of information to help me make up my mind. The sheets seemed to be mainly full of horrific side effects which could happen but probably won't. I guess I'll go ahead with it unless it makes me too sick to want to continue but it seems that I will at least have a very tired outlook this summer since that seems to happen to most people who have the therapy. Whatever....

In Cherry tree blossom heaven.

One month now since my operation. I still dream of the day when I wake up (or more specifically fall asleep) without a nagging pain in my chest and back but progress otherwise seems OK. On Monday when we unusually had some sunshine I managed to do a few jobs in the garden that needed doing. Gasping for breath on occasions after pushing myself a bit too much but definitely a lot more active than when I was finding it hard to shuffle more than a hundred yards in a day.
Walks around the garden with the cats are now a regular feature. Sophie, the now mature 3 year old female, is showing young Filou all the tricks of the cat trade. Already he is an expert tree climber and has caught a couple of mice. Bravo Filou!

Last night, I had one where I had an appointment to see my surgeon Dr Van L. As I entered his room he said "You're late." I started to protest that I had been sitting outside waiting to go in. "No - you're late" he said again.
Ah I thought as I woke up from my disturbed sleep "Late" as in "The late John Stean..."
A reminder at least not to take anything for granted.

I was released from hospital last Thursday(12th) so I spent 10 days in there in all.
The operation was carried out on the day I went in with very little fuss and bother. I remember waking up sometime, seeing Pat and waving a finger at her. The next few days I was hooked up to a huge variety of machines and bits of apparatus. Initially I had an epidural feeding me morphine onto a place near my spine. i had a couple of quite agonizing sessions during sleep where the epidural had become detached and eventually they switched me over to a "patient controlled" system where the morphine is fed in through a canula on the wrist and the patient regulated the amount of painkiller by pressing a button.
When I was finally disconnected from some of the apparatus and had my catheter removed I thought I would be able to walk to the toilet about 15 metres away. No such luck - I was far too weak and unbalanced.
At times I felt as if I had been dropped into a performance of "The Singing Detective". The morphine was giving me remarkably unpleasant waking dreams whereby I would close my eyes and I would be in a 1950s hospital with flaky paint and graffitti etched into the walls and a quite different set of people would be conversing with each other usually in the most surreal of terms.
There were some interesting people on the ward with me. Barry, a sound and light engineer, was in with a collapsed lung. John, an old buffer with profoundly racist views turned out to have nothing wrong, Andrew, also with a collapsed lung after pleurisy, was due to leave the day after me.
I'd like to write more about the experience but fact is I'm still very weak and writing takes it out of me too. Maybe later. I'm by no means pain free yet either - aches and pains all over and only partially relieved by the pain klllers.Anyway I'm out amongst cats, parrot and friendly human types and it is good to be so. Now I must try to build myself out of the feeble state that I'm in at present.

Got my date for my lung lobectomy. It's scheduled to take place early in the morning on the 2nd April at Norwich hospital. My heart is in my mouth- but I expect they'll be able to sort that out too.

The biopsy went as well as these things can go. A few painkilling injections into the back is never going to be a pleasurable experience but they seem to have done their job while the CT guided needles went in to collect their "core samples" (a phraseology which made me feel unusually like the Antarctic continent). Dr H did an excellent job and nurses were kindness personified. I'm just got to take things a bit easy for a day or two which, in practice, means restraining myself from attacking various aspects of the garden.
Filou has had his final injections and has been identity chipped so it's time for him to start his outdoor adventures. Crossed fingers that he manages to say out of (too much0 trouble.