Patterns

Friday, 13th October, 2023.

The counter-intuitive thing is that while treatment was happening there was a regular established pattern (getting to hospital) that a drowning mentality could cling on to. Post-treatment there are body difficulties but no established pattern for structure. 

It’s been ten days since my last zapping. It’s been difficult. There is pain from the bladder / urethra and the weeing frequency is often. One major difficulty is whatever happens with muscle movement means the rear end tries to activate. And the liquidity is not controlled or stopped in the normal way from its arrival. However, today was groundbreaking. Firstly there was some control over the release while weeing, as in I could control it, and more importantly — how much detail is decent information and how much is TMI? — I could fart. How much pleasure can be taken from a fart? Here there is serious danger of moving on from decency.

Radiology has said six weeks for full recovery and I can see that. The bladder and bowel have taken a battering. Today, though, there was the first hint of, not really solidity, but a difficult-to-measure lessness of liquidity from the bit that should be solid.

So, what’s the future? I’ve had a (alcoholic) drink each day and I’m sure this raises concerns for my flat-mate. Me too to a certain extent. But deep down I’m happy. Body-happy. There are things I would change (a life partner would be nice) but they are out of my control. 

Time. I just need time. One more week takes me to the 21st, which is a significant personal date. That will be 19 days from the X-ray machinery, 21 days on the Monday. As discussed earlier, Monday’s are a good day for a new start.

Three weeks is enough for my mind-convalescence which has been my main, and deliberate if unconventional, priority so far. By the 21st both Seth and Alf will have visited and gone home again. It is a good target date to start swimming again. It gives me a week to get the trike serviced. I had a long consultancy with Orthapaedics yesterday afternoon. In the end there were three of them, each calling in a more senior surgeon: ’You are an extremely complicated case.’ Story of my life. A little part of me thinks the combination of buggered knees, MS, lymphodema in the right leg, blood thinners from 2018’s PEs got a lot of coverage, and oh yes, cancer, makes me a outlier curiosity for top class surgeons. They want an MRI (another one, what’s that now, 11?) to check the ligaments and won’t do anything until November’s Oncology consultation, but I left the hospital, (another new hospital that’s eight now in the last five years) with a strong feeling of it’s going to happen which had altered from an initial strong feeling that it wasn’t. Either way, for a knee op to happen there are things that I have to, a must must, not an it would be nice to, put in place. My BMI is still too high for an op, I’m about fifteen and a half stone (102kgs but I don’t know that currency) which put my BMI at a pathetically pleasing less than 35. OK, only just at 34.7 but still. That’s four stone since Christmas, a stone and a half since treatment started. All of this means the knee, and I want it operated on very vey badly, it requires a fundamental shift in life-living patterns. Addressing alcohol, at last, will be addressing a life pattern of fifty years. At last, and here’s the thing, I feel ready to.