Friday, 29 September 2023
It’s not party night. Not yet. Not quite.
But it feels like it.
In no particular order. My friends, and part of the reason I moved out of Cheltenham, my friends who looked after Zen and I, and then me, beyond friendship, beyond love, beyond brotherhood and all that, for the past five plus years, took the key of not just a new house, but a new life, in Cornwall. My son, Sethie, joined his younger brother, Alf, in the world of adulthood by receiving a post-uni job offer. An extremely good friend put a deposit down for the major work on her yacht rigging system that has been bubbling away on her mind for a number of weeks. Don’t tell her I said this, but her yacht is both her kids and her dog. My artist friend Rob Mackey got in touch to say Tracey’s Christmas present is ready.
Does sport count? First day of the Ryder Cup. Europe are blitzing America. A bit like Australia getting kicked out of the ruby World Cup. Some countries at sport, it’s not that they’re bad losers, it’s that they’re bad winners. I feel really sad for American golf supporters and Australian rugby supporters. Oh, wait! No, I don’t.
Oh yeah. Honda have been in touch to tell me my car is in country. They’ll get it adapted next week, I can pick it up at the end of the week.
A car. First time I’ll have driven in a decade. And left footed too, as it were, to boot.
Probably other stuff.
Oh, yeah, cancer.
I’ve completed 18/20 zapper sessions, the fifth of two five-day-a-week treatments, my last Friday. Two more dribbling into October. Just as I got home, the phone goes. It’s the radiology nurse specialist. This definitely feels like end of term, discussing the roadmap, the stuff of the future. And the underlying implication, there will be a future.
The tumour should be destroyed. It should be disintegrating and being expelled in the body’s waste. To the differing results of MRI and whether there’s infiltration into the bladder, radiotherapy will have destroyed tumour cells in the bladder anyway. The left iliac lymph node was included in the profile for zappery.
If I want I can switch back to bicalutamide from the three-monthly testosterone-blocking injections, the next one’s due now — a whole blog post to come on that — and it’s important to get restarted on ‘blood flow’ happening in my man parts. That’s a bit of a wired one since I haven’t had an erection since April. It might be party night when I first have an erection again, but don’t worry, I’ll spare you the details. Or the gory details, at least.
The future will be registered by PSA readings, every three months to start with. The first a week before my Oncology appointment in November. That will be interesting. Five, I guess is the target, I’ll take advice on that.
Just think, there’s a bit of a chance treatment might have been curative after all.
Whisper it.
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