h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I decided not to have any more treatment after a week of pain and nausea. Started wishing I'd not bothered with the emergency trip to hospital in the first place and quietly bled to death. Nice way to go, I thought... fairly painless and quick. Anyway, I had a treatment review yesterday and the doc has prescribed better sickness and pain control (or so she assured me) and thereby persuaded me to have another cycle of chemo... also radiotherapy. I'd refused the radiotherapy before because they wanted to slice me open and bring my ureters to the surface so that my kidneys could drain into a bag glued to the front of me. Yuk! Not a hell of a lot better than being incontinent... which is what I'll be (or so she assured me) if I don't carry on with the chemo. She agreed I could have the radiotherapy without the disgusting rearrangement of my waterworks. So there it is. The hair is now coming out in clumps so it'll be a relief to get it all shaved off on Wednesday.

Journals may be slow to appear as I'm staying with my brother while this treatment continues and he has a very dodgy and intermittent broadband signal. I've been trying to get on line for days without success until now.

I now have some very important work to do... got to rack some apple wine.

Tib, I do hope the new regime proves less distressing and more successful. It must be a nightmare, but I guess you owe it to yourself to try whatever is available.

I am glad to see you are finding distractions and things to keep you busy and that you are not on your own while this is going on.

with the apple wine, it sounds lovely.

Websailor

On dodgy broadband, I know what you mean. I'm in the last area in the state of California not in the prime coverage area for my broadband wireless. Works well most of the time but still occasionally crashes.

Yeah. Hope so Websailor. It does make me wonder if I'm just agreeing to a load of grief ultimately. The drug they're giving me, that makes me feel so horrible, is cisplatin. I looked it up on Wiki and this is the thing that sticks in my mind:

"Cisplatin combination chemotherapy is the cornerstone of treatment of many cancers. Initial platinum responsiveness is high but the majority of cancer patients will eventually relapse with cisplatin-resistant disease."

The chances of actual cure are "tiny" (to quote the doc). I may be swapping my own body's perfectly acceptable choice of death for the NHS's long, drawn out torture version. That would ironic I think. I don't know... is that or would that be ironic?

I've lost about 3/4 of my hair now. There are no bald patches yet so it's falling out evenly - but in handfuls. And the strangest thing: it's the hair that still has colour that's going first and mostly. I'd got a fair amount of grey but a lot of my original colour too (a sort of light, sandy brown). I look as though I've gone white over night because the brown is falling out first. Weird!

Anyway.


Here I am, back, only one day after managing to get on the internet. I think I've spotted a pattern. I add a new connection to my brother's router and it works for a day or two. Then Ubuntu fails to find it again. So I delete the old connection from the list and put it in again. And that works for a while. No idea why. Maybe it's just a coincidence that appears to have worked the last couple of times. I'd suspected that it was because Ubuntu on my computer is so much quicker than the Microsoft operating systems on Bill's computers and the broadband signal is so poor and slow that Ubuntu just fails to find it. Who knows?


That apple wine is a funny customer. It's my third batch of apple wine from last autumn. The lees (all the dead yeast cells etc) are supposed to sink to the bottom of the demijohn and that's what they usually do... except this particular demijohn of apple wine, in which the lees keep floating to the surface. I've currently got about 25 demijohns of wine and cider on the go (mostly 1 gallon bottles, but also three 5 gallon carboys) and all the lees are at the bottom, except for this one apple wine. I strained it yesterday to get rid of the stuff and there's already a new plug of lees at the top of the newly cleaned demijohn. It's a nuisance. Can't think why it's happening

Still, as long as it tastes okay in the end, who cares

I also have about 36 2 litre bottles of cider ready to drink and 44 bottles of beer that should be ready by the end of this month

On the hair anomaly, less grayed hair falling out first, it probably has to do with greying being caused by reduced circulation of the blood to the hair follicles, so, paradoxically, where the circulation is strongest and the hair least greyed, the cisplatin is being taken up at a faster rate.

That makes perfect sense