Summer is finally here. It’s taken a while but it’s due to get to 31 degrees today and I must say it’s feeling like it might. There is a bit of humidity in the air, and a shower is predicted for this afternoon although given the propensity of the Bureau of Meteorology to get things wrong, I wouldn’t be too sure you will have to get your gumboots out.
The great harbinger of summer, the First Cricket Test has been played, albeit it lasted less than two days, the shortest Ashes Test in over 100 years, and the weather was still cold. We had visitors here on Saturday night and they were cold enough that I flicked the heater back on. And just for the record, our plucky Australians put the English gentlemen to the sword in Perth. Bring on the Second Test! But, I suggest summer might now be here to stay.
Linda is still in bed. We have a quiet week ahead, nothing to do medically until Friday although she does have a phone appointment with the diabetes team on Thursday, but we don’t have to leave home for that. Then a trip to Pambula on Friday afternoon for a couple of nights. The accommodation has a deck view to the ocean so I am hoping to be able to do exactly nothing while I am there.
The scariest thing at the moment is that it is one month until Christmas, exactly! Another year has almost slipped away, and I am still very grateful to be here with Linda with a view to celebrating another festive season with friends and family. Who knows what life will be like this time next year?
I think my last update highlighted Linda’s continuing struggles with the side-effects of chemotherapy treatment. She was very weak, struggling to get out of chairs and needing to be transported around in a wheelchair which of course makes life more difficult for everyone. Mouths ulcers were making eating increasingly difficult and diabetes medication was making her feel ill. The registrar we saw a couple of weeks ago was quite concerned and so with some trepidation we returned to Linda’s regular oncologist last Thursday.
Dr Manoharan is quite a young woman but probably older than she looks seeing that she is a senior oncologist at the Cancer Centre. She is very polite and somewhat straight forward, not in a “in your face” way but she likes to explain how it is and be quite frank. Which is how we like it. I guess when you get into a position like hers and have seen hundreds of patients in this condition you learn the best way to handle things. She is very clear and concise.
She was rather concerned. The registrar had conveyed to her how Linda was feeling and the dichotomy is that the chemotherapy seems to be working but Linda’s condition is not recovering. Blood tests showed her cancer markers had halved, an excellent result and Dr Manoharan plainly stated that to her eye everything is going well and Linda should be feeling much better. She was at a loss to explain Linda’s lack of recovery. So, it’s either the chemotherapy just being too severe or, as she stated, something going wrong somewhere else in the body that’s not being picked up. She will not give Linda chemotherapy until she recovers more sufficiently. She has booked another round of scans which will focus on Linda’s lumbar region and we will see where we are after that.
Linda has recovered a little since last Thursday but not as much as we might have hoped. Scans will be done and perused and we will talk to the oncologist again before deciding the path forward over this rickety bridge we are travelling on.
Linda is now up, reclining in her new electric chair which has a mechanism for lifting her up and out, saving my back from lifting her. She is fed and watered and has had her tablets and all things being equal is set for a cruisy day.
That’s our update for the week. We keep going and keep fighting
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 