Glowing personality ?

Having just returned from my PET scan in Aberdeen I am glowing not with personality but with radioactivity, in order to do the scan I was injected with radioactive sugar and the leaflet contains nice advice like "do not let small childeren sit on your knee for the next few days" honest. When I asked the nurse if she was weighing me to determine the dose she said "no we give you the maximum we are allowed to" so I have a few days of double flushing the loo and I guess sleeping in the "spoons" position may be inadvisable.

I tried to get the nurse to leak the results to me but she did not give anything away, despite taking half an hour to ensure the scan was good enough that they did not need to do a repeat. I suspect, given her steely determination to say nothing, that there is still some activity on the scan, but I will have to sit on my hands and wait for my doctors to get the results. Meanwhile I will try to set myself up for the next phase of treatment until I get the actual facts and the results of my CT scan on Thursday. Hopefully I will bump into the doctor on Friday which is Chemo 6 or get to see her next week to at least eliminate the uncertianity. If I do have the next stage of treatment, then I will try to get it to start after the 28th so I can have a jolly weekend as planned to celebrate the end of the first phase of chemo (and can sneak in a meeting of close colleagues in the UK the week before to catch up with them) prior to "going underground" again for two months more treatment.

My trip to Aberdeen went well, I took the opportunity to get a map and walk from the train station to Lee's parents house which took me through an international food market, past a cathederal and through a park, all in all a very pleasant stroll for a sunny sunday afternoon. Contary to the title of lees previous blog Lee's mum fed me with a very nice tea of slow roast lamb while her Dad and I split a nice bottle of Rioja wine, her sister Dot also turned up for a chat and we rounded the evening off with the new edition of Top Gear (no Aston Martins on show) and a documentary about Krackatoa which was very interesting. Thanks to the wine I slept very well and got up to a breakfast of black tea as I was not allowed to eat anything.

Sandy, Lee's dad very kindly walked me up to the hospital where he himself worked for many many years and gave me a kind of history lesson on the way about the development of the hospital and the different departments he had worked in. A funny moment was when he said "what are all these schoolchilderen doing here?" only for me to point out they were probably the medical students - which they were! I returned to their house for lunch, in this case the famost Aberdeen butteries and lamb broth which, after a day of starving, went down very well. Lees mum makes great slow cooked lamb which I must discover how to replicate in our new oven.

Getting scanned itself meant lying down for an hour (no movement allowed) to let the radiactive sugar distribute itself around the body and then lying in the scanner for a further hour, I spent the time "visualising" nice possible futures hoping that somehow this would influence the results. One of the key things I have concluded from this adventure is to value and cherish family and friends more, the other perhaps less obvious one is to take more risks to enjoy life at the moment, hence you will see the alarm in Lee's blog as I comtemplate spending some savings on a silly (but not depreciating therefore not that silly) car to enjoy while I can.

Thankfully the effect of the steroids has diminished and my manic tendency to clear out my garage of household rubbish has mostly worn off, just in time to give Lee a well deserved rest (from me in manic mode) and for some new seats and carpets to arrive for my MG. This will get the inside looking as nice as the outside over the next few weekends in time for our big show at the start of July. Although this week is mostly going to be dreary medical stuff (with my first flying lesson thrown in on Wednesday) I can use the energy of chemo 6 on friday to restore my car in the recently cleared out garage, hopefully with sunshine and the radio to keep me in a good mood.

Finally thanks again to Sandy and Sylvia for looking after me in Aberdeen, I will keep you all posted as the results of the tests come in, for the moment I think it may just be "the eye of the storm" but I will keep my fingers crossed for the unlikly outcome of sailing off into the sunset !

Cheers for now

Gerry

(still with a DB9 screen saver, and without a DB9 budget)