One door closes

I'm still here...appreciating the good things, pollyanna-ing what might be seen as bad. It's been a mostly cloudy morning here, and just a few slivers of sunrise gold made it through the gaps but before that there was a pretty pink light coming through the gap in the curtains which made me open them and look. I give thanks for being awake and noticing!

Yesterday was a strange day and I took the evening off to assimilate and regroup. I was waiting for my Tesco delivery when the phone rang (I have no doorbell so this is the normal way of getting my attention) and it was a large delivery of 'surgical supplies' (you don't want to know!). So I stomped down to get them and stumbled back up and the chemist's delivery man kindly said he'd shut the downstairs door as my hands were full. I wasn't looking forward to going back down to meet Mr Tesco but the next thing that happened was a knocking on my flat door and a ringing on my phone and there he was with a stack of boxes! I didn't know whether to be relieved at a trip saved or annoyed at the first chap's poor grasp of security...but the Tesco man said it was my downstairs neighbour had let him in on her way out. I thought it had been him phoning but the phone rang again and it was under all the items on the sofa (I nearly wrote 'cans and packets' but of
course it was under a pile of organic fresh fruit and veg, whole grains etc etc!) and it took a while to get to it. And when I did it was the good GP with the results of my blood tests and urine tests (not brilliant) and an outline of his next cunning plan...and asking if I’d heard about the MRI. And then there was a call from the hospital about the MRI.

A funny thing happens to you when you’ve already had a diagnosis of cancer...anything that doesn’t feel right makes you wonder if you’ve got some more. Of course sometimes nothing is wrong at all but I’ve always thought it’s funny that we tend to forget there’s a lot of other horrible things you can have the matter with you! I’ve known people with early stage MS and MND and frankly wouldn’t want to swap knowing what they have to look forward to...and you know what? The real bummer is that you can have more than one horrible thing at once! So, although I couldn’t understand the details due to her accent and turn of phrase, I could tell the registrar was more jubilant than I was about the scan apparently showing nothing ‘recent’ in my brain (she was a bit vague as to what archaeological remains there were) because this means something else horrible is causing the symptoms and it’s back to the drawing board and hopefully the neurologist ...and the urologist and ‘anyone else who knows me’ as they say.

If it gets to the stage when a neurologist thinks you might have a brain tumour then whatever you have got isn’t an over active imagination but if all the symptoms pointed to that what else could it be? Probably a combination of things, with the first in the dock being my ever weakening solitary kidney which we’ve all come to take a bit for granted now as it hasn’t tried to kill me quickly for a while. Once your kidney function drops below a certain level it can have a knock on effect in all other parts of the body causing lots of other things that can finish you off and make you feel quite rubbish beforehand even if you don’t have extra diseases elsewhere.

Anyway, whatever...I’m most exultantly grateful I don’t have to worry whether to have radiotherapy or not or which oncologist I have to see! I’m actually quite grateful that they’ve found my anaemia is coming back because if it gets really bad they might give me another blood transfusion and this is lush...well afterwards anyway when your whole body feels alive again for a while and you bound around like Zebedee on amphetamines! I’m also grateful that having one GP on the case for a while means some concurrence with my suspicion that the problem isn’t that I keep getting infections in my urinary system but they keep failing to cure the same one (I know this isn’t actually good news but at least I don’t feel like it’s all my fault). And to get back to my preferred non-medical topics...I give thanks to Laura my ‘painter and decorator’ for hanging a few drops of lining paper and putting the first coat of eggshell on the inner sides of the living room doors and to myself for choosing (as usual – smug bitch) such totally spiffing colours! I also give thanks for a very entertaining episode of Beauty and the Geek Australia last night where the beauties had to make birdman machines for the Geeks to ‘fly’ into Darling harbour...