I have a further scan

Form No. 1

The Hospice team certainly produce results. The nurse, Nicola, came last week to do a home assessment and recommended some anaesthetic pads to ease the pain in my thigh. She telephoned her advice to the surgery and the pads were with our pharmacy in Clare the next day! I have to stick one on the thigh each night, where they slowly release their chemistry to numb the area. They contain a similar local anaesthetic that dentists use to extract a tooth, and in combination with strong Co-Codamol they definitely work. She also recommended a scan to assess the new pain. Remarkably, the appointment for this came through in Friday and I was in the CT unit at Addenbrookes on Monday. Additional to the thigh, they have also scanned my head, chest and abdomen to check on progression and assess my suitability for radiotherapy (RT) treatment. They had to repeat my head CT - I guess they couldn't believe it the first time. They work late and I had the scan in the evening, but they still posted the results for the head online the same night. It showed "general cerebral atrophy", but no malignant spread to the brain. So my brain has shrunk - but I could have told them that, for my whole body shows general atrophy, my thoughts come slower and less imaginatively and I often forget what I'm doing and sometimes struggle to bring a familiar word to mind. The penalties of aging - slowly going ga-ga as well as getting weaker. I know I shuffle round the park to walk the dogs - now I shuffle through my thoughts as well. We now just await the results from the rest of the body, and will see what they recommend. Maybe one blast of RT will shrink the spreading beast and ease the pain.

An Orchid for Ann

I have bought a new maths graphics package. It was only £20 and is great fun and easy to use, even for non-mathematicians. One just types in any equation and this package graphs it and can even colour it. I am using it to draw strange and interesting forms; this first one I have called Form No. 1 (no marks for originality), and for the mathematically interested, the equation is very simple: x²+y²+sin2x+sin3y. One doesn't need to know what the equation means, but I then painted the resulting shape in oils onto canvas and voila - a new piece of art!

Much more beautiful is a gift from Matthew and Rosie which they bought for Ann on their visit last year for my 80th birthday celebration. It is a small orchid in full bloom, growing as a bottle plant so it rarely needs watering, and has been blooming for nearly a month already.