I was phoned at about a quarter to three this afternoon and offered a bed. The chemotherapy will start tomorrow, but because I am here it will be able to start bright and early. What a relief! Gillian was away on business, so Fabienne very kindly brought me to Cheltenham. Thank you, Fabienne, I’m so […]
Our lives at the moment are ruled by uncertainty. I never know from day to day exactly how I will feel. Will I be nauseous? Tired? Full of energy? It’s impossible to tell in advance. The uncertainty doesn’t stop with how I will feel; it extends to my treatment. I was supposed to go into […]
What’s this? Week 4? I thought the cycles were three weeks long. It’s true, they are, but there has been a delay in me going in to hospital to start cycle 4, so here I am, still at home, half-way through the fourth week of the third cycle. This extra long cycle means that I’ve […]
Earlier this month some researchers from California Institute of Technology published a paper in Nature with the intriguing title Evidence of RNAi in humans from systemically administered siRNA via targeted nanoparticles. Let’s pick that mess of jargon apart, shall we. RNAi is RNA interference, which means that the cell’s normal processes are interrupted. In this […]
I was due to go into hospital today to start cycle 4, but when I phoned in this morning I was told that they didn’t have a bed for me, and that I should try again tomorrow. I think I have to accept that going in on the planned day is an increasingly unlikely occurrence. […]
I’ve mentioned LibriVox quite a few times on this blog, but although I’ve been carrying out my duties as an admin on the site, I haven’t recorded anything for a long time. Someone posted a rather nice comment about an earlier recording recently which inspired me to get out my microphone again. Tonight I recorded, […]
In spite of a slight hiccough yesterday, it has been an extremely good week. I’ve been on three excursions, received some test results, had very little pain, and even sold some redundant photography gear on eBay. On Monday Gillian and I went to visit Gloucester cathedral. I remember it as being full of light, and […]
By Gillian Chris has been feeling odd all day today, but managed to eat a good breakfast (his famous scrambled eggs) and a full lunch – though we decided to stay at home for lunch rather than going to our favourite pub as we had originally planned, since we were both feeling well below par. […]
Yesterday Hugh, a friend and former colleague, picked me up at home and took me to visit Croft Castle, which is about an hour’s drive away. It is a grand old building, but not the first built on the site. There have been Crofts living at Croft Castle since 1086, although not without interruption. The […]
Today I got the results of my mid-chemotherapy CT scan, but before I tell you them I’ll tell you about the test for whether or not it is possible to treat my tumour with Herceptin. It turns out that the tumour does not over-express the HER2 gene, so there is little point in treating it […]
