Alan went into hospital while I was away on holiday, and had a heart attack which he didn’t recover from. But the thing that gave me quite a nasty shock is that a major contributory factor towards his death was oesophageal cancer – which of course is what Chris died of. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know whether that was sheer coincidence (and Alan did use to smoke years ago, which is a known risk factor) or whether there is a hereditary component involved. But nasty, either way. Oesophageal cancer is not a pleasant way to go. Apparently Alan lost three stone in weight over the last few months, and he was pretty skinny to start with.

He was a somewhat distant father, and a very distant father-in-law, but he was a link with Chris and it’s sad he’s gone.

However, Rob is also painting the barge-boards on the garage extension, where the paint is just peeling off, and I’m rather annoyed about the need for that. The extension is only a few years old, and there is no way it should need repainting for several years yet. Indeed, the window frames on the extension are all still in good condition and don’t need any work at all yet. And, oddly, the soffits (i.e. the horizontal wooden panels underneath the vertical barge boards) are largely in reasonable nick. It is just the barge boards, which it seems have been badly primed, so that the paint hasn’t properly bonded to the wood underneath. Rob suspects that my builder used pre-primed timber for those lengths of wood rather than “doing it properly”.

Under other circumstances, I would probably be putting in a complaint to the original builder and insisting that he “makes good”.  But I really don’t think it’s going to be worth it. Last time I saw Brian, the chap who built the extension, was about 13 months ago. He was sitting in the chair next to Christopher in the oncology department of Worcester hospital having chemotherapy for lung cancer, and looked seriously ill. I’ve checked the online obituaries in the local paper, and someone with the same name, of approximately the right age, died of cancer a few months ago – so I’m pretty sure it’s him. Even if it’s not, I reckon that he would be far too sick to go up a ladder with a paintbrush. So I’ll just have to put up with the shoddy paint job and get Rob to do it properly.

However, I’ve been getting comments and complaints from several friends and family members who find it upsetting if they phone me when I’m out and they unexpectedly have Chris speaking to them. So I’ve given in and changed the outgoing message to be me. Sad in a way, but another step forward I suppose.

We had a tried-and-tested scale of pain which we used for many years,  mostly to quantify how bad a headache was  (five and upwards was reserved for the special hell that is a migraine). The scale came into its own in the hospice, when Chris was able to communicate to me quite easily if he was in pain, even when he found speaking a struggle due to his brain tumour. I noticed though that when I translated the scale for the benefit of the nurses, they doubled our score to fit their notion of a one-to-ten scale.  So if he told me the pain was a three, they marked that as a six, and immediately gave him some more morphine.

So it’s no wonder that I find that paracetamol barely touches a level-three headache!

“For the past three years I have used Chris’ recording of the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est” on librivox.org to teach my literature students World War I poetry. I clicked on his contact link on the site because I wanted to thank him for recording such a powerful reading of the poem; my students are always moved by his voice. I was saddened to read that Chris died, but I wanted to let his family and friends know that his voice has held the attention of hundreds of my students thus far.”

I think that makes the point very eloquently! Chris would have been so pleased to know that he was helping to introduce a new generation of students to first world war poetry, and indeed his Librivox poems are living on.

So when I saw that Malvern Theatres was showing the very latest Ayckbourn play, Life of Riley, I had no hesitation in buying myself a ticket for yesterday’s matinée. The first 15 minutes were a bit slow, as all the characters were introduced. But then it became clear that the title character, George Riley, had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and had just six months to live.  The humour of the play lay in his friends’ reactions to George’s imminent demise, but it was all a bit too close to home  to me for comfort.

I did think about leaving at the interval, but decided that would be cowardly. The second half was funnier than the first, and I did laugh out loud a few times, but I was braced the whole time for more uncomfortable plot twists – including the funeral that formed the final scene. I spent the whole play sitting rigidly bolt-upright and had a stinking migraine by the final curtain.

Next time,  I think I’d better check the plot synopsis on Google first, before buying a ticket!

Oh well, I suppose it is at least progress.

Crocuses outside the bedroom window

I’ve been away on business most of this week, so haven’t seen much of the garden in daylight. But yesterday morning, when I opened the bedroom curtains, the first thing I saw was ~50 cheery yellow crocus blooms right outside the bedroom window. It’s a lovely sign that Spring is on its way at last.

Chris may have never once bought me a bunch of flowers, but I’d so much rather have this living display. It will make me smile and think of him every Spring.

Kevin blogged earlier this week about terminal agitation, and how the palliative care nurses explained to him what was going on and helped Joan cope with it. Chris also suffered from that in the last few ghastly days at the hospice, when he kept struggling to get out of bed. He was surprisingly strong and it was very difficult to stop him hurting himself. I found Kevin’s post about Joan immensely reassuring, even six months later, because it helped me understand what we went through.

Jeanne comes across as (I hope she’ll forgive me for saying!) a somewhat formidable American woman who has had an aggressive metastatic breast cancer for the last eleven years. In that time she’s been through virtually every treatment there is, and has strong views on being the one in control of her treatment, rather than being dictated to by the doctors. We liked her attitude, though I don’t think we needed any on-line encouragement to rigorously question Christopher’s medical team – after all it’s part of our scientific training…

Currently, Jeanne is taking part in a clinical trial for something called T-DM1, which sounds like a new “drug of last resort” when standard treatments have failed. It is working remarkably well, and she is now in clinical remission for the first time in many years. However, she can’t simply relax and enjoy being in remission, because somehow she has to raise enough money to fund the cost of being in the trial, as well as her current ongoing treatment. This is the USA after all, and she’s been too ill to work for many years now, so of course there’s no work’s medical insurance to pick up the bills. It makes me really appreciate the good old NHS – at least we never had to worry about paying for the best available treatment.

Joan is the other cancer blogger I read regularly. She is an Australian, who was diagnosed with advanced (metastatic) bowel cancel within a few days of Christopher’s own diagnosis in December 2009. They started blogging about their experiences at about the same time, and we’ve been reading each other’s blogs ever since. Joan has been enduring an aggressive regime of chemotherapy for the last year, and is always a cheerful online presence, despite the ghastly side-effects of the treatment. Unfortunately, the oncologists have recently concluded that there is nothing much more to be gained from further treatment, and she is currently very ill and in hospital. I really feel for her – and also for her husband Kevin. I have an inkling of what he must be going through at the moment and, believe me, stressful doesn’t begin to cover it.

It’s odd in a way. I’m never going to meet either of these women, and under other circumstances our paths would never have crossed. Yet I’ve been following their stories with keen interest for the past 14 months or so, and the positive attitude with which they face their illness inspired us both.