Tag Archives: life

2021… again!

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I thought I’d name my traditional end of year wrap-up blog post something slightly different. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster year for me. After everything that happened last year (see Cancer, Chemo and Corona) life has taken a new meaning. It’s taught me that we take everything for granted. Waking up every day and feeling well is a blessing, when so many people have it worse off. I’ve been trying to sieze the moment and do as much as I can. The word “bored” doesn’t exist because I’m always trying to do something. I’ve ticked off a number of odd job things that I’ve had on various lists for years. Sometimes you just have to get up and hustle.

The experiences of what happened to me last yeast were quite frankly the scariest thing I’ve ever had to deal with, and I don’t think anyone will quite understand unless they have had to go through something similar. I have so much to thank the NHS for, and which is why anyone who disagrees with getting a vaccine annoys me immensley. The costs of my hospital treatments last year anywhere where “free” health care isn’t provided quite possibly runs into the tens of thousands. I just did a quick Google search for “knee replacement cost” (just one of the many components of my surgery) and the first result came back as £10k, and that’s only scratching the surface. My surgery was 7hrs long with a number of top surgeons at the RNOH in Stanmore. I was in hospital for 2 weeks before being sent home. Then the next phase was nearly 8 months of Chemotherapy with 3 week in patient stays at Leicester Royal Infirmary. Plus monthly physio calls and checkups. You get where I’m going here. I’m so very grateful for living in this country and having this wonderful health service.

I probably should have seen a counciler sooner, to help me deal with the aftermath of spending a whole year out and the mental onslaught of dealing with being told I had Cancer, and then fighting that for a whole year whilst isolating and not being able to have visitors to the hospital. I’ve been keeping busy by throwing myself back into work (not that I’ve been thanked for it once) but no one has kept an eye on me and with the workload building up and up I’ve had to take it into my own hands and take some time off to deal with the stress and reset a little.

Mental health is as important as phsyical health. Last year you could physically see that I hadn’t been well. This year I’m looking fine but mental health has taken a rollocking having to deal with everything and realistically probably masking the issue a little by keeping myself so busy.

Take care of yourselves and one another. Keep an eye out on your friends. No one is invincible.

My Wife Anna and my close friends and family have kept me going through all of this.

At this stage I’m a little fed up of things repeating themselves like Groundhog Day. Let’s hope 2022 is an improvement and we see this Coronavirus off in a timely fashion. 🙂

End of Year wrap-up

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Me Dec 2020

 

Hm, where to start? This year has been a bit crap hasn’t it?  I’ve just tried to light my fire bin in the garden and everything is too sodden. Even the wood I chopped up and put in there is wet and sodden which sums up the year as a whole.

No one knew what would happen at the beginning of the year. I spent last Christmas and New Year with a cancer diagnosis looming over me, and whilst I was going through the operation in Feburary to have a tumour removed from my leg, the news of Covid coming was everywhere. I was lucky that the op went ahead and the chemo which followed was not delayed… as it has been for so many and for those people I really am sorry.

I won’t mull over this too much as I know people do it have it worse off. And I’ve written a bit about that in my last post – Life is relative – but I wouldn’t wish chemotherapy on anyone. It’s one of those things that starts off OK and then as the treatment continues and your immune system is shot, that everything else goes off the rails. I contracted Covid from hospital and spent 3 weeks getting over it. I was blue lit to Northampton general and spent a week there with 38.5degree fevers twice a day underneath a freezing cold air conditioning duct. It was horrendous. Three weeks with a fever that high twice a day wasn’t pleasant. Luckily the disease didn’t go to my lungs as that could have been a different story. I thank my fitness for that but it could have been 50/50.

I’m done with chemo now, and I’m focussing 100% on physio and getting my leg strong again. I’m on track to put on weight again with a target of 79kg… got another 4 to go and I’m working on building upper body strength again as well. I have a page where you can track progress here: Instagram

I want to say a big thank you to my fiancee Annabelle who’s been an absolute star and a rock this year, having to put up with me being in hospital for 3 weeks at a time or more at times and doing much more housework than previously whilst I recovered. I honestly wouldhn’t have been able to do this without her. A big thank you also to my family and friends, for the video calls and calls in hospital to keep the days occupied.

I also want to say a shoutout to the company I work for for being so tolerant and for allowing me to keep my position. I’m phasing back to full time in Jan 2021.

I’ve been able to keep up with freelance work also, which is useful and will be continuing with that next year.

I appreciate life a lot more now, that’s something new. Every day I wake up now is a good day. I saw some not so nice things having been an inpatient in an oncology / heamotology ward for over 6 months. My emotions are wrecked though. The smallest thing can have me balling my eyes out and just looking at photos of last year can do that but I’m stronger and I’m going to be stronger…

 

And that’s a wrap. Thanks for reading and all the best for 2021 if you read this far!

Life is relative

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I’ve done a lot of reading this year. I’ve spent a lot of time in hospital, most of which was spent waiting and drifting from breakfast to lunch to dinner. So to make up for that I set myself a higher than normal reading challenge on Goodreads and made a concerted effort to read much more than I normally would.

I garnered a rather unhealthy obsession with the Vietnam war. A war often forgotten about because it was so unjust and for the longest time America wanted to move on and hide their shame. It is afterall, up to that point, and probably thereafter, the only war America has ever lost.

The war went on for nearly 10 years by the time it was all wrapped up and troops had all moved out. A lot of kids grew up in that period and a lot of politicians, and world leaders, came and went.

I have been comparing my experiences of that war and some other battles fought with my own battles this year. The  essence of this is, that there is always someone in a worse state or having a worse time. Vietnam basically has two seasons: hot and hot and wet. The climate is horrendous. Insane humidity that no one can train for. The training that troops in America undertook before shipping out, were nothing like what they were to expect. Nowhere in North America is as wet, hot and humid as Vietnam Jungle is for the most part of the year.

So you’re sitting in the jungle, it’s hot, you’re soaked through and you’ve not slept properly for a fortnight or more becuase each night you’re dug into a foxhole in the pissing rain with your boots disintigrating and your clothes rotting with no change because supplies have run out. To add to the mix your radio equipment is unreliable and you’ve lost contact with HQ and each night you’re bombarded with mortar shells and machine gun fire.

8 months of chemo, where I spent 3 weeks at a time for most parts in a hospital ward getting little sleep but getting fed 3 meals a day on a regular basis and as much tea or coffee (as bad as it was) as I wanted is nothing compared to what thousands went through in Vietnam.

So I compare my own experience with the things I read and decided it could have been a whole lot worse and it’s not worth complaining about. Afterall, it’s just a little speedbump in the road. I feel for the hundreds that didn’t make it back from Vietnam, fighting an unjust war that in the end no one wanted to fight.

I’ve also added in a second book below which tells the real life story of a 17 year old boy on the Eastern front in Germany (just in case you’re fed up of jungle and humidity) where he endured starvation and freezing cold, wearing inadequate clothing, and suffering frostbite whilst fighting for his life!

Cancer is bad, but these folks had it a lot worse!

You may want to read:

  1.  A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo (Vietnam War)
  2. The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer (WW2, Germany, Eastern Front)

You may want to watch:

  1. The Vietnam War by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick
  2. The War, by Ken Burns

(YES, both bias towards America but believe they’re telling the whole story).