Working Hard

My brain is full of things to do. My patients are waiting. Some of them are grumpy. I am promising haste, but I cannot deliver. I have a fairly constant little voice at the back of my mind saying "there's something I've forgotten to do..."

This is entirely normal for a GP. Every day is spent frantically trying to do more than enough, to keep everyone happy, to allay fears and fill forms that need to be in tomorrow and fix that problem that's been going on for years. 

I am delighted to back in the thick of it, but I miss those days when I had all the time in the world to sit with a lonely widow, or crack through the steely facade of a scared father. 

I have other work to attend to as well. 

Keeping healthy is not as straightforward as you might think. 

First, there's the compulsory eight hours sleep. 

Then.

Oats (organic, stone-ground).
Berries (boiled to get rid of hepatitis). 
Bananas (not too many, your potassium will go bananas).
Green tea (not too much, it'll suck up all your folic acid).
Coffee (minimum 2, maximum 6 cups a day).
Wholemeal bread. No, sorry, wholegrain. Spelt if you can get it. Feck it, probably best to avoid gluten altogether. 
Vitamin D. Vitamin B. Vitamin C. Definitely Vitamin K. Not Vitamin E though. 
Probiotics. 
Fermented stuff (bound to be some of that in the back of my fridge...).
No red meat.
No processed pig.
No antibiotic-filled poultry.
No waste-filtering shellfish. 
No tuna (mercury).
No cod (non-sustainable. Save the fishies!)
No blue cheese. 
Organic muslin-strained home-knitted yoghurt. Pronounced correctly.
No unpasteurised dairy. 
Heck, what am I saying, no goddamn dairy at all!
A glass of red wine. One, I said. Red, I said. Not fizzy.
No refined sugar. Only common-as-muck stuff.
No salt. 
Wheatgrass. 
Cacao (whatever happened to spelling it cocoa?)
That stuff that turns into frogspawn when you add water. 
Watercress.
Kale. (Kak).
For the love of god, don't cook the vegetables!
Cook it to death! (see Berries above).

Meditate twice a day, 10 minutes minimum. 
Aerobic exercise, 30 minutes a day.
Pilates.
Yoga.
Aromatherapy.
Hydrotherapy.
Psychotherapy. No drugs though. Those pharma companies are evil disease-mongerers. 
Do not even get me started on the vaccines....

Set goals.
Fill a jar with post-it notes.
Talk to yourself in the mirror.
Pray. And mean it. He'll know, you know. 

Write. Sing. Row. Draw. Run. 





Yes, clever clogses. 
You have spotted that this is a preview of my soon-to-be best seller: The Sick Doctor's Guide to Having a Strong Argument with Cancer. 
A compilation of all the other self-help pulp out there, cleverly disguised as Medical Fact.

Happy New Year

I didn't intend to leave such a long gap between posts, and I didn't mean to make a big deal of January 1st by suddenly re-emerging into the blogosphere, but there you go. I guess I am innately melodramatic. 

The main news is that I went to see the Top Man in the posh place in Dublin. 
I was right, my insurance doesn't cover it. 
After sitting in the plush waiting room (for the same length of time I would have in HSEville) with the free coffee, the photocopied crosswords on the tables, the polished leather armchairs, the exceptionally ancient fellow patients, I go into to see The Man. He looks at my scans, says things like "blimey, what's that?" while occasionally glancing at me, tries to make thin banter about the Real Capital, and pronounces that yes indeed he can fix me no bother. 

"Emm but my insurance won't pay for it."
"Of course it will."
"Emm no it won't."
Given that we were right in the middle of Panto season, this could have gone on for some time. 
Thankfully, he is a man in a hurry and with secretaries, so he got them to do the next bout of to-ing and fro-ing. 
And indeed, once again, the getting-a-bit-impatient insurance lady said No.

"Not to worry, we will make you a public patient and the State will pay for you."
"Sure that's fine so."

Some minor protocol-avoiding meant I could toddle home again that evening and get stuck into the Christmas mayhem, and forget about the CyberKnife spongeing that I will be doing in a few weeks.


Outside of all this cancer stuff there was a lot more fun going on. 
I became one of the very few women who is ecstatic to be forty. Couldn't be happier to be getting old and grey.
I had a good party.

The week before, we went to a 50th birthday party. The week after, we went to a 90th. I like the maths of that. 

We had a pathetically wholesome Christmas, with beside-ourselves excitement when Santa came, and a swim in the sea which reaped huge respect despite it being really not that cold at all. I was very tempted to go for the bikini to show off my lovely scar, which would have notched the kudos level up to 11. But I don't like to be a drama queen....

Board games, organised exercise, chats, leaky mince pies, champagne, stinky cheese. We had the lot. 

And inevitably I am here now on the first day of the new year, thinking how grateful I am to be here, how lucky I am to have the people I love in my life, and how wonderful the world is.

Over the top? 

Maybe just a little bit. But it's my party!

Dublin, London, Paris, New York.....Newcastle???

That last little bit of cancer needs to be fried, or melted, or poisoned, because it can't be cut out. 

To be honest, while I realise cutting out is the be-all and end-all when it comes to this kind of thing, I do find it is quite a nuisance when it comes to having a fully functioning body. It turns out that your body is pretty good at doing what it does, and when you start hacking pieces out of it, it doesn't react too well. Scar tissue, bowel shortage, liver regrowth - they all cause their own little bit of trouble. But, fair enough, quite a bit less trouble than flesh- and organ-eating cancer. All I'm saying is that a body diminished by surgery isn't as efficient as an intact one, in my experience. 

So the boyos cannot cut out this last bit, and that makes me just a little bit pleased. Only because they assure me that they can find another way to get rid of it. 

The options are stereotactic radiotherapy, electroporation, intra-arterial chemotherapy and possibly something else but I lost track a bit in the conversation at that point. 

What they didn't tell me is that the first one is also known as the Cyber-Knife, and the second one is the Nano-Knife. I don't know if the third one has a cool-sounding nickname, but since it won't have Knife in it, it would be hard to see how it could beat the other two. 

So, which is better? 

Cyber = techy, other-worldly, a bit mysterious

Nano = tiny, precise, possibly something to do with Mork and Mindy (or the Presentation Sisters. Either way, two impeccable pedigrees).

The other deciding factor is where I can get these done.

CyberKnife - fancy private hospitals in Dublin (which my insurance doesn't cover). Or Beaumont (not so fancy).

Intra-arterial chemo - New York or Paris (in Paris, they leave the pump hanging out of you, as a fashion accessory, obvs).

NanoKnife (my preferred option) - Newcastle. Upon Tyne like. Reet. Not exactly a top destination, but it does have that Brazilian knock-off statue thing. 

Of course, it's not really up to me (autonomy out the window again). My scans are being sent to Top Men all over the world (well, Newcastle mainly I think, because the chap there is the Toppest of Top Men) and they will do top-level chin-stroking, and get back to my own boyos who will let me know if it's Cyber, Nano or Pump. Another fun variation on the Rock/Paper/Scissors game. 

Now, where's my passport?