Another week!

A quiet week, enlivened by visits from Chrissie on Thursday and Phil who stayed on Friday night. Lovely to have some quality time with them. Saturday was so sunny that we pottered down to the canal, escorted by the farm dog Amber. The daffodils are glorious this year, though taking a battering from this chilly wind. Geoff, of course, when he's not being a carer (cat, fish, birds, house and of course me) is busily planting, mowing & wall mending.

I've been trying to prepare for the meeting with the surgeon on Tuesday with a little research into him and into the human liver! Mr Reyad Abbadi is a Kings man, so he must be good... He calls himself a hepatobiliary and pancreatic surgeon, which I found interesting as hepatobiliary is a new word for me, and is not in the Oxford dictionary! Can work out hepato as in hepatitis so liver and biliary which refers to gallbladder and bile ducts. Anyway, he lives and works in Bristol so that is where I shall go. The waiting for an op date is hard, though.

The human liver is big, up to 2 kilos (largest organ after the skin! is that an organ?!) And it can renew itself, which I find encouraging. Anyone sensitive should miss out the rest of this paragraph as I'm going to talk about symptoms of liver cancer. I won't generalise as this cancer is different from the more usual one caused by hard drinking! Mine appears to be, as I think I've said, from a infection in the gall bladder which is joined on to the liver. My original symptom was the daily temperature fluctuations ranging fom 35.5 to 37.8, which left me feeling confused and miserable. And exhausted, with no energy, poor concentration, inability to make decisions and loss of interest in life! I have quite a lot of nausea and stomach ache, presumably because the liver is squashing other organs. Recently I've had the delightful treat of excreting bile - sorry, nothing nice about cancer!

Really most of the time I'm not too bad but exasperated by having no energy to do the things I want to do to put my life in order. So I fall back on reading, mostly delightful escapist rubbish. I did however yesterday read our Book Club choice for April: Being Mortal by Atul Gawande which is by a doctor facing the current impasse between medecine (which can do extraordinary things to save and prolong life) and basic human requirements to choose what matters at 'the end'. He deals with both very old age and the way safety seems to be society's main concern not individual human need to do what makes one happy and with terminal illness where we should decide our priorities before we get locked into rounds of difficult treatment. A kind, moving and sobering book.

Now back to a nice Peter May bit of escapism... Antiques Roadshow on TV tonight. Maybe we'll have a walk at Avebury tomorrow...