Trip down memory's lane

We’re back from Manchester. The surgeon has decided he cannot operate, not because the operation would be too dangerous but rather because this form of cancer is so aggressive, & going by the speed with which it has returned, he would basically end up cutting out more & more as the cancer grows faster than he can operate. However, he did offer one crumb of comfort. If chemo can bring the cancer under control, possibly even shrink it, then he will be happy to look again & reconsider.

 

The trip wasn’t entirely without other values. We managed to see my stepbrother who, surprise surprise, turned up in the hotel bar where we were staying. We sat at separate tables but near enough to talk. I’ve known him since I was a very young child. He was the first boy my brother met when he started primary school & went through the school system together. They remained firm friends until my brother’s death in 2001. We reminisced over past days, over friends & family, some long gone, some still alive. It was a good couple of hours of catch-up.

 

After we’d had dinner at the hotel, it was still only about 9pm so we popped to see another old friend. He lives next door to the hotel. He, too, I’ve known for most of my life. In my childhood, he lived in a house that backed onto another friend’s garden. We had regularly war games, on opposing sides, though the hedge. His mother was a whirlwind at the church I attended until I got married & moved permanently away from the area.

 

The friend became a protector for my brother – the latter had a heart defect & was a haemophiliac that meant he was always a little sickly & tended to be picked on by bigger, stronger lads. Then, my brother was taken seriously ill & spent two summers in hospital, the latter with pleurisy the result of not looking after himself properly. This friend, my brother’s childhood protector, & his family took my brother in as a lodger so they could keep an eye on my brother.  The friend’s marriage ended in divorce, but the two men continued to share a flat until the day the friend was disturbed when my brother didn’t appear in the morning. Eventually he went into my brother’s bedroom to find he’d died overnight in his sleep. His heart had finally just given up.

 

This childhood friend has been going through things in his flat & discovered a box of slides my father must have given to my brother long ago, so now this friend has passed them on to us. Quite what we’re going to do with them we don’t know. We’re not even sure if our old projector, stowed away unused in the attic for the 20 years we’ve live here, even still works. For that matter we wonder what the quality of the slides will be after being stored so long in less than ideal conditions.

 

We’ll see, but just now we want to recover from our trip to Manchester & get ready for my 3 hospital appointments at Kendal hospital next week. The first is to put in a PICC line, the second for the first session of chemo & the third to talk to the oncologist again. My fourth appointment is a telephone appointment with the radiologist about my recent radiotherapy. It’s all go.