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On the lh side behind the vertical tree branches is the Hereford Rowing Club. Not a good day for the rowing fraternity |
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Bought as a birthday prezzie for VR, the prunus admirably indicates wind speed |
Sixty years ago health treatment differed widely from that of today. Then helpful information was often denied patients or handed out grudgingly, expressed in obscure euphemism. The justification seemed to be: don’t-worry-your-pretty-little-head.
Now questions are encouraged and patients prepared mentally as well as physically for procedures - particularly noticeable when surgery and subsequent chemotherapy are contrasted. The former is more or less self-explanatory; with the latter, toxic substances are introduced leading to a wide range of reactions, not all of them pleasant.
I’ve already had one pre-chemo consultation where I was broadly informed, weighed and required to supply a blood sample. There’ll be another in a fortnight, the difference being I’ll be asked to sign a waiver. Proof the reactions are hard to foresee.
For that first consultation I decided to walk to the hospital: Two and half miles, some of it along the banks of the Wye, generally conceded to be one of Britain’s prettiest rivers. Already grievous forecasts about Storm Eunice were being made (they got far worse later that day) and the Wye was over-filled and fast-flowing. If I toppled in I might well fetch up at Chepstow – consult your atlas.
I felt beset by predictions: my health and the weather. Methods have improved in both these fields, but it’s as well to reflect that these more precise percentages still relate to bad outcomes as well as good. If all predictions were 100% good they’d no longer be predictions. I’ve been fascinated by probability, one of the tougher branches of mathematics, but what I’ve learned hasn’t eliminated my distaste for gambling.
Of course, I’m not the person throwing the dice. I am, you might say, the dice itself. Returning from the hospital I boarded a bus that took me 66.6% of the way.
Yikes! I hate that you have to go through this.
ReplyDeleteColette: I'd forgotten Yikes. It has its very own place in the pantheon of (verbal) ejaculations.
DeleteWalking 2 1/2 miles is really pretty impressive, especially in high winds. I'm glad you're feeling well enough to take a walk like that.
ReplyDeleteIt's been more than ten years now since Roger had chemotherapy. It worked. He's still here and feeling fine! I hope your chemo treatments do the same. Take care there.
robin andrea: I used Google's GPS to time the walk exactly, door to door. I think Google had a younger and fitter pedestrian in mind, resulting in an elapsed time of 49 minutes. I managed it in 59 minutes. At one point the river had overflowed the pathway; greatly daring, I mounted an adjacent wall, about 1 m high, and walked that to keep my feet dry. The wall was somewat higher at the end than at the start, and there were no useful handholds. As I pondered my descent I noticed - out of my eye-corner - someone had followed me along the wall and was waiting interestedly to see how I got down. Jumping seemed the only honourable solution. I alighted as delicately as an autumn leaf.
DeleteAs to chemotherapy, it isn't usually prescribed for someone of my age. But the surgeon reckoned I would profit from it and I took that as a compliment.
My approval for the walking. You may yet get the bug. disapproval for your use of centred text for your captions, a format you saw fit to criticise me for some time ago.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: If you disapprove of centring caption lines, why did you do it?
DeleteOne disadvantage with walking: it's difficult to combine it with reading.
Because I accepted your professional opinion on the matter and have ever since justified to the left. Walking/reading: audio book?
DeleteWalking is highly recommended to counteract any side effects but especially those that may lead to worrisome thoughts and predictions of potentially not so positive scenarios.
ReplyDeleteI can vouch for it. I would add cycling but I have a feeling it's not quite your thing.
Keep it up, the walking, and may it all work out splendidly for you!
Sabine: The main advantage with walking is that it can be precisely timed, one isn't at the mercy of traffic density or "leaves on the rails". I have recently adopted short daily walks as a means of encouraging my bowels to do what bowels are supposed to do. Any further benefits are incidental.
DeleteCycling "not quite (my) thing." On the contrary, many of my teenage holidays were spent touring Britain by bike, staying at Youth Hostels. What's more, I worked for a year on Britain's premier mag for two-wheelers, now called Cycling Weekly. I usually arrange my main summer holiday in France to coincide with the TdF which augments one of my long-standing obsessions - polishing my French. What I do not do is embrace cycling for its intrinsic nature; for me it is a form of transport and as such has its advantages and disadvantages. It must, for instance, bow the knee to railway trains since reading and writing are activities denied to two wheels.
Similarly with walking. I have no wish to devote large chunks of my waking day to walking; my walks start and end at my front door, the emphasis being on exercise rather than ratiocination. The environment is thus inevitably suburban which may sound unambitious. But the majority of people in the developed world live in the suburbs. I observe them through their windows as I hurry by (night-time is best) and compare their social mores with mine. Usually to my own disadvantage.
Iagree with Sabine to embrace cycling - even as I do with an e-bike. You are out in the fresh air and still exercise the body, particularly the legs. You can also meet new people in congenial conditions in village cafes. I try to do about 20 miles every day, weather permitting and always feel far better fot it when I get home.
ReplyDeleteMy wife is having cancer treatment at 83 and is something of a national guinea pig in that she is having the new "immunotherapy" treatment, rather than chemo. Apparently if it becomes a general success it will eventually replace chemo and has much less adverse side effects. Her treatment is for 75 minutes every three weeks for a year and she has had no apparent side effects yet after two treatments.
All the media frenzy about the latest high winds reminds me of the famous headline, "Small earthquake in Chile, not many dead".However a part of the roof of the O2 centre in London was ripped off so the metrocenterists think the end of the world has come. I remember the "great storm" of 1987 and here in Kent experienced its full force, where whole forests were laid waste and residential caravans were demolished and blown over cliffs into the sea, where a channel ferry was blown ashore. That really was a storm of hurricane ferocity, This recent one was a strong gale in comparison and had very little effect here in Ashford, although I did have a rubbish bin blown over (shock.Horror!)
Avus: Ah, the old dragon of metrocentricism raises it head yet again. If a thing doesn't happen in south-east England it hasn't happened at all. From Mill Hill northwards all is chimera. If you had diverted your attention from media frenzy (Curious: I had you down as a DT reader) and studied the unfrenzied met maps, you would have found that the greatest concentration of wind force was along the SW peninsula and (more cruelly) throughout South Wales. I live on the fringe of the latter and can trump your blown-over rubbish bin; in my garden a eucalyptus tree in a giant terracotta pot - the whole weighing, say, quarter of a ton - was upended.
DeleteIronically, in 1987 I lived in the land of metrocentricity and was prone to its attitudes. All that bleating about the seven oaks of Sevenoaks being reduced to three, was it? Our patrimony undermined; a thrust to the heart of London commuterdum and of extortionate property prices. Scroll forward 35 years and who gives a toss about what happens to Merthyr Tydfil? Do people live there? Aren't they Welsh? Do they count as human?