see that tatty old door

sleepers going in

garden in progress

what a mess!

Mandy and Pete's Wedding

busy

oooh, I've been so busy -- I did a bitof voluntary work at B's school this week. Only 4 hours in the classroom, but I had to spend a good while preparing the text and resources, so it kept me off the streets.

We've also been having a new landscape project done in the back-garden, which is nearly finished: photos SOON

My mate mand got married this weekend. It was a really lovely do. The service was in the Town Hall in Manchester, a very fine building with lovely high ceilings and long stained glass windows. Sadly I cant find any sites with good pics of the interior, but you can follow the link for a few images.

Mand and Pete had written their own vows as well, which was good. Then we all had a short stroll across town to the Dukes 92 ~ a bar-restaurant by the canal, where we had a lovely "sunday lunch". The room they had is virtually all glass on two sides, with great views out over the canla basin, creating a marvellous sense of space inside.

Mand looked marvellous and I am so happy for her. She is so delighted with her new life... I did a "best-woman" speech that went down well, no doubt thanks to my impeccable planning! haha
Sadly I don't think I got any decent photos of us together, but I will download later and have a look!

we are going up, I say, we are going up

Yay ..

Oh when the REDS, oh when the REDS oh when the RED go marching in

I wanna be in the number, when the REDS go marching in!

I am so pleased for the team, the fans, and everyone who cares about my city!

YAY!

btw- here's another version of Pottermouth, with better sound quality and pictures to illustrate the "cultural" references! -- cos the BBC themselves have presented it

great stuff!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmsRwj6Iu04&feature=related

wooo

that was so surreal - the short version is the scans are clear ..

the long version is: we arrived @ the hospital bang on 4 (my appt time) cos the traffic was terrible, the whole city snarled up due to an M6 crash, apparently

and we can tell Dr A isnt there cos we know his car ...

so we sit and wait

and B says "it's a good job we're not on pins, isn't it?"

and he turns up at 4.45 cos he's been stuck in the nightmare traffic too ... and we're just saying hello in the foyer when this other guy (the 4.30 appt fellow) grabs his hand and scoots into the room with Dr A ..

queue jumped at the oncologist, whatever next!

So B says "let it go it's ok......it's not like we are on pins!"

then we're wondering should we phone/text ppl who know we're seeing the doc @ 4 -- cos clearly it's going to be a bit more of a wait ..

but we didn't ..

I carried on doing the suduko puzzle and meanwhile saying to B I think my doctor is very handsome -- he looks gorgeous in his pink shirt and tie ensemble -- and she says she'll throw a brick through his lovely sporty two door 90 grands worth of mercedes if I carry on .... (it seems that she can remember the dream I had about him ... it's not only psychotherapists whose patients can get crushes on them !!)

she is only joking though, she loves him too ...


then we go in eventually and then we realise he hasn't looked at the xrays ...

and he is making small talk about me going back to work and how've I been ?... and general chat about my health and my stoma and surgery and I am thinking

ARGH -- look at the x-rays will you ?????

B says he's being very holistic in his approach, when he finally goes to get this thick pile of images .. and we sit there patiently while he gazes at each one in turn, ocasionally throwing out remarks like "so far so good"

and he is SOOOOOOOOOOOO casual -- and I want to offer him a magnifying glass and say are you sure you've really looked at that!?!?!?!??!


but he says it is fine --- and that's that

and now we are breathing again

Scaredy CT

I am scared .. entering serious anxiety attack-territory now, despite all the deep breathing and displacement activity.

I see Dr Adab in a couple of hours and will up-date this about 7 or 8pm tonight.

Fingers crossed!

xxxxx

Just for Julie

Pottermouth

-- I dont tend to go on about it in here, but I am both a lass from Stoke on Trent and a bit of a football fan ...

Now, Stoke City FC are teetering on the verge of promotion to the Premiership, and me n the missis have been going to a few games and getting all excited with the rest of the fans round here .. ... ... ... and it's a great diversion from the serious stuff we're dealing with this week ...

I heard on Radio 5 that a local poet had penned a little ditty to encourage "our boys" .... apparently he left his poem as a voicemail on the local Radio Station .. and as is the way with these things, someone else has caught the sound bite, added a few images and popped it on to YouTube .

It might not be your sort of thing, but this amuses me, and his accent and dialect is very much my heritage .. and actually all the things he mentions are my heritage too .. and it's so funny and really ratehr touching to hear it strung together in this way ..

Ladies and Gentlemen -- I give you, our very own Stokey legend ---

Pottermouth:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hO6RaGvGCdI&feature=related


:)

posers

french fauna

quintessentially french photos

cocktail photos

take heart

If you want to catch up with my mental state I just updated the Take Heart blog:
http://takeheart-suze.blogspot.com/

delay

hi

sorry for dilatory catch-up since we got back from France. We've been madly busy both at work and socially ... the highlights:
holiday was fine, gite was really lovely and the area is marvellous, but on the down side is was very cold weather (same as in UK) and I had a bit of a flu thing :(

Thursday, we got back and had a few cocktails in kent with B's grandad and then later with her mum and her husband who was celebrating his birthday, so that was lovely

We spent Friday exploring Dungeness and Rye (lovely place) and bobbed into see B's sister en route through London

Then trogged back home to monumental unpacking (we never travel light - the customs man pulled us over to see what piles of stuff we'd got, somewhat in disbelief that two women away for ten days could need so much - I'm sure he thought we'd got a couple of refugees tucked under the blankets!)

I've actully been into work every day this week (typical stupid part-timer behaviour.)

Went to see Stoke get beaten by Palace on Monday night.

Forced a few more cocktails down ourselves in celebration of two years of our civil partnership on Tuesday (with our lovely mates Mr K and Sam)

Couldn't face (yes you heard, couldn't face) more cocktails last night, but selflessly mixed a few for B and Kasia to celebrate K's birthday.

Today, I've waited in this afternoon for a plumber who's not come cos he's got personal problems .. so have I .. my loo is not flushing!

AND I also signed a contract for two UPVC back doors -- which I'm writing here before I tell Brigid (gulp)

AND in between times, I am trying to get the holiday photos edited so I can share them, AND catch up with 2 million on-line mates as well. Oh, and had a good chat with my line-manager about my contract for next year, which college is being very obliging about ...

SO

I'm so happy to be home, really smiley happy ... :)

oh yeah, and best of all I am just totally delighted to find out that I can access the OED at home if I join my local library, thus accessing the best book in the world for free instead of £2oo a year! YAY - I'll be off to the library to re-join tomorrow ...
http://www.oed.com/about/
:)

Easter

One of the silver linings about being ill and going part time is that I dont have to dedicate my weeknds and "holidays" to endless marking anymore, which was always such a stress at Easter when coursework has to be finalised .. my heart goes out to colleagues busy on that this week ..

The weather forecast is grim, even in France it is the same as here - I hope it DOESN'T acutally snow on our gite!

Meanwhile, here is a cheery pic of my n B, in Jean's house, with the Easter Chicks she gave us (which are obviously already eaten!)

Resigned

Another land-mark. I have officially resigned as Head of English at college and expressed the desire to work only part time next year. I am pleased about it, and know this is the right decision for me, but just occasionally I get a huge side-swipe of emotion that just makes me cry about it. I've hardly cried about anything to do with ME this year (other ppl's stories and TV drama have been safer vents for my weepy moments) but stuff to do with work ALWAYS sets me off.

I dunno - I don't see myself as "career-mad". I think I only applied for the job in the first place as a way of avoiding being bosssed about by a muppet! Since that rather reluctant start I like to think that I did a good job of managing the team and supporting all those students over the years. I will miss that side of it.

It's not as if I'm losing my job altogether, I can still do good lessons and make resources ... so why does it feel so sad? (thanks to Ann H for "being there" for me on Monday!)

Cancer eats away at your life, inside and out. It has unexpected repercussions and implications.

Some people might wonder why I am making that change anyway. There are two other women at work who have had cancer and kept their HoD jobs going, so why can't I?

I think it is mainly about the prognosis issue. Having a good prognosis would (maybe) feel different, but having a grim prognosis encourages me to make choices. That, and actually: just the luxury of a debt-free existance and a supportive partner means I CAN make this choice. Really it is a privilege to be able to change tempo in your life. Four other ppl in the English Dept have done this over the past ten years without being "ill" to prompt them into it. I no longer want to give 70 hours a week to a job and I am am happy, really, to make the change ..

79

well here is a thing to share with you ....
Today I sort of had this imaginary flight of fancy in my head (can't recall what set it off) and I was imagining living for another 30 years and being 79 .. and somehow I realised that is the first time I've imagined myself seriously further ahead than a few months since this caper started

It feels like a momentous thing, somehow, to get back that sense of a future, however short-live that feeling is.

It also made me realise that for a very long time I have been totally resigned to the idea that my life-expectancy is short ... and how hard it is to think outside that idea (mainly cos my oncologist told me there's a 66% chance of it coming back this year!) hard to imagine being the 1 in 3 who gets a reprieve ... somehow ..

maybe I've been being too pragmatic in having that short-life idea in the back of my mind all the time... anyway, today's little spark of imagining a future was rather special ...

I mean I dont sit around imagining myself DEAD, or even being upset about that .. I'm pretty blase about that in fact, just a wimp at the idea of more pain and more pain and more pain that you have to go through with cancer before you get to the "peaceful oblivion" thing ....

"thinking positive" and live your life" mantras are more than just words, but I can't bring myself to be pollyanna and oblivious to the reality ... except that is might NOT be the reality .. the bus I sense hurtling towards me might suddenly slam the brakes on ...

and I might live to be 79

hidden costs of cancer

Bleugh, Friday turned out to be a pretty irritable day, due to my efforts to get myself insurance for our next holiday to France. My recent multiple stays in hospital mean that most companies wont cover me for anything medical, never mind anything to do with cancer.

Of course I don't really need cover for "cancer" - in summer 2006 I cycled round France with a tumour the size of a loaf inside me, so even if there is a microscopic new one growing, it won't be enough to cause me any problems ... per se ..

BUT my stoma is a worry. Friends of mine have recently had some scarey blockage and dehydration experiences and I dont fancy getting caught out by something like that and not having some cover.

Any rate it was pretty hellish having to answer more or less the exact same detailed medical questions for the privilege of being told to "sod off" at the end of it .. a particularly stupid bit came when one guy asked me if I'd had any blood out of my arse recently .. well NO I haven't ... cos my arse doesn't work, does it? I told you I've got a stoma .. hey ho.. I supose if there was a tumour there it could be bleeding, and it cold comeout of there ..

.. in general, though, it seems that they just dont really engage with what they are asking you about, just following the prompts on the screen, and it is not a good way to spend a whole morning.

Anyrate, I have found one who'll do it, not cheap, but it will give me peace of mind.

tissington trail

out on the Tissington Trail

1/2 term

Edited to add the pics - two mad women and a flavour of the decor in the room we had ....

Well after a WHOLE five weeks back at (sort of) work I get the feeling of a proper holiday, as a break from work. And didn't we do well? The weather this past week has been amazing, and we sat at the top of the Great Orme (which I had miraculously scaled under my own steam this time) and literally basked in the sunshine and still air. We had marvellous clear views out over the coast all round and further into the mountains beyond.. lovely

See, life is full of these moments when you just think it doesn't get any better than this.

We started to try and book again for B's birthday, the bank holiday in May, but is turns out Llnadudno has a "Victorian Extravaganza" time that very weekend, which might be a case of things not getting much worse than that, heaving with funfairs and massive crowds, so we are looking around for a Plan B ... !

It is sunny again today, tho bitterly cold, and we will be off on our bikes in the Peaks ...

... with the new camera we just bought, but that I've not really got my head around using yet.

It is a fuji finepix with lots of optical zoom (x18) so good for nature shots, I think .. I'm slowly working my way through the manual, which is surprisingly well written, but still too much to take in at a time.

Sorry I've been a bit poor at updating this lately .. but a steady string of things are OK would be boring, eh!

New Years Eve photos

Some recent photos of us with the lovelyLili and Bouclette.

I am even smiley-er now cos the hotel we stayed in at Leeds for this rendezvous was less than immaculate on the cleaning front, so I (politely) filled in their customer satisfaction thingy, and the manager has just written to offer us a return visit at their expense to "restore your faith in xyz hotels"

Nice!! cos we DID like the central location and the space in the room itself, so I will take them up on it sometime (got 6 months for their offer as well)







Nous sommes tres jolies, n'est ce pas?

Planning?

Hi - I have recently made a few baby steps to try out being at work, and it has been great fun, just doing some one to one work with final year students on their coursework.

NOW my reversal op has been put on hold, cos my surgeon can no longer do it at the end of this month, and then she is on hols for most of February.

Thinking about that I decided to say I'd prefer to wait till after Easter, cos that is so early in March, then we can have a holiday somewhere nice, NOT blighted by the possibility of post-op trauma ... and then maybe take the time to see what my next scan shows in April, maybe?

It is so hard to know what to do.

To some extent, fear of the cancer coming back makes me want to delay the surgery anyway, cos if these are a few precious months of not being in cancer treatment then maybe it is better to not be post-op in them ... and just not bother with the reversal ... in favour of "quality of life" time with B and gently doing a few hours of work.

Some ppl say "You have to do what you want" and I dont even know what I want.

Then other ppl say "Oh just get on with it and get back to normal" and then I think, what is normal when you have a high risk of return cancer in the back of your mind every day ?

New Year's Resolution?

I don't care much for resolutions, but I will continue to try to live with pride and dignity this year. I'm also resolved to learn a bit more about using Photoshop and working on this picture added a couple of new techniques to my repertoire.

It is now nearly a year since my big operation, and 15 months since I last went to work. I've had 20 in-patient hospital visits over the past year, sto say nothing of the clincs, bloodtests and scans, so I DO hope that 2008 will bring less of that and more of the normal stuff.

I owe a massive thank-you to all my family and friends who have been so strong and supportive in 2007. It is much appreciated. I must thank Brigid most of all, I couldn't ask for more.