I conquered this personal Everest on Friday when my physio,
the wonderful Carol, announced on her arrival that “the plan for today’s
session is to get you up the stairs”. I’d
had no idea that she was so ambitious (for ambitious read deluded) and was
duly terrified.
Never before have a set of stairs looked so daunting. Standing at the bottom step was one of the scariest
things I’ve ever done, but, I refuse to be beaten, so up I went. And it was fine. I wouldn’t say it was the smoothest stair
climb I’ve ever done – it was slow, laborious and definitely not elegant, but I
did it nonetheless. Coming down is even
less elegant, as I have to do it backwards at the moment, so whoever (usually
the blessed Kevin) is behind me for safety gets a full-on view of my arse on
the way down. Isn’t he the lucky one!
He was excited about me being back upstairs at first, but then
I started passing comment on the changes he’s made since I’d last been up there
three months ago. “Ooo, that looks nice”,
“No, I don’t like that”, “That’ll need to be changed”. I’m surprised he didn’t throw me back down
the stairs straightaway. ;-)
Apart from that, the other big bit of news is that I had my ‘re-framing’
scan to assess the progress of the chemotherapy. That was another experience I’ll happily
forget. I had to down half a litre of
barium meal drink beforehand, which was vile!
It tasted like one of Macbeth’s witches had come up with a disgusting blend
of vegetable oil, chalk, a token squeeze of orange juice and the odd bit of eye
of newt and spleen of toad thrown in for good measure. They also give you an injection of some weird
stuff that dyes your blood so it shows up more clearly on the scan. It’s heated in advance which they warned me
would make it feel really weird, particularly around the bum area. Apparently, there’s a large valve in each
buttock where the blood pools? Unsurprisingly,
‘they’ were right; it definitely did feel really weird - a bit like I'd wet
myself actually. Very disconcerting.
Anyway, it’s done now and I get the results on Monday
afternoon. Fingers, toes, legs and
everything else crossed everyone …
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