Before I went in for chemotherapy I treated myself to a pair of the Bose Noise cancelling headphones (yeah the real bad boy ones). Well all I can say is what a joy to your ear they are. Firstly they are so comfortable when putting on, like slipping into fresh egyption cotten sheets (whoops back on subject). Then you flip the switch to activate the noise cancel and its like a compression of reality.
You don’t realise just how much backgroud noise is going on until you turn it off. It almost feels like the world in collasping inwards. Then you turn on the music, and sweet sweet sound comes pouring out. No blibs and burbs, or tinny base. These are one of the sweetest sounding headphones around. The cancelling of background noise lets you enjoy the smooth tones anywhere. (well almost).
Once the music starts it really is like a separate world, and you are the only person there. In a city of 35+millon people, thats a big thing.
The last few days have been totally freezing. If I did know better it would be reasonable to think it was just waiting for me. The weather channels are actually saying that the sakura will be in blossom on Wednesday. They are normally accurate as cherry blossom is big bussiness
Just had a wonderful day away this weekend down at Zushi which is the next main stop along from the famous Kamakura. It a really lovely place with a vibe of Japan mets Manly/Capetown.
The weather was stunningly nice, cool as the wind was blowing of the snow from Fuji-san, but still a wonderful early spring day. Being only an hour from Central Tokyo its actually quite a commutable distance and is up for serious consideration to move to. Its not really Shimoda, but still a wonderful place to come to to regenerate.
OK, why Christmas tree’s. Well spend some time having chemo therapy in a hospital and you start to see your IV stand as a Christmas tree. When you have an intravenous canuler they can add all these little gadgets so you can have more than one IV line running into you at one time. My constant companion was always the saline bag, added onto that were the others they gave me. In the mornings they amounted to 5 different things going in. It was just a matter of the nurse coming in and hooking up all these different things to the stand.
From memory there was the saline, the anti nausea, the kidney sometime, the urine something and something else. After most of them went in the first chemo cisplatin went in for 3 hours, then a really shitty one which I have no idea what it was but hurt like hell. Then the next chemo Etoposide for another 3 hours. They used to give me hot packs to put on my arm as it relieved the pain of the shitty one going into the vein.
I would start at 9am and finish about 7pm. I guess I was really lucky that they pumped so much anti nausea into me that I was never really violently ill, rather I spent a lot of time feeling like I wanted to throw up but could quite get there. When I could it was minimal, but damn I remember the smells of lunch and dinner so much. At one point they gave me a mask at dinner time so I could try and escape the smell of everyone else eating.
Being in Japan a lot of the food was fish and it really smelt, which is terrible as I love fish and to date of writing I’ve not cooked salmon as I’m scared the smell will be too much. Another one is Listerine which I had to used daily to keep my mouth clean of infection. By the end of chemo and after talking (limited) to them I lived on cheese, yoghurt and apple juice. I just couldn’t face anything else.
Oddly when I could start to eat its been spicy curry’s and chilli which I think has been me wanting my taste buds to feel alive again.
The days of having chemo all seem very blurry now as they just seem to run into each other particularly at the end. I’m really glad they said I only needed one round as anymore would have been awful. Even one is taking so long to recover from. The first week I could barely get out of bed, actually I spend days in bed with the only reason for getting out being to goto the hospital for another blood test to tell me how worse I was getting.
One of the effects of the chemo was the drop in platelets and white blood cells and when it hit rock bottom I was not allowed out of the hospital again as I would have caught every germ going around or bleed to death. Fun huh!
Anyway enough. The above needed to be written and now it has.
Well i am back at work now trying to make sense of it all. Its not as easy as I thought it word be,the cancer has left more than one scar. Someone asked me today why should they attend a change meeting I almost replied back ‘because it’s your fucking job.’ I guess my bullshit threshold level has dropped.
Times up and now the real world needs to be faced again. But the what is the reality? The wonders of IT in the crazy world of investment banking or dealing with cancer. I know one thing for sure, the shape of my heart is very different. I can neither look forwards or backwards the same way again. oh well next!
Oh how I have gotten used to Japanese efficency. Its 7:49pm in the back end of nowhere and my bus should be here by now. thirty seconds late. no wonder the driver apologised. and to think in London I never wore a watch so as not to know how late the buses were
A slow day for the sun to come out so quality book reading time and then oddly sleepy time. I guess the batteries are still not upto full charge yet. Did get a wonderfull afternoon on the beach in the sun. Have also become a somewhat avid viewer of Japanese TV. Language aside some of it is dead funny. Last night we had the moving company olympics, dead serious and dead funny. Then there is guess the game show. There is nearly always a cooking or travel show (which invarably has the hosts raving about the food in some quaint traditional restaurant – followed by a slow mo close up shot off the food being picked up with chopsticks.) Another fav is the white bread cooking show,butter and salt included. And lets not forget the samuri programs where all the shoguns talk like they are constipated in a frozen dunny. Not to dissimiliar to some of the male TV hosts. I could go on
I cannot claim credit for this, however it is to good not to share.
I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Woolworths and was in line to check out. A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.
On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again, although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms.
I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so,I was going to try it again.
I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.
Horrified, she asked if I’d ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I’d been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me. I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.
