TORIES TO CUT FUNDING TO HOSPITALS

It's official: David Cameron announced today that the Tories would definitely make cuts in spending on schools and hospitals, should we be fool enough to elect them. We have all been warned!

God knows, Gordon Brown is a dull man, but my instincts tell me he's a man of principle and commited to a socialist (with small s) ethic of free health care at point of need and accessible higher education for all - should they want it. GB has a son with cystic fibrosis, and Cameron, also had a child with special needs. It stands to reason that, with Labour (Labour!) paving the way for a two-tier health service by allowing patients to top up their drugs fund (something I'm still not quite over the fence about), the Tories will tighten the financial screws on cancer treatment even more. Part of me is frightened by this. Part of me rejoices that they are not elected yet, and, until they are, we still have access to a reasonable spectrum of care choices.

PLEASE, PLEASE DON'T VOTE THEM IN AGAIN! I made the mistake, when a naive 19 year old, still at university, and tired of doing my homework in the dark nights of the 1970s, of voting for Margaret Thatcher (just the once...but once was enough). She's a woman, I thought. She must care. But that didn't follow, no more than it follows that Cameron cares for universal health care in this country because of the recent tragic loss of his eldest child, cared for so well at NHS Trust St Mary's Praed St. Never again.

As a note to this: I worked once at an inner London cancer unit (The Middlesex Hopitai), checking in patients on reception in thr morning, typing up notes and doing clinic filing in the afternoons - as part of a summer temping job while at University in London. This place was really Dickensian - but, even then (Thatcher's Second Term), the moves were well underway to dismantle the good old systems of Matron bug cont/total ward managementl, et al. Then the private cleaning r came in - and we all know wherwe that has led us. There were no drivers for chemo patients (and chemo was GRUESOME in those days....) The patients had to wait all day for an ambulance to take them out into the hinterlands of Middlesex itself....The only entertainment was a woman who had had the roof of her mouth removed, and when she took out the prosthetic soft palate (can't spell medical words...), it sounded as though she was in an echo chamber. Used to please the punters anyway. After a day at that place, you'd have been thankful for Simon Bloody Callow and his inane drivel on the X Factor...
NEVER AGAIN!

CRAZY CUTS

A pop-up ad on my Tiscali mail page reads:

HAVE THE BREASTS YOU WANT NOW...AND PAY LATER.

And I'm sure there are plenty of takers in this crazy world who would put a bristling pair of new boobs on their wish-list for Christmas. (Credit crunch? what credit crunch?) Even as I write, the Tonight programme on ITV is running an investigation into those creepy-looking, pill-popping cranks who think it's their inalienable right to live to be 150. One anal-fixated, middle-aged male argues, in defence of the fifty plus supplements per day he's been taking for twenty years, that he aims to avoid 'the diseases of old age'. Is the unspoken one, the one that dare not say its name, a disease of old age? Try telling that to six year old with leukaemia or a twenty two year old with breast cancer and a two year old child to bring up.

Grotesque as they are, I feel mildly sorry for these cock-eyed opitimists who think cosmetic surgery can fix their lives. And what sort of life is one in which you feel obliged to 'restrict your calorie intake' (although the quack who came up with that popped his clogs at the not so ripe old age of 79) or spend your earnings on shed-loads of quackery? Imagine a society like that - a collection of grotesques in which old age doesn't begin untill you're ninety. I'm all for medicine fixing the body (it's fixing mine!), but not beyond its alloted span; and we would all do well to remember that the longterm tally for that is threescore years and ten. It's surely what we do in those alloted years that counts; but I guess I am giving this an unaccebtably moral overtone. Sad though, I think, that those eternal youth-seekers, fixated on 'eternal life', quite fail to see beyond the limitations of this world. It's materialism gone crazy - like a cancer.

The truth is, we are all dealt a certain hand. Some of us get cancer. Some of us don't live to get it because we die in road accidents or are murdered in the cradle by our parents. Do we ever get the breasts we want? The legs we want? The face we want? The height/weight/hair (curly or straight) we want? And when we pay to get what we think we want, we end up wanting something else entirely. That is, of course, those of us who can make those choices. (Credit crunch....what credit crunch?) If NHS funding for cancer care is the postcode lottery it is purported to be (though I haven't found it to be so here in my case....yet), and it came to the choice between spending money on breast reconstruction or some risky new life-prolonging chemo treatment, I think the choice is pretty obvious. In such a case, you'd get the breasts you want (for now, perhaps), but someone, somewhere would surely be paying later.

PINCUSHION AND BREAST CANCER CARE

All royalties of my latest novel, PINCUSHION (BeWrite Books, www.bewrite.net) will now be donated to Breast Cancer Care. I hope, one day, that more can be done to support women living with secondary breast cancer, especially here in Cornwall, where there is no support gorup funding to date.

NO MIRACLE CURES...

It is Breast Cancer awareness month, and the Tory Party are having their conference. David Cameron, their 'man with a plan' to lead Britain into better times, has pledged a 'say no' policy, predicated on a lack of 'miracle cures'.  To what exactly?  Gordon Brown may be a terminally dull and uninspiring leader, but the current parlous state of the economy has a Capitalist cause, its roots not in public spending but in the corporate greed of Cameron's cronies in the City. I fear a return to the 'values' of Thatcherism may prove toxic to the NHS, and to cancer patients in particular, reliant as we are on a tantalising, but increasingly expensive, cocktail of ground-breaking new treatments. 

Take my own treatment, Herceptin. It remains expensive, due perhaps to the monopoly of its developer, Roche Pharmaceuticals. But it is the NHS that has made it widely available to people like myself, an NHS I saw repeatedly holed in its bows by the forces of Thatcher. That was the era when 'private' companies took over the cleaning operations within hospitals. The legacy? MRSA. That was the era that saw repeated cuts to all kinds of services, based on the Iron Lady's sub-Keynesian theory that 'there's no such thing as society.' Margaret Thatcher called open season on any service that was public, rather than private. Hers was the era of the Poll Tax, with residents of Labour Councils (i.e. those dedicated to public spending) paying three times more than Tory bastions, like Westminster, run then by Dame Shirley Cohen, who absconded to Israel rather than pay back the taxpayer the money she had accumulated by selling off public housing and even public cemetaries!  (I was particularly unfortunate with my London Poll tax since my Camden (Labour) flatlet commanded a huge rate;  a mere fifty yards away in Westminster, they paid a mere £80 per year because their Council had no more public services to spend its money on!)  If Labour has messed up these last few years, it is only because it hasn't gone nearly far enough in rebuilding a Welfare State that was systematically dismantled in one short decade of Thatcher cuts and diktats. If Labour hasn't gone far enough to redress this balance by increasing taxation (such as the reintroduction of a supertax on some of the financiers, for instance, who have caused such havoc in the current economy), can we really expect Cameron, Son-of-Thatcher to  help us cancer patients? Don't be fooled by the shiny red cheeks and winning smile. 

In 1979, the first year I was able to vote, I fell for Margaret Thatcher's ralling cry during the Winter of Discontent. ('The British people can't bury their dead..') The great Tony Benn came to speak at my college at London University, and, to my eternal shame (mitigated, perhaps, by my youth and political naivety), I turned my back on him and voted Tory. Fast forward ten years, and the legend 'Third Term, Third Reich' appeared on the bridge at Chalk Farm. Fast forward to an era of greed and sleaze. And tax cuts, sure! 

I don't think I would have been alive today if the Tories had been in government. And, were I still living in Central London, there would probably be no public cemetary left in which to bury me. It's bad enough seeing cancer patients fighting for life-saving/prolonging drugs today.(Even today, the BBC has reported the shocking story of a young breast cancer patient's fight for Avastin.)  Tomorrow, if the Tories get in, I fear the lights will go out for good on the current Cancer Plan. 

A Man with a Plan indeed. We have been warned.

NICE ADVANCED BREAST CANCER DIAGNOSIS AND TREATMENT

HAVE YOUR SAY

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the national organisation responsible for providing national guidance on promoting good health and preventing and treating ill health, is currently developing clinical guidelines on the diagnosis and treatment of both early breast cancer and advanced or metastatic breast cancer. These guidelines will help to shape how breast cancer care is delivered in the next few years and which treatments and care are available.

A draft of the guidelines was recently published and NICE is keen for people affected by breast cancer, or interested in breast cancer issues, to feed in their thoughts about the proposed draft. This is your chance to share your views on services and treatments and help inform a joint response from Breast Cancer Care and Breakthrough Breast Cancer. The charities are working together to develop a response to the guidelines, to help us make sure that our response represents the views and experiences of as many people as possible. The Advanced breast cancer guidelines are particularly important to the work of the Secondary Breast Cancer Taskforce and as members of the Reference Panel we would really like to hear your views on this guidance.

To inform our response, we would like you to complete a questionnaire on the topics outlined in the guidelines. The survey can be completed online at; http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=5zNiZVqyJ95wSnzllJDy3g_3d_3d.

If you would like to read the draft guidance they can be found here: http://www.nice.org.uk/guidance/index.jsp?action=download&o=41615

The deadline for feedback is Friday 12th September 2008. Please return hard copies of the survey to Chris Quince, Policy and Campaigns Assistant, Breast Cancer Care, 5-13 Great Suffolk Street, London, SE1 0NS.

Please note that all responses will be shared with staff from both charities as part of our joint work on the consultation. However, all responses will remain anonymous.

BOOK RELEASE

COMING SOON....

6th September – PINCUSHION by Anne Morgellyn.

The latest in a series of psychological thrillers that chart the adventures of Louise Moon and her precarious love affair with brilliant but unconventional pathologist, Chas Androssoff.

Performance artist August Stockyard, attention-seeking heir to a media and property empire, dies in typically theatrical fashion, after making the bequest of adjoining houses to his pregnant girlfriend, Cressida, and to his former comrade-in-arms, Louise Moon.

But was August's demise simple suicide or was it the result of a kinky sex game that went wrong? Had he cleverly planned to shame his distant father and take revenge on his ruthless uncle, the obese and grasping millionaire who now had his eye on Louise?

Or was it a game from the grave, pitting Cressida and Louisa in a fight to the death as reluctant and mismatched neighbours?

Excerpt: http://www.bewrite.net/bookshop/excerpts/pincushion.htm
About the Author: http://www.bewrite.net/authors/anne_morgellyn.htm

All BeWrite Books are available from: BeWrite Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson and other online booksellers and to order from high street bookshops.

Print ISBN: 978-1-905202-82-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-83-6
Price: £6.99
Pages: 188

ALL ROYALTIES FROM SALES OF THIS BOOK WILL BE DONATED TO BREAST CANCER CARE.

We were healthy

Watched a very moving film about Theriesenstadt yesterday in which a ninety-eight year old Jewish pianist recounted the story of her survival as part of the prisoners' orchestra: We were given black water in the morning, she said, and white water at mid-day, and black water again in the evening, and yet we were healthy. Why? Because we looked forward to playing in the evening.

In the same film, a horrible nexus was drawn between the anti-semitic writings of Wagner and the use of music by the Nazis as a warped cultural tool with which to bludgeon the inmates of the concentration camps. (Primo Levi writes of how he will never get the music of the Lager - those infernal German marching songs, out of his mind.) Wagner believed that Jews had 'corrupted' the music of the Romantic period by their use of minor chords, and that their only hope within German society was to 'go under' (assimilation or annihilation?); yet it was Felix Mendelssohn who resurrected Bach's Matthew Passion! Perhaps this Nazi infiltration of the highest of the arts is an example of how a good impulse can so easily turn to bad - like a cell turning cancerous and setting forth on its interminable death march. For me, though, after watching the film, it was a message from the gods of the power music has to heal, minor chords or not. Beethoven felt it at Heilgenstadt, where it turned his mind from thoughts of suicide to thoughts of transcendence. And how Beethoven transcended! Wow! I was playing the Fifth Symphony - for the first time in years, as part of my current music studies. What a testament to healing that is, and what a powerful force for good.