Monday, 26 January 2009
KNITTED BREASTS: A MASTECTOMY AID?
An eighty-four year old woman from the South East has been knitting breasts to help new mothers learn how to feed their babies (BBC report). There could well be an application here for women who have had mastectomies, the knitted boobs being far cosier (and, strangely, more comforting) than the 'comfie' given out in hospitals post op. When I got my 'comfie' (this being the interim padding women are given before they are able to wear the custom-fitted silicone breastform), I was told I would have to weight it down with dried peas or shells (!) to match the hang of the remaining breast.
But I wonder if the knitted boob could be therapeutic - a way of coming to terms with the inevitable? Before my daughter was born, I spent hours on the sofa (with my late lamented labrador bitch), crocheting cot blankets and shawls (although these turned out to be somewhat redundant since the baby slept with me as I was breastfeeding her...). Had I known about the knitted boob pattern, I'd have adapted it for my own needs prior to the mastectomy. It might have proved a talking point at least!
But I wonder if the knitted boob could be therapeutic - a way of coming to terms with the inevitable? Before my daughter was born, I spent hours on the sofa (with my late lamented labrador bitch), crocheting cot blankets and shawls (although these turned out to be somewhat redundant since the baby slept with me as I was breastfeeding her...). Had I known about the knitted boob pattern, I'd have adapted it for my own needs prior to the mastectomy. It might have proved a talking point at least!
Saturday, 24 January 2009
Home run....
On the clearway now to 50, and feeling marvellous! My nurse, Sarah, said it's the Time of the Crone: a stage where women can begin to be free of cultural crap like looking good to attract or please men (although I don't quite feel ready to let myself go along the frizzy hair and hairy armpits tack - not just yet) and confident in their exchanges, with an assurance that comes from life experience and wisdom. That's not to say there won't be plenty of stupid fifty year old women (what will Jordan-Boob-Jobs be like at fifty, I wonder? She's raddled enough at thirty...Look at Madonna, described by her latest ex husband as a piece of gristle). I'm grateful, simply, to be where I am: an Amazonian matron who has survived 4 years on palliative treatment for advanced breast cancer. To have seen my daughter mature into her teens in these difficult years and achieve a scholarship to one of the best schools in this country (and certainly the noblest) is quite enough. That is a life IN FULL. (And I have published 3 novels, with another on the way, and run a successful education business and - so I'm told - helped countless students along the way.) Not used to blowing my own trumpet. But this is what counts, surely, the legacy one leaves - not a major party with a load of freeloading guests who may or may not be good friends? Blowing money on immaterial (though expensive) ephemeral 'milestones' - like stupid white wedding jamborees - has always been a complete nonsense for me. It's not that I'm mean or that I don't celebrate my friends. On the contrary: I am deeply grateful to all my friends, especially to those who (unlike my mean-spirited family) came forward to support and comfort me when I was on my own and facing chemo for the first time; and I do try to show it whenever I can (I hope) - not just on my birthday. I hope my friends know how much I appreciate them. They know who they are. So if they don't get an invitation to a 50th birthday party from me in a month's time, I hope they will understand that I am celebrating quietly, just glad to have made it this far.
Best of all, yes, best of all: at 50, finally, I can liberate myself from the curse of my indifferent mother and from all those, in the now thankfully distant past, who have sought to undermine me or hold me back in some undefinable way. You won't be reading this, of course, so I could freely name you - but I can't be arsed any more! Yippee!
Best of all, yes, best of all: at 50, finally, I can liberate myself from the curse of my indifferent mother and from all those, in the now thankfully distant past, who have sought to undermine me or hold me back in some undefinable way. You won't be reading this, of course, so I could freely name you - but I can't be arsed any more! Yippee!
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
CELL PHONE HELL
A great big Boo to the idiot policy makers who decided to allow the free use of mobile phones in NHS hospitals (with the exception of scanner and other high tech rooms, of course). As far as I'm concerned, this will make the prospect of a hospital stay - or even a clinic visit -even more unbearable, not to mention the fear of being happy-snapped by some fuckwit with a cameraphone ('I'm at the hospital....See this woman with her breast removed.... Cop this pic of the crash trolley...') It is usually visitors, in my experience, not the patients themselves, who are guilty of crass behaviour in hospital. This could be to do with fear, or a sort of superiority - a drive to prove they're not physically sick (though often mentally retarded). Whatever it is, they're a nuisance, and the use of cellphones is going to turn this nuisance into a downright menace - to other patients (who don't want this kind of chirpy intimacy and unwanted intrusion into other - banal - lives) and to staff, who are harassed enough by all the other beeping and alarms and twittering and whingeing that goes on.
Cancer patients, of course, are amongst the most vulnerable of all. I think we should join together to get this daft policy reversed. I'm all for designated phone areas FOR PATIENTS ONLY- but not a go-anywhere roving menace. That's asking for trouble.
Cancer patients, of course, are amongst the most vulnerable of all. I think we should join together to get this daft policy reversed. I'm all for designated phone areas FOR PATIENTS ONLY- but not a go-anywhere roving menace. That's asking for trouble.
ANOTHER YEAR
This will be the fourth year of my palliative treatment, and the second of Herceptin at Home, which has proved not only beneficial to my health, but a pleasure in the company of the excellent team of nurses who come to sit with me throughout the infusions. I can make my own hot water bottle and sit in my own arcmchair as the drip goes in; and, with these nurses; it goes in first time - in fact, they managed to get through the whole of 2008 using the same vein. How differerent to the procedure at the Haem clinic at the hospital where those nurses, too, were unfailingly pleasant and patient, but harassed and overworked beyond their call of duty. Cannulations there took several attempts; and I rapidly became known as 'the woman with no veins', which doesn't exactly boost the morale of those designated to give the needle - not least to say my own morale (or amour propre). Anyway, the only clinics I have been to in the last 12 months were the Consultant's check-ups; and even in those, I managed to get away without being jabbed. In fact, the last cannulation attempt on me at the hospital was at the CT scanner, when even the doctor they called in to assist gave up when he saw my 'veinless' hands.
So Herceptin at Home it is, when I go straight from the piano (get the circulation in the hands and arms to work) to the chair. Nurses arrive when they say they will arrive and leave within 2 hours. This is private treatment, of course, although I receive it on the NHS, thanks to some deal between the Hospital Trust, Roche Pharmeceuticals (who manufacture the drug), and the healthcare company. Each dose of this drug costs at least twelve hundred pounds; and once the costs of the nurse and the equipment (cannulas, saline, etc) are factored in, that's a lot of cost! But it has saved my life. And I feel blessed and grateful for it.
Thank you.
So Herceptin at Home it is, when I go straight from the piano (get the circulation in the hands and arms to work) to the chair. Nurses arrive when they say they will arrive and leave within 2 hours. This is private treatment, of course, although I receive it on the NHS, thanks to some deal between the Hospital Trust, Roche Pharmeceuticals (who manufacture the drug), and the healthcare company. Each dose of this drug costs at least twelve hundred pounds; and once the costs of the nurse and the equipment (cannulas, saline, etc) are factored in, that's a lot of cost! But it has saved my life. And I feel blessed and grateful for it.
Thank you.
Tuesday, 18 November 2008
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!
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!
Friday, 14 November 2008
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.
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.
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