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.

Stupid woman…why else would I buy dog food???

The japanese take great pride with being in touch with nature and the changing of the seasons. Witness spring when as soon as a single stonefruit blossum appears a millon Japanese are mobilised to take a picture of it or of them standing underneath it. Yet with all this love of nature and natural freash food, they are totally oblivious to the power lines interfering with the view supplying power to the vending machine in case anyone wants a cold coke after all that nature.

Just tuned into a ‘cooking chat show’and todays sponsered product looked suspiciously like whale meat. Just to remove doubt they showed a big picture of a whale to show all the japanese housewives that they are getting the choicest cut of whale. They then showed the contents of the can (which you get mail order). It basically looks like expensive dog food – the type with chunks and gravey. And no matter how good you are at taking the contents out of the can and presenting on a plate, it still looks like dogfood.

Scientific whaling my arse. Still if they are going to serve it up like Fido’s dinner then Greempeaces job is done.

The new generation wants fillet o whale and fries, not cans of petfood. pics coming soon

A beautiful day again here in seclusion. Except for the chilly wind it would have been perfect. Walked up the coast this time. Tried sometimes lying in the sun but the wind got the better of me. Did get some great pictures, one set of this old boy who was collecting seaweed and came scurring over to talk to me! On another note I found the pictures of my chemo iv tree,it was a little upsetting, healing time still required.

Finished off the weekend of sun, air and walking with a real authentic onsen. Our timing was perfect as everyone was on the train back tothe ratrace. Place was practically empty. will link to the etiquette of onsen when I return to ratrace!