"The same thing we do every night, Pinky – Try to take over the world!
Narf!! The only difference being right now it should be called "The same thing we do every week – G, Try to take over IT!"
I’m still trying to work out which on characters fits each of the
players here, but I’ve almost got it sorted. Now I just need to do
some research onto the supporting characters and I’ll have them all
nailed down. Turning it into a cartoon is my way of dealing with it
and basically I think its a load of bollocks. The IT department here
is only a handful of people yet from the way some of the ‘lords’ behave
you would think it was a surfdom created to do there bidding, and we
surfs are way to incompetant to be involved in those ‘managementy’ type
things.
And looking out the window that seems particualarly true. The
weather has gone all foul again which likely means that spring is
on the way with rainy season somewhere there as well. The last few
months have been so focused on
I finally got my act together and have updated the footsteps web site. All that spare time in various bed and sofas with a laptop did have some benefit.
I was getting concerned that I had different web systems in different places and was ignoring my home page which was looking very dated and had become very static. Basically little more than a jumping off point to the gallery or to the blog. Thats all now changing with an open source product called Joomla. So far I’ve got the blogging component up and running with some integration to the coppermine photo gallery.
I’ve even cleaned up some of the pictures as I’d gone a little overboard and had loaded to many up there! So please bear with me. I’m don’t know if I’ll transfer this blog over but time will tell.
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!
