On safari!

The weather is 27 degrees and I am starting to type up this post from the balcony of the 'lodge' in the Eastern Cape . What an amazing place South Africa is, and we've barely scratched the surface.

And now four days later I'll continue the blog from Cape Town airport!

This has been the best holiday Steve and I have ever had, I think the highlight for me was the safari , but all of it has been amazing.

We enjoyed our stay in Tsitsikamma National Park at Storms River, stayed in a wooden chalet hanging over a gorge, a beautiful setting for celebrating our 32nd wedding anniversary. We hiked the waterfall pass , and did the suspension bridges, also lucky to spot whales again from the shore.

Lalibela Safari lodge was incredible, everyone so welcoming, although the first surprise was the twenty minute drive from reception to the lodges! We worked out the whole area was actually a bit bigger than Jersey!

After a quick bite to eat we set out on the evening drive and our guide was a chap named Rudi, i tell you there was nothing that the guy did not know. He's actually trained in taking walking trails, so was always stopping to talk to us about the flora and fauna, as well as making sure we spent time with the "big" animals. Certainly elephants are my favourite, although I loved the gentle demeanour the giraffes appeared to portray.

We were so sad to leave the quiet, peaceful tranquility of the game reserve to head to Port Elizabeth ( PE as the locals call it) and catch a flight to Cape Town.

Having arrived at the hotel earlier than we expected , I suggested we tried to go up table mountain as I'd seen the forecast for the next day was poor, and so we joined the queue - not too bad going up about a 40 minute wait for the cable car, but the weather was already worsening.

We did glimpse the views from the top, and so it wasn't a wasted trip, however the wait for the queue going down took over an hour, and it was getting cooler , plus we were on top of the mountain and very exposed !

Sure enough the following day it was raining and the mountain had its tablecloth on, so our plan was to catch a few hop on hop off buses and see the sights, as well as getting our bearings, we learnt quite a bit about the Capetonians from the commentary provided too.

Yesterday we were supposed to visit Robben Island, but just as we were about to board the boat a message came through that the winds had picked up and it was too rough. Disappointed , but it can't be helped, so once again a change of plan.

Another bus route and a visit to the Kirstenbosch botanical gardens, where
bizarrely our guide was a retired Irishman !

Today we hired a private driver, a lovely man called Desmond, ( brought up in district 6) who took us out to Cape point, and Boulders beach ( Simons Town) , getting us back in time to catch our transfer to the airport.

So, it would seem everything has gone according to plan, and if you are on Facebook you would definitely think so, as I only post the 'good bits', and there were many on this trip!

However there were one or two blips on the way, don't like to keep things too straight forward and simple.

The "chest infection" that had wiped me out two weeks before the holiday was seemingly still with me, I finished the much stronger course of antibiotics four days in and thought I really should start feeling better.

My coughing had not decreased, I was quite tired, and admittedly we did have early starts but by 9 pm I needed to go to bed. What I found increasingly concerning was the raw burning pain in my chest, that came upon me on even the slightest exertion, walking up 10 stairs would do it.

Fortunately it only started to worsen when we were on safari , but as the only exercise you needed to do was hang on in the jeep, even I could manage that.

It came to a bit of head on Monday afternoon when I just felt awful, I'd slept quite a lot in the day between the 5:30am drive, ( brunch at 10am) and the afternoon drive didn't begin until 4pm. I thought I'd have to miss it,breathing was constricted , I had a bad headache and was STILL coughing.

In desperation I texted KG back in Jersey and outlined my symptoms. I had also looked at the tamoxifen leaflet for information, I'd only been taking the tablets a few weeks and one of the more uncommon side effects were experiences I'd been displaying .

DR KG was not only 'on duty', but "what's app" rang me, she said that when I get to civilisation again to get checked out, however in the meantime stop taking tamoxifen , puff on Steve's ventolin , go back on rivaroxaban ( blood thinning ) tablets , and take disprin twice a day.
She was concerned I had a blood clot in the lungs. I was concerned I had a massive amount of cancerous tumours in my lungs,neither situation ideal, ( well, your mind does play tricks on you when you're not well)

We left the game reserve and had a short flight to Cape Town, arrived at the hotel early afternoon, and then we had a stroke of luck, there was a doctors surgery straight opposite the hotel, but of course lets get priorities right- we needed to go up Table Mountain, and NOTHING was going to stop me!


I've explained how chilly it was up there ( 5 degrees, compared to 27degrees we'd had in the game lodge!) so by the time I fell out of the taxi at 5:45 pm I didn't look or feel great.

We nipped across to the surgery and got an appointment for 8:45 am the next day ( good or what ), fair to say, hot bath more tablets and another early night for me.

Dr Wendy Dicks was a very lovely doctor , she listened to my rambled account of ailments, my sketchy outline of drugs I'd been on and then the added tickler of having ovarian cancer .

She decided that after a thorough examination that she would do an ECG, and promptly wheeled the trolley in and did it, if there is something amiss with the heart it could indicate a blood clot. It appeared normal ( hurrah) and then took two blood samples to send off to the hospital , one for infection level, the other called a d-dimer ( apologies if anyone from the medical world is reading this and I've got it wrong- also no snide jokes from my siblings about being dim thank you) which is an indicator of a blood clot, and we would have the results back by the evening.

She then diagnosed that I actually had acute sinusitis , the nasal drip ( very pleasant ) was causing the coughing, but my chest was clear. Dr Wendy put me on a different set of antibiotics, she said the others would not have worked on my sinus at all, ( that explains a lot then) , also prescribed a saline nose wash ( yes as unpleasant as it sounds, but extremely effective ) some herbal cough medicine to soothe my throat and some probiotic tablets to counteract the upset the antibiotics would do to my digestive system.

All this for the princely sum of around £67 , we did have to buy the medicine which worked out around the same price , but I do have insurance so hoping I can claim some back.

When we arrived back to our hotel that evening, we nipped across to the surgery and DR WD had left us a note explaining that I was very unlikely to have a clot, my neutrophils were raised, fighting infection obviously but all seemed fine, however I was to go back if I was concerned about anything .

More than once pre holiday I had Steve's reservation and voiced concern about 'taking me away on holiday, and what happens if I get sick' ringing in my head, however it wasn't too bad.

I let him be the 'leader' up all the hills, and when it got too much he pulled me up, he very carefully monitored my wine intake , don't want to counterbalance the antibiotics . He made me hot drinks in the morning( well he did keep waking me up at 6 am!) and he didn't get annoyed with my continued coughing. #lovehim

This post had to be continued at Gatwick airport, now awaiting our flight back home, shame it's another 5 hours away, but all was ok on the 11 and half journey back, and it didn't appear to be foggy or raining outside so all things being equal we should be home by late afternoon.

And now although still coughing(?) I'm starting to feel so much better.

Top Marks South Africa.

Pictures to follow 😎
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

What day is it? Where am I?

Questions I ask myself as we wake up in a different guest house almost every day.

What a fabulous trip it has been so far, and what a truly beautiful and VAST place it is! Amazing scenery with contrasting mountains, seashores and plains, and the fields are so huge, as big as the whole of our small island it seems.

Considering how ill I was ten days before the trip, and at one point with yet more impending cancer treatment due I did doubt we would ever get away on holiday.

Fortunately we did and we have both loved it. The flight was long but bearable , and we collected the hire car from Cape Town before setting out to Hermanus , the whale watching 'capital'. We got there in time to enjoy a walk along the cliffs and had our first whale sightings.

It was very windy and so our scheduled boat trip the next day was cancelled, however we planned to do a much longer walk along the cliffs and hopefully get to view some more of these magnificent creatures.

It was spectacular to be able to perch on rocks close to the swirling seas and see these huge mammals swim slowly along, seemingly enjoying the swell. I did envy the folks that had binoculars ( I forgot ours!) and long camera lens, but with the whales only a few hundred yards off shore it didn't really matter.

We left Hermanus and headed inland to Oudtshoorn , it was a long drive so we broke it up with a stop over at a game reserve for lunch. We only had a one night stay at this B and B and so had to decide to either do the Caves, or the Ostriches.
As the weather wasn't brilliant and we had had a fair bit of rain, I didn't fancy going somewhere dark and cold, and so we booked to visit a working Ostrich farm.

We saw the whole process from hatching straight through to going out to visit the fully grown birds. Did you know they have a poor immune system? They get sick quite quickly, don't like the cold much either- that makes two of us then. They can be aggressive, particularly the " teenage boys " and they all like to kick ( forwards apparently) just in case you ever come across one.

If you do happen to go into a pen/ field you take a stick and hold it up, they feel threatened as something is taller than them, so less likely to attack.. I thought our son being 6ft 7" wouldn't have need of a stick, but Ostriches have very long necks!

Driving back down to the coast we are really in the Garden Route now, we stopped briefly in Wilderness for a drink , but wanted to carry on to Knysna and find our next B and B .
You can see why it's a popular place with lagoons, islands and beautiful scenery all around.

Heading off today to do some exploring as we have two nights here before we make our way to Tsitsikamma National Park.

Good news too in I've just about stopped coughing and I've nearly finished my antibiotics, it's been tough to be in 'wine' regions and not really had much wine ( but maybe that's not a bad thing?!)


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10/10/17

Blurgh.

That pretty much sums up how I feel. I have used the metaphor "run over by a truck" or "a wet dishcloth". Neither particularly accurate.

What I do know for sure is I have a large sense of humour failure.

Feeling that I may have need of some help with fighting the forthcoming infection I took myself to the doctors last Thursday and was given some antibiotics.

I'll feel much better by the weekend I thought.

However, it was not to be and  my damaged immune system finally gave up the ghost on Friday, and by 7pm I was in bed shivering.

I have to hold my hands up and say I wasn't being 'sensible' by staying in bed/on the sofa all weekend, It was because I just couldn't be bothered.

I couldnt be bothered to do anything at all, showering was an effort, as was reading or watching TV or eating. Coughing was painful and exhausting.

Think I've painted a bleak enough picture of how 'blurgh' life has been. I'm sure I'm not the only one, I know there have been some pretty awful bugs going about, and I thought I had managed to avoid them all....sadly no.

Sunday night I thought, at last I'm feeling a bit better, Monday morning I took the dogs for a walk, I say walk, it was more like a slow stumble.

I managed to drag myself around the supermarket came back and promptly went back to bed!

Enough is enough, and after another dog stumble this morning, I made another doctors appointment. I told him i wanted a refund as the tablets had not worked.

I now have much stronger antibiotics, and I've spent most of the day in bed asleep.

In order for me to be well enough for Friday and our flight to SOUTH AFRICA , I will have to spend the rest of the week resting- and the sad thing is, I'm not bothered.

This In itself, (notice no 'sport' since last Thursday) is a measure of how poorly I really feel.

Thats all the negative side of the last seven days, but of course there's always a flip side.

I've felt so rubbish the last week that I've hardly thought about cancer, see, we all need to play "the glad game". 


If you haven't heard of the Glad Game, read the extract.... or don't if you can't be bothered.


Almost everyone of a certain age remembers the story of Pollyanna and her “Glad Game.” First published as a bestselling novel in 1913 and later adapted for film, Pollyanna told the tale of Pollyanna Whittier, a spirited, optimistic young orphan forced to live with her cold and unsympathetic aunt Polly after the death of her parents, who served as missionaries.

Aunt Polly, a well-to-do spinster, lives in a small New England town where it seems like clinical depression has somehow contaminated the municipal water supply. Virtually everyone Pollyanna meets is miserable. Her lonely aunt; the bedridden, chronically ill Mrs. Snow; the grumpy and reclusive Mr. Pendleton and a large cast of cynical background characters provide plenty of narrative conflict for the relentlessly positive Pollyanna, who can only respond with the “Glad Game”—a game her father made up before he died to help his daughter find the good in any bad situation.

The game was born when the missionary office, responding to Mr. Whitter’s request for a secondhand doll for Pollyanna, sent a pair of crutches instead. Seeing his daughter’s disappointment, Mr. Whittier invented the “Glad Game” on the spot, suggesting that, rather than focusing on her dashed desire, they look for a reason to be glad about the crutches. It took them some time, but they finally decided they could at the very least be glad they didn’t need the crutches, because that meant their legs were strong and healthy.

Upon her arrival in sad-sack Beldingsville, VT, Pollyanna plays the game to convince herself that the hot, musty, sparsely furnished attic space provided for her by her aunt is actually preferable to the plush bedrooms standing empty below. With no mirror above her dresser, she reasons, she can’t see her unwanted freckles; with no art on the walls, she can better appreciate the view from the single small window.

She draws her cranky new neighbors into the game too, gleefully explaining its method and origin to anyone who dares be unhappy in her presence. Sometimes, her attempts to get people to look on the bright side go a little too far; challenged by the bedbound Mrs. Snow to find a reason someone in her condition should be glad, Pollyanna says in earnest, “I thought how glad you could be that other folks weren’t like you—all sick in bed like this, you know?”

Unsurprisingly, the townspeople are annoyed by Pollyanna’s evangelical zeal for forced optimism. They find her simple-minded and irritating. Indeed, “Pollyanna” exists in the cultural lexicon not as a friendly euphemism for an optimistic person but as an insult, its meaning falling somewhere between “hopelessly naïve” and “completely divorced from reality.”

But here’s the thing: Pollyanna was right.

Pollyanna’s optimism doesn’t just cheer people up on a bad day—it saves lives. Mrs. Snow, the chronically ill shut-in, goes from dwelling on her sickness to knitting blankets for hospital nurseries and feeling grateful to be alive. An elderly widow who’d stopped living the day her husband died begins wearing color again—a symbol of her decision to finally move on. A quarreling couple abandons their plans to divorce, having begun, at Pollyanna’s urging, to focus on the positive in one another. And reclusive Mr. Pendleton adopts Pollyanna’s friend Jimmy, giving both man and boy a chance at a family and a new life.

Pollyanna’s dedication to the “Glad Game” is put to the test, though, when she loses the use of her legs after an accident. Previously, and without tact, she had boasted that the more difficult it was to come up with something to be glad about, the more fun the game was. Now paralyzed, she discovers, in the words of her maid, Nancy: “It’s easy ter tell lifelong invalids how ter be glad, but ’tain’t the same thing when you’re the lifelong invalid yerself, an’ have ter try ter do it.”

Were Pollyanna written in 2015, the novel might have ended on that note, and win prizes for its conscience-raising critical commentary on privilege. Who is Pollyanna, after all, to tell anyone to cheer up, or to focus on the positive? The accident might even be seen as cosmic justice—taking her down a notch and forcing her to confront the very philosophical “aggressions” she had simplistically offered in response to people facing hardship. Perhaps, in epilogue, Pollyanna would denounce herself for not having tried harder to see things through the eyes of her miserable neighbors, and they would all live unhappily ever after—albeit in solidarity, advocating for their right to wallow.

Thankfully, the book was written in 1913, so when the townspeople hear that Pollyanna can no longer bring herself to play the “Glad Game,” the entire town bands together to show her what a difference she and the game have made to their lives. Visitors come to her bedside, sharing how their attitudes were changed by looking for reasons to be glad. It isn’t long before Pollyanna decides that she can be happy she had the use of her legs for as long as she did, which was time enough to make a difference.

As a person who is chronically ill and facing numerous serious difficulties in my life at the moment, I thank God for Pollyanna, and her message, which help me remember that even on my worst days, I have much to be thankful for. Playing the “Glad Game,” or something like it, truly helps keep me sane.

This Thanksgiving, in the midst of all the suffering in the world, whether overseas or in our own homes, I hope we’ll all take a page from Pollyanna’s playbook. There is always a reason to be glad. Let’s find it, and be thankful.

Wednesday 4th

Hello,
This is Aunty A touch typing from J dictating. A first.
Ok.....so......starting at the end.

No immediate treatment. Jolly pleased that we can go on holiday next weekend, with further radiotherapy at some point on my groin, with possibly more radiation in my abdomen.
The day started well with the flight on time with a smooth transition from Gatwick to South Kensington. Made the hospital by 11am and saw Dr AG by 11.15. I believe it's so much nicer if you have to give somebody bad news or difficult news, on a face to face scenario.

Dr. AG explained that obviously the disease has progressed into low volume disease and the reason the lymph node in my groin is causing me some discomfort is the fact it is pressing on a nerve, which in turn causes pain down my leg and my knee.

The two lymph nodes which are inflamed and enlarged which are cancerous are not attached to any major organs i.e. liver or kidneys.  This is usually how the BRCA 2 mutation acts so for once this is good news.

We discussed the rising CA125 (blood cancer markers) and it seems that when first diagnosed you can have a very large tumour and not a particularly high count but as the disease progresses the counts will become higher with only a small amount of disease.  So it's better not to concentrate too much on that marker, but more on how you are feeling.

The conversation then turned to chemo.  There is no chance of me having any PARP inhibitors or going on any trials in the future as my bone marrow is suppressed due to the myleodysplasia.  When I had my first chemo my bone marrow began to change.  By the time I had my second round of chemo my bone marrow mutated, and this is irreversible.  If I never had Chemo again I could manage as I am, but at some stage when the cancer is to the point where I have no options left then they will give me Chemo.  However, there is more than a huge risk that one of the cycles will flip me over to Leukemia and there is no coming back from that.

Dr AG then had a quick consultation with Dr. AT and looked at my last CT scan.  She thought that radiotherapy for the problematic groin lymph node could easily be dealt with, but suggested that we go on holiday and let it get a bit bigger to encourage the radiation to work more effectively. You cannot revisit previous radiation areas.

Our good friend LT had been looking after another friend who has recently had an operation for breast cancer, and was just starting her first week at the Marsden.  She passed on my contact details and we arranged to meet after my appointment.  Simultaneously, another Jersey friend was also having a scan yesterday and we had arranged to meet her and her father too.  So it ended up in a rather bizarre table for 5 at a rather nice local chelsea restaurant.  It all felt a bit surreal with us three ladies talking quite openly about our past and recent treatments and how we were dealing with it in a rather "matter of fact" way.  The luncheon was brief as Steve and I had to head back to the airport at 4pm to catch the 5.15 flight.

It was imperative that we were back in the island by early evening as I had a netball match to play (AA - good grief!) pleased to say well worth it as we won (I only played half the game).

Once again I have been humbled by the amount of well wishes that contacted me during the last two days to say they were thinking of me and the level of support that I receive from family and friends (thank you Sheena your card and letter were lovely and I'm pleased I made you smile).

Unfortunately I have been brewing a sore throat/cold which has severely impeeded my energy levels (hence half a game of netball) but loved the racket ball this morning (thanks girls) and had a fabulous possibly last swim in the sea this afternoon (AA - mad girl ! :S)

Back in the door from badminton, and pleased that my PA can touch type skillfully so this blog can get posted tonight.

 I needed a hot tub after my sea swim....... just missing gin and tonic ..........

Me and Liz......BEFORE G&T

Sunday night supper.....