Days of Christmas

Christmas was dark this year.  There are almost no markets.  Restaurants and cafés are closed.  Some ski resorts are open and promise fun and sun, but I don’t want to take the children or indeed myself up there without a lodge to warm up in after a few hours in the snow.  The valley is covered in low-hanging clouds.  The temperature doesn’t stray far outside +1 and -1 degrees Celsius.  Sometimes it rains.  When it does, the clouds are darker and it feels as if night were about to fall at two in the afternoon.I...

One in a million

Over the past year and a bit, as I’ve been struggling with cancer, undergoing first a fairly substantial resective surgery and then three chemotherapy programs, I’ve always told anyone who asked that I was doing fine.  This was generally true.  I felt good.  The disease seemed far away.  There were only a few episodes when I was doing poorly.  They passed quickly.  I don’t see myself like this anymore.Over the last week or so, I haven’t been doing too well.  It started after the intervention to implant the stent...

More liquid

Today I was back in the hospital.  It’s getting a bit much but it was necessary.  I wanted to talk to my doctor about the liquid in my pleural sac, and he wanted to see whether there was more he could drain to make the Christmas weekend easier on me.I came with two questions.  Why did this liquid appear in such a large quantity all of a sudden, and how do I make sure this stops?  I didn’t get satisfying answers to these questions.  My doctor said that it’s always a bit of a guess why certain things happen at certain times...

Staying negative

After I had the nasal swab and was given a bed in my own little room in the emergency department, things progressed only slowly.  My emergency was not a life-threatening one.  Various subsets of a crew of four women, a nurse, a senior doctor, the main doctor and a trainee doctor, kept coming into the room, doing this and that to me while I was anxiously awaiting the results of the Covid test.The nurse tried to test me blood for oxygenation.  I don’t know if she was successful.  Drawing venous blood is easy and relatively painless. ...

Powers of deduction

This past weekend was one of the strangest in a very strange year.  On Friday night, I wrote how I was suffering from shortness of breath, how even riding downhill from work put me out of breath in ways I had not encountered before.  This was nothing.  On Saturday morning, we went to the local DIY store because Flucha needed some parts to build kites, never mind it’s nearly winter and the fall storms have long given way to a near-complete stillness of the air.I packed the kids into the trailer, hooked it up to my bicycle, and we...

What's important

It’s exactly one week since my little operation and time to take stock.  The liver values have come down.  They’re all normal, except for bilirubin, which is still a bit elevated.  This will slowly fade over the next few weeks.  The pancreas values are unexceptional.  All went as planned.  I was even released on Monday afternoon as my oncologist had said.I don’t feel fully restored yet, even though the operation was endoscopic without a single cut.  There’s something a little odd about my digestion, though I have...

One more day

It’s getting a bit silly.  This morning, I spoke with the doctor who was already present before the procedure and thus more familiar with my case than the weekend covers.  He was all positive.  The liver values were dropping.  Bilirubin had gone down dramatically.  The pancreas markers were normalizing.  It was all looking good.  “You could almost go home today”, he concluded.  I didn’t like the almost much.The doctor asked about my poo.  After a few weeks of being somewhere between mint and fluorescent...

More waiting

With the light blocked by dark clouds everywhere and too many hours spent locked up in the hospital, I thought it was close to dinnertime when the doctor came to see me yesterday.  It was shortly after two.  The doctor wanted to discuss my current state and, as I hoped, release me to go home.  I felt ok.  My digestion wasn’t 100% stable, but it hadn’t been all week.  I felt hints of pain from various parts of my lower abdomen, nothing I could place and nothing that worried me.  The doctor didn’t say anything about...

Time passes

In hospital, time is relative.  Yesterday, I spent all morning and half of the afternoon waiting for the time of the surgery being announced and then for surgery itself.  At the beginning, there was no time.  The operation would begin when a slot had been found and everyone was ready, the nurse said.  It was a busy day.  I had stopped eating and drinking the night before and was told to keep up the fasting until the operation.I lay in bed thinking this could be a good time to read, catch up on emails and write about what’s...

Waiting hours

Two nights away from the family for the first time in eleven months does unfortunately not mean business travel has started again.  A night in the hospital is somewhere between a night in a hotel and a night on a plane.  The bed is comfortable enough but sleep is mediocre.  Three old men in various states of decrepitude coughed, moaned and snored all night.  There was no breakfast waiting for me when I woke up.  Instead, it was a nurse by my bed.The intervention would be today, she said, but no one could yet say when. ...

Signs of lightness

Over the last few days, I’ve been watching my pee carefully.  In keeping with recent trends, I would have expected it to become lighter in color and look normal again.  This is not what happened.  If anything, it’s been getting darker.  My skin also changed back to the healthy look of the recently tanned, which is apparently not healthy at all.  The whites of my eyes are quite yellow.  It’s quite obvious that the bilirubin values have gone up again and likely that the other liver markers have followed suit.The first...

Easy procedure

Half the time, I seem to get an oral contrast agent before a CT.  Half the time I don’t.  At least that’s how I remember it, dimly.  This time, I had to take it.  The contrast agent is 600 ml of a clear, largely tasteless liquid that I’m asked to ingest over the course of half an hour.  I have nothing against the contrast agent, except that it makes the whole procedure take longer.On Thursday, it took longer than usually anyway.  I had to wait a bit and then, when I had already bared my upper body and clothed it in...