Tooth 2 (implant)

Nine months ago my Dentist discovered I had a Cyst under one of my teeth when being checked out for having the tooth replaced by an implant and and additional white piece on top (see) .
Well today they were finally able to start the original work and after being hacked around I'm the proud owner of an Implant (no tooth yet).

I'm just waiting for the pain to start.

Scan Ahoy - More Therapies

It looks as the only time I get (remember) to write blog entries is when I'm coming up to MRI scans. This or next week I'll have to go to the Doctor to get my Blood checked for Platelets as usual, and then the scan is booked for the 17th Feb with the Oncologist / Neurologist check up the week after.

Can you believe its Six months since my last dose of Chemo?
As I've said before its always a bit of a worrying during this time not knowing how the MRI results might pan out, but this time is a special worry because it is in the next 3-6 months that Tumours often/usually reoccur.

I have a dentist appointment on Friday too, not related, the Dentist is checking out the Op I had to scrape out an old tooth. If all goes well I need to decide if I want an implant to replace it. And what is the major deciding factor? Cost, Pain , No (well maybe a bit on Pain). It all depends on the state of my tumour.

Studying a lot treatment news at the moment. A couple of interesting ones:

TTF again
Remember my visit to Dr. Magneto that resulted in my tumour downgrade. Well there is a lot of activity in the area of TTF, including the results of a trial combining TTF (the Electric field machine) & Temozolomid (the Chemo I have been using) with recurrent patients showing a mean time to disease progression of 155 weeks compared to 31 weeks for normal chemo.
Damn this downgrade I want one of these alien defense mechanisms and I promis to take my pills.

Gene Therapy
There is so much going on in Gene Therapy I can't help thinking this is where the cure is coming from. Take a look at this where they are using a 2-pronged gene therepeutic attack to force regression.

Brain Tumour Virus anyone?
Hold on to the end for the twist.

It has been noticed that GBM tumours attack middle aged people that were well-educated and from higher socioeconomic backgrounds (and then there is me). Their "hyper-hygienic" lives have possibly left there immune systems susceptible to more common viruses such as CMV.

Now a neurosurgeon has discovered a relationship between Brain Tumours and the CMV virus, a herpes virus that is normally harmless lying dormant in 80% of the the population. But in tumour samples it seems that CMV is actively replicating. If this turns out to be causal then a vaccine may be on its way (but probably too late for me).

An interesting Postscript: Back in April 2006 Carol was very ill. She had severe bouts of tiredness and fatigue for several weeks. When she had her blood tested they found the culprit, CMV, and that an anti-arthritic drug that she had been taking had reduced her resistance to it. Eventually the problem cleared up on its own.

16 Months later I was diagnosed with a GBM tumour that the nuerologists reckoned had been growing for "one or two years".

Is this just coincidence or did Carol & I pass around the the same virus (via the usual bodily fluids) with astoundingly different results. Back then I worried that Carol's illness was life threatening. This needs investigating, if only to prove or disprove the irony of it.

A Musical Interlude

So what has been streaming off the Music server over the past few weeks?

The Minimalists:

Carol bought me a boxed set of 10 Philip Glass CDs (Glass Box - cool name but not made of glass) for Christmas. Amazing what a set of well placed hints can achieve :-). Once I played all of Glass Box the experience set me off on a search for my favourite minimalist pieces.   I've been a fan of minimalist music in its widest sense as long as I remember. I guess my earliest minimalist experiences were with some bits of Holst and Kraut rock bands such as Faust, Can and Tangerine Dream. Only later did I discover the "classical" minimalists such as Terry Riley, Steve Reich, John Adams and Philip Glass in the US with Arvo Part, Heinryk Gorecki and Michael Nyman (who coined the phrase minimalism as represented by music) in Europe. Anyway, here are some of my favourites of the moment (listen in peace with an open mind):

Gorecki - Symphony No. 3

Glass - Orange Mountain Music, Symphony No 3, Satyagraha, Tehillim

Part - I am the true vine

Tangerine Dream - Atem

Reich - Music for 18 Musicians

Can - Future Days, Bel Air

Faust - Miss Fortune

Riley - In C (Wang Yongji performance)

Nyman - The Piano

Adams - Shaker Loops

Christmas Songs - Carol loves her festive songs (old, modern & ancient) to be playing for weeks before Christmas so I have to hide in the study to hear anything else and given how unfestive that is I don't get to hear much else on the run up to Christmas. Even though we have a random playlist of around 250 "festive favourites" its amazing how quickly they repeat on random play. Each year I try to add some new songs but only few are accepted by the festivities organiser :-)

And the rest: 

Sons & Daughters -  Rough rock folk with a great Scottish (girl) lilt

Small Faces  - Ogden's Nutgone Flake - their finest

The Acorn - Glory hope mountain - Canadian indie folk with honduran beats.

Nitin Sawhney - London Undersound - Yet another wonderful album from this man despite the appearance of Paul McCartney

James - Just re-listening to the band who should have had the success of the Smiths

Iggy Pop - The Best : Lust for Life, The Idiot, American Ceaser

Fotheringay - Sandy Denny's last band (only recently realeased 2nd album, 37 years late). Wonderful English folk album

Jim & his new Liver

In the recent post on our UK trip I mentioned an old friend, Jim who was waiting for a Liver Transplant. Well they finally found a donor on 30th December and he went in for his transplant on New Years Eve. After over 12 hours of extremely complex surgery he was moved into intensive care around 9pm, and into a normal ward yesterday. Christina, he's wife, has been keeping his family and friends up to date with remarkable regularity.

Apparently he is making great progress. I only wish I was close enough to pay a visit. I hope he knows how much me and  the rest of the family are thinking of him.

Christmas

We decided that this year would be the first time our "kids" Christmas stockings (with little packages therein) but we resented for the baby of the family (17) because he hasn't had as many years of it as the girls. 

We also warned everybody that this year we would buy smaller presents for everybody now we have the new grandchildren and husbands / boyfriends,  another promise broken I think especially when I look at what I got (you really shouldn't have).

We did the baking early enough this year that before Christmas it had all gone and we had to do it again.

The Snow came down heavily on December 16th 

And had gone completely by the 23rd, so no White Christmas

This year we decorated in Blue and Silver because we have had Red & Gold (my favouirite) for too many years, I'm told.

We did the usual Chrismas day with the whole of the nuclear family plus electrons and the occasional photons coming around late Christmas Eve and staying 'til morning and forgeting to to leave until Boxing day. 

From the readings on the bathroom scales it was clear that we had a fine Chrismas.  

Confusing Scan's

I Got the scan CD at the beginning of December for the scans of November and I planned to do one of the super comparisons that I did back in July. Unfortunately that was not so easy this time.

For the past two sets of scans they used a different scanner (the left one for anyone being treated at Aarau Kantonspital) and when I looked at the two sets compared with the earlier scans it was difficult to make a simple comparison. 

Instead of showing a clear Tumour the pictures where a lot more fuzzy and indistinct. In fact to my uneducated eye it was a difficult to see what was going on. Also, the format was square rather rectangular and the resolution lower. I'm sure that the experts understand the pictures fine, but I would rather have pictures from the other scanner (the right one) to look at. I'm wondering if I have been put on an old (cheaper) machine while I have been improving?

Anyway the point is I am not going to put up the scans this time and I'm going to see if I can get on the other scanner next time. Perhaps I need to complain about some deterioration in my health next time to get on the better machine :-) 

Return to Blog - England Trip

It's been a month since I wrote in my blog and there is a lot to write about. So I'm going to do  a bunch of entries to catch up, starting with our (Carol and me) trip to visit Family and friends in England. Good fun, but not exactly relaxing when we are in our homeland. 

We drove to England (see route above) setting off at 6:30am in the rain, crossing France  and arriving in good old blighty about 12 hours later also in the rain. We took a ferry across the channel (cheaper than the chunnel and time to rest and get the duty free). Once on the mainland we popped in at Ramsgate where Amber's boyfriend Patrick was taking an English course and had some stuff for us to take back.

After being flashed by oncoming headlights a few dozen times we realised that we had forgotten to buy and fit headlight correctors  (you need them to stop blinding drivers on the other side of the road when driving a left hand drive car on the left side of the road, or vice-versa ) anyway we decided to carry on to my Sister Janet's in Welwyn where we were staying over the weekend.  As we past Rayleigh (Essex) we thought about popping in on on one of Carols aunts but as it was getting late we gave it a miss. Strangely we found out later that her aunt had died earlier that day.

Janet is my big sister being 10 years older than me but seemingly 10 years younger in pretty much all ways. We spent the weekend talking about all subjects under the sun and beyond, and Monday morning arrived in the blink of an eye.

On Monday we went to see my Dad who is 87 and suffering from final stage Alzheimers and is now looked after in a nursing home. At this stage of the disease he doesn't really recognise anybody anymore and sleeps much of the day. It is very upsetting to see him like this. 

My dad was such an bright and active man whose spent many of his weekends rock climbing, caving  and hill walking and even leading the "dangerous activities" unit in the Hertfordshire Scout movement while still in his 60s. 

We were at the home for a couple of hours with him drifting in and out of sleep with showing no response to our conversations, but then, in one of those events so common in Alzheimers it seems, I kissed his head goodbye and he woke up and became highly aware of us (possibly even recognising us). We then spent the next hour or so looking at old photos with him quite often recognising (with some help) people and places. It was lovely that when we finally said our goodbyes that we knew we had experienced one of his more lucid moments. 

Next stop was to Crowland near Peterborough to visit Carol's mum. I don't know what Carol and her mum talked about but I had a good old time talking to Carol's step father about our usual topics, PCs, Technology and the state of Britain :-) We took in a bit of shopping in Spalding and then on Wednesday morning moved southward to the north of Stevenage Clan boundaries.

On Wednesday we spent a great afternoon with Jim, my oldest and dearest friend.  We have known each other since the start of comprehensive school at age 11 and grew up through those formative years together. On leaving school we went off in very different directions but continued to keep in contact despite that. More recently we have been keeping up to date on our respective healths as Jim is waiting on a Liver transplant. During our visit we found him in great shape but we know how quickly that can change. We  continue to hope and pray for a donor soon.

That evening we spent with my little sister (a whole 4 years younger than me) going through a lot of old photos that she had acquired and I have spent some time scanning and fixing.

Thursday found us at doing the odd bit of shopping in the pretty little town of Hitchin. Carol and I used to go to Hitchin from our respective homes in Stevenage quite a lot of in our teens to visit the good pubs (lots of Music) and to shop in the "hippie" shops. We hadn't been to hitchin for aroud 25 years so were suprised to find one of our favourite "hippie" shop still open and not to mention the local sweet shop with all the jars in the window see below.

In the afternoon we paid a surprise visit to the pub in Gosmore near Hitchin run by my 3rd sister Carol (7 Years older than me). Its always a pleasure to visit if only for the beer and homemade pub food :-)  Then in the evening it was off to Biggleswade for dinner with Carol's sisters Lyn and Debbie. It was especially nice to bump into Lyn's daughters.

Originally we had plan to drive home on Friday but because Carol's aunts funeral  was on that day we decided to shift coming home to Saturday so that Carol could attend. That gave me time to pop in on my stepmother in the morning and to do some shopping at Tesco in the afternoon for all those English things we find hard to get at home like Marmite, Cornish wafers, Diet tonic water, Marmalade, Curly wurlys, Crunchies and other such necessities of living.

This, of course gave us another evening with Marion and my charming nieces who had arrived home from Exeter and Aberdeen universities (why opposite ends of Britain I don't know).

Up early on Saturday got us back here early enough to have a good nights sleep to help get over the fun but hectic week.