Hieronymous the Anonymous

Rigby 1, H zero

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Rigby has the habit of barrelling down the hallway at full tilt and leaping onto my bed at the end of. He takes great joy in this, and though I am forever trying to dim his exuberance this always make me smile. You gotta love a dog that lives so joyously.

This morning though I wasn't smiling. I'm sitting on the end of my bed putting my shoes on when I hear Rigby clattering down the hallway in his familiar way, and look up just in time to see him leap and all 30 kilos of chocolate brown, fast moving muscle careen into me. The thick skull of the top of his head connects with my jaw and forehead and for a moment or two I lose consciousness.

I am dazed and sore when I regather some of my wits. My head aches all the way down to my neck. There is blood in my mouth from where my teeth have torn into my cheek, and a lump on my forehead. When I stand I feel wonky and somehow disconnected. I can talk ok, but it feels as if I have to drag my words up from a dep well, and they feel heavy on my tongue. It seems an effort to articulate. All is not right.

Perhaps foolishly I decide to lie down for a bit, and before I know it I am fast asleep. When I wake it is a little after 11. I have an appointment at 11.30. I quickly get up, feeling odd still, like my eyes and my head are somehow separate from my body. I feel a little out of balance, a little dizzy, and the pain in my head throbs. I swallow down a couple of ibuprofen and dash out the door.

The temptation all afternoon has been to sleep, though apparently that's not a good idea with concussion. I was so sleepy though that it was hard to resist.

I'm much better now, though not right. I've been into the city to collect my suit and had a quick drink sitting in the sun of City Square with Becky. Home now though, a quiet evening ahead and a good nights sleep - should be right for tomorrow.

As for Rigby? What do they say - no sense, no pain? That seems to apply to him. He probably thought it was great fun the little scoundrel.

Blurred

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I've got out of bed to write this. I'm conscious of not being too bound to my bed. I need the rest, and bed is the most comfortable place for me to be right now, but I feel useless and unproductive.

I say that but I don't feel the guilt I might normally. I may be unproductive but there is good cause for that; and if I am to be productive then I have to get over this virus - and the best way to do that is to rest. In the end I feel too weary to worry too much about anything - everything is diluted.

I don't feel terrible. I have the usual symptoms of a virus, the aches and pains, the swollen glands and blocked sinus, the sore eyes and ears. The symptoms are mitigated by the medication I am taking, but I am left without much energy. I get up to do things and fade away. I made the mistake of going out briefly on Wednesday only to find the symptoms rear up on me, together with a fever. Everything says bed, and so to bed I go.

I am awake now and up because a ringing phone woke me from my little doze. I lay in bed with a cup of tea at my elbow. I read sometimes, or listen to the radio or an audiobook, or just lie there when the effort to concentrate or listen becomes more than I'm willing to expend. My mind traces it's course through my still body. It's rare that we stop like this except when we are ill, and so the experience is novel, even for one as reflective as I am.

It is strange to lay there feeling the stupor of sleep slowly overtaking you. You lay in bed, the light comes in from outside, as do the sounds of passing traffic, the postman on his motorbike, the voice of the woman next door calling to a cat. Rigby lies on the floor beside the bed. He will at my invitation jump up to join me, and always when the phone rings. I shush him down.

I think. I don't think about anything particular, nor do I set out to think about anything particular. My mind takes its own course, wending its way through the recent events of my life, detouring occasionally to alight on something I read somewhere, wondering at it, before going on to briefly contemplate some of the projects I have set before me. None of this is deep, my mind goes from one subject to the next much as a butterfly flits between leaves of a tree.

Eventually I doze off. It is pleasant and easy. I sleep for 45 minutes perhaps, perhaps an hour. For much of that I am in that blurry state of half-sleep, distantly aware of Rigby getting up or snorting in his sleep. At some point a more alert part of my mind bids me to wake. I do not want to sleep too much through the day, though I doze like this 2-3 times a day. I think, I don't want to spoil my sleep tonight, but truth is I sleep so easily in the day because my nights sleep are disturbed. My nights are full of strange, obsessive dreams, the dreams of someone in delirium, odd films unspooling in my mind that I know as I watch are false, but am unable to turn away from, or to wake. Come the morning I am glad to see daylight after the unpleasantness of the dark.

None of this is unusual. I have been sick enough to know that among other things it brings an altered state of being. In part that is a result from the changed routines. There is something disorientating about being sick. When usually you get to prepare for the day and go to work instead you lay in bed watching the time tick by. When usually you are up and about, a part of society and out in the day you are instead laying bed amid tangled sheets and open books. The sense of time diminishes, and becomes less important. What matter what hour it is? Time blurs.

I don't like that, and so I get up every so often and try and do something normal. I am tempted to head out this afternoon just to be out and to breath the air and to feel part of everything again. I won't be out tonight, but tomorrow I have plans and hope to wake tomorrow well enough to do them. Four days abed is long enough.

In the sack

A sick day today. I was up until 2am watching the cricket from South Africa before it was washed out, before going to bed. I had that tight feeling in my sinus and struggled to breathe through my nose, before waking this morning with the tell tale symptoms of a decent cold - swollen, aching glands, sore sinus, a 'busy' head, a sore neck, as well as a general lethargy. I've spent the morning in bed.

I find it a little odd that I should succumb to this now after surviving the swine flu and all the other winter ailments I might so easily have picked up. True, it has been a wet, cold few weeks, but today the sun is shining and I'd rather be anywhere but my bed - though it is nice to have an excuse to rest and catch up on my reading.

In actual fact my health has turned sour since a few weeks ago when I had a general check-up. At the time the doctor told me my blood pressure was perfect, my cholesterol low, and that in general I was in pretty good nick - gratifying news after the tough year I've had. Unfortunately that was the cue for the wheels to begin wobbling.

At the time I was running/walking 5km a day, certainly not something I do for pleasure (I find it boring), but something I felt I needed to do to get back to the level of fitness I desire. At the same time I was doing other general exercise to get me in shape. As of about 10 days ago all that stopped.

In the space of 24 hours I developed two separate and presumably unrelated symptoms that gave me pause. More seriously perhaps, I would lay in bed feeling an intense pain in the middle of my left calf. It was a pointed pain, as if someone was pressing the handle of a brush into my leg, with the pain pulsing and radiating into the surrounding tissue. What worried me was that this is exactly where I had my blood clot last year. Sure enough, my leg once more swelled up.  I probably should have seen a doctor about it, but have decided to wait to see if it persists. Since I've stopped running it's gone away.

The other complaint is less explicable. I seem to have developed tennis elbow out of the blue. There was some tenderness there, but I expected it to go away. Then suddenly it got a lot worse, to the point that the pain was reasonably intense and the discomfort such that I struggled to twist the lid off a bottle.

Much as anything else these ailments have been the source of great frustration as well as inconvenience. There was a sense that I could not take a trick - that just as I was getting back on my own two feet again (literally) and looking to claw back some of what I had lost, I am dragged back again by these problems that just won't go away.

That's for now though. I'll manage, and in time will get back to where I want to be. In this I have to be like the tortoise.

Getting back to normal

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I finally feel like I'm getting back to the level of fitness I expect of myself. It's been a tough year for my health. The blood clot left me unable to do strenuous exercise, and when that finally cleared up my foot was giving me problems. I could barely hobble around the block and with instructions to stay off it wherever possible my fitness further declined. At about this time my lower back began to seriously play up, leaving me feeling very stiff and inflexible when not in pain. A curious aspect of this what I felt crooked. When I walked down the street I felt as if I walked leading with one side, as if I had not put my pants on straight.

The resolution to all this came when I finally decided to see an osteopath. My initial opinion was confirmed when the osteo told me I had twisted my spine. She also told me that my left leg - where most of my problems are - is about a centimetre longer than my right. Over several weeks of treatment including acupuncture we delved into my ailments searching for a cause.

About 13 months ago I went to a physio with similar complaints - stiff, sore, shooting pains through my buttock down into the back of my left leg, and so on. Treatment at that time was inconclusive and it was not long after that I was diagnosed with DVT in my left calf. At the time I didn't connect them, but with the passage of time and subsequent events I began to wonder if in fact there was cause and effect in this sequence of events.

I discussed it with the osteo. I told her how the year before last I had gone travelling through North Africa hoisting a heavy pack. My pack at times was near 30 kilograms, and though the weight did not trouble me overmuch I wondered later if my lazy habit of slinging it over my right shoulder had created my problems. That's a fair amount of weight unevenly spread, requiring the body to adjust and adapt.

My speculations led me to wonder if this had not caused my spine to twist, which placed pressure on my back and my entire left side and had then somehow resulted in the DVT developing, and the further complications after which seem, in retrospect, like dominos tumbling in a line.

The osteo could not confirm or deny this postulation, and suggested I speak to a doctor about it. It's not terribly relevant anymore - the horse has bolted - and so I haven't bothered to do anything as yet. In the meantime her treatment, combined with the exercises she set me, has freed me up substantially.

A little over a month ago I couldn't touch my toes. I couldn't get within 6 inches of them, very poor considering that not so long ago I could touch the ground with my clenched fists. I still can't manage that, but I can touch my toes again.

All this has meant that I can exercise again. I lost a lot of muscle tone throughout this and put on about 7 kilos, and was pretty well helpless to do anything about it. I have now been exercising more freely and am feeling the benefits. I'm still a long way short of where I want to be, but I feel stronger and look more toned. I expect to improve substantially more.

My brother in law over the weekend tapped his belly and indicated he was at the age now when it was ok to spread a little. I don't share that view. I hate being sloppy in any way. I am proud and have standards I need conform too, and can't help but think that begin compromising on some then the rest will follow. And I'm vain - I don't like looking out of shape, no matter how old I get. I guess the most compelling reason is my health - I need to maintain a certain level of fitness for my ongoing quality of life.

I expect within a couple of months to fit into last years suits without an issue, and for things to be back to normal.

Again

I spoke to my Dad this morning. Normally I'd speak to him every 5-6 weeks, but it has been a lot more frequent this year. His wife, my stepmother I guess, has cancer, as I think I've mentioned here before.

It's not something I have written a lot about. It may seem selfish, but I've been trying to put it out of my mind. I am over-familiar with cancer having witnessed its insidious toll on my uncle, aunt and stepfather - and now my stepmother. It is a terrible way to die, and I am of the view that if I am ever diagnosed with it than I'd rather go out sooner, when I am still physically and the memories of me are healthy and warm, rather than later when I am a mere husk of a man. I pray it never comes to that.

I can't ignore it any more though. I speak to my father, a proud, strong man whose habit is to fight for everything, and hear in his voice the quiet despair of a man who has run out of ideas. He still searches, but I get the impression he knows that the search is futile. He'll stay strong till the end, you can rely on that, but I wonder what comes after.

As for my stepmother I can only imagine what she is going through. I haven't spoken to her since Christmas and I respect her wishes in that. One of the awful things about cancer is that it can rob one of their sense of dignity. The treatment is intrusive and toxic and leaves its mark. She has quietly fought that battle with my father beside her and unseen my sister and I supporting from the sidelines. There is nothing more we can do.

Today they are greatly disappointed. They had thought the treatment had gone well, the signs were positive - yet the doctor gives them no further cause for help. His prognosis is unchanged - before Christmas, and quite possibly well before then.

He tells me, dad, that he has seen it himself in the last few days. She has no energy, can't walk 100 metres and even doing that is at a shuffle with frequent stops. She is on oxygen, and from what I gather has lost hope after this most recent examination. I have not enquired about her physical state and do not want to know - though I can imagine.

I feel a little disloyal writing this even if I do it under my anonymous identity. It is something I have to write though because it is of my life, and because it is not something that can be ignored. More than anything, it is not something that should be ignored.

I won't be writing a lot, though it is inevitable there will be things that must be reported. There is little anyone can do. I told my dad that, told him I knew there was nothing we could do but that we, my sister and I, are here whenever and however we are needed.

This is a terrible, terrible thing. Again.

In the dentists chair

I went to the dentist on Monday for the first time in about 8 years - I'm one of those people not so crazy about the dentist. The good news was that my teeth are pretty good. One small filling and that would do it. Today I popped along to the dentist again to get it done.

I remembered this morning why I'm not crazy about the dentist. I mean nobody likes getting holes drilled in their teeth and pointy needles stuck into their gums, but there's a lot more to it than that. For me I reckon it's the absolute loss of power. There you are sitting in the dentists chair, tilted back and with your mouth agape. You lay there with your mouth jammed open and numbed from the anaesthetic. Above you like some omnipotent God the dentist pokes around in your mouth with sharp instruments and a humming drill pulverising the decayed tooth. He chats with the dental assistant about lunch plans and about a groovy song he heard coming into work that morning. You stare up through the oddly coloured and silly looking glasses they've put on you, incapable of anything more. You might as well be a piece of meat, except every now and then the dentist brightly asks how you're going. In normal circumstances you might attempt some witty rejoinder, but the best you can do with your mouth jammed open is some kind of guttural grunt. While all this is happening the dental assistant sticks her little sucking tool in your mouth like you're a baby. Sometimes you feel a trail of liquid run down your chin onto the small bib they've clipped around your neck. Oh joy, you think, so this is what its like to be a baby. Or a very old person.

Then they're done. You rinse and spit. One side of your face feels swollen. You imagine your misshapen face. And afterwards when you have a coffee you have to guard against dribbling.

Good news that's it for 6 months - or maybe another 7 years. We'll play it by ear.

Being travel fit

I was getting a massage the other week in Bali lying there and letting things float away as you do when I thought I have to get things right for me. The massage was deep and relaxing. Shortly after the masseuse covered me in yoghurt before washing it off with warm, frangipani scented water. I felt my body relax, but in that relaxation I recognised that regardless of what she was doing to me that there was a deeper physical malaise I have been suffering from.

I aspire to something I think of as being travel fit. To be travel fit means I can take off tomorrow with a pack on my back and touch down at some far-flung destination and do my usual thing without a hiccup. My usual thing is to explore by foot, to delve into the little nooks and crannies, and to engage with the local culture. It requires things which I have always taken for granted. A certain amount of physical strength to manage a heavy pack and associated baggage over a distance. And the fitness to walk all day and to occasionally exert myself much more. Though there have been times that I've been bone tired, managing this has never been a serious problem. If I climbed Mt Sinai or trekked through searing temperatures then I could always take it easy the next day - that was allowed.

Right now I am not travel fit. I can't do a lot here in my home town of Melbourne, let alone somewhere far from home.

I haven't been completely right since getting my DVT, and in large part that's understandable. Managing that caused me to lose some fitness simply because I was unable to do many of the everyday things I was used to. Unfortunate, but to be expected. Now though I'm meant to be right, and I'm not.

Medical science has not been a huge source of inspiration in recent months. No-one has managed to come up with a conclusive answer as to what caused my thrombosis. Now that it's gone the general feeling seems to be alls well that ends well. With a shrug of their collective shoulders they tell me it's just one of those things, and seem inclined to that. Well I'm not so inclined. I'm a man who likes to understand things. If I can understand something then I can deal with it. I have a lot of questions, but I'm getting no answers.

I might be easier with all of this if I felt properly recovered and as I was before. I don't though. While I accepted a certain level of inconvenience while I was officially ill, that's no longer the case. In ways I feel worse now than I did before, and wonder if going off my medication has done is a cause of that.

I feel pretty wrung out. Left to my own devices I would sleep 10 hours every day very easily. As it is I force myself awake and feel groggy for hours afterward. Throughout the day I feel weary and occasionally I stop to rest simply because I must. I have few physical reserves right now. If I do anything more strenuous than usual then I feel it for much longer afterwards.

Mentally I am still very alert, and in fact feel at the top of my game. But like everything else fatigue plays a part in my mental endurance. Fatigue is what I feel pretty well all the time.

It is a hardly a comfortable way to be, and gives cause for concern. I can get away with it to some extent right because I'm working from home. But what happens when I must go to a client site and I'm charging a squillion? There are no excuses then.

On Wednesday I took myself to a Naturopath. I needed a new way of looking at things, and I needed some answers. In her brief analysis of me the naturopath told me that I was zinc deficient and that she thought my circulation was playing up - perhaps explaining why I got the DVT in the first place. She admitted that maybe I needed the medication for my blood, and has prescribed for me a nasty tasting tonic, as well as some zinc and coenzymes. I go back next week.

I had to hang around the city that day and by the end of it felt thoroughly washed out. My eyes were staring and heavy, and body weary. This is what I was feeling in Bali when I made that pronouncement, and what I feel all too often now.

I have to get right. And have to get fit. If nothing else my vanity demands it, but in reality there are much stakes than that.

In the hospital

I went to the hospital the other day for an appointment with a specialist. It was a hot day, as most days are this season. I entered by the main entrance, where the road curved to allow the ambulances to drive up and deposit their patients. It was busy inside, doctors and nurses humming by, people visiting sick family and friends, and the odd patient in pyjamas or smock or in a wheelchair.

I stood by the lifts waiting for one to arrive. I was in shorts and t-shirt, as befitting the weather. Though I was there as a patient also I felt able bodied amid all this, tall and strong and, if not at the peak of my health, then much better than most here. It was important for me to feel that.

Upstairs at reception I checked in, signed some forms, and then directed to the adjoining corridor to sit and wait until called.

I sat, waiting to be called in at any moment - foolish, I know - before picking up my phone to read the latest news on it. My eyes swung around. There is a particular hospital decor, functional, but also drab and dispiriting. The floors were lino, marked by the wheels of carts and wheelchairs. The walls were plasterboard, or some derivative of that, blandly painted and scuffed in places. The ceiling was of those cork or plaster tiles, perforated like a Swiss cheese. The brief glimpse I caught of the chambers as doors opened and closed offered no more cheer - small, dark, cluttered rooms that spoke of another era.

Past my eyes going in either direction was a steady stream of people. A couple of nondescript men - whether they were doctors, patients or visitors I could not tell - wandered by. One said "I like Charles Bronson in Streetfighter". The other seemed to muse on that before responding. "I like him in Chato's Land", he said.

A pretty doctor of Indian extraction wandered by. "How did you enjoy the tennis?" another woman, a registrar I think, asked her. "Oh it was great," the Indian doctor responded, "I can't get it out of my head!"

Downstairs I had seen a large and extravagantly dressed woman in a modern electric wheelchair. Upstairs she zoomed past me coming and going several times, as if this was part of her daily routine, the 'walk' she took to keep her occupied. Once she nearly ran over my toes. A couple of elderly women entered the corridor and sat nearby. Each wore face masks connected to an oxygen tank, and I looked at them wondering if I would not rather be dead than reduced to such a state.

At that moment another patient turned the corner. He was middle aged, dressed in civvies but like those of another more respectable, less casual era. His face was contorted and he walked stutteringly, leaning to one side like a boat about to capsize. He's not long for this world I thought, and then corrected myself. I did not know. How could I? And I knew that sometimes the most desperate seeming case can be redeemed.

I sat amid this constant stream of humanity as if I was separate from it, like I looked at it through a window. That suited me. I did not feel part of this, did not want to be part of this. I was fit and strong, wasn't I? Wasn't I able bodied still? And though I sat waiting in the oncology ward I felt like proclaiming, I'm okay, I don't have cancer. I was just a visitor lost his way.

I was finally called into one of the small consulting rooms. The doctor went through my file with me, asking me questions about various things which he duly noted down. I discovered for the first time that I'd had 3 clots, and not the single clot I'd been led to believe. The clots were in veins radiating off the major artery, and though they had now dissolved had caused permanent damage - which is why my leg remained swollen. The body should find a way, he told me, to ease the pressure and return my leg to its previous dimensions.

I asked questions. It's part of my nature, I'm curious to understand how and why things happen. I didn't want to be left in any doubt. I realised too that it was my attempt to wrest some control from the doctor. You walk in that door and you are an ailing body. You are subject to their scrutiny, mutely allowing them to examine you as if you are a piece of meat. I did not want that; do not want that. And so I asked my questions, one after another, for a few moments controlling the agenda. Then he asked me to get up on the bed.

He examined my leg. Then lifting my shirt he poked and prodded at my stomach. He asked me to sit up. He asked me to breathe deeply as he got his stethoscope out to listen to my chest. I am familiar with this, and solemnly breathed as instructed. Then he called in a colleague.

I had seen the other doctor before, and now I asked him questions as I sat down once more. I was methodical in my questioning, much as I am when I am trying to get to the bottom of a business process I amtrying to understand and rectify. There are always more questions, and each answer leads to another.

In the end I understood this: that they cannot explain why this happened to me, that it is for the moment one of the inexplicable mysteries of medical science, though hardly rare. That I should over time be right, though it is wise to to be wary. And that I don't have cancer, or anything else for that matter, at least as far as medical science allows them to know.

I have blood tests in 2 weeks, and a follow-up appointment with them 4 weeks later, and then I should be home free. For now I can get on with my life again, and that feels good.

Sick, and tired of it

Every so often since I got diagnosed last year I have an uncomfortable, unpleasant night's sleep. I guess I average one about every 3 weeks, which isn't too bad. And it's not terrible, just inconvenient and, ultimately, a little bit worrying. I had of those nights last night.

I wake up at some point. I lay there and as I lay there completely awake I try and and precisely understand what is happening. Words are important. And so when I think initially that it is difficult to breathe I revise that to 'laboured'.

You take breathing for granted, inhaling and exhaling, but now I am forced to consider it. It is uncomfortable, as much psychologically as anything else. Suddenly you wonder what is happening? Why? And then, as you swallow every breath like it's whole plum going down, it is that what sets your mind off.

At the same time your breath occasionally catches. It is audible, like a snore except it isn't. I feel it catch as if it is at the top of my throat. I imagine it is my oesophageous, it feels like there is a flap on it that closes occasionally, making my breath catch. When it does this I feel it all the way up my throat, to the back of my mouth.

And there is a pain inside the tip of my left thumb.

Throughout all this I am trying to make myself as comfortable as possible. My mind conjures up all sorts of possibilities. I am calm, it's not my nature to leap to wild conjectures, but I know this is not how it should be. I wonder if it is my declining fitness that is a cause of this, or something more sinister. Or perhaps something quite simple. I wonder though, without knowing.

I fall asleep and I wake in the morning and go through my normal routine. Being Saturday I collect the paper from where it has been tossed on the driveway. I make coffee as I listen to the morning news. And I take the first of my pills.

About a month ago I went to the local doc complaining of a pain in my left foot. It felt like it was deeply bruised, but there was nothing there. I let it go, thinking it would go away, but instead it got worse, to the point I was walking with a serious limp.

I wondered if it had anything to do with my DVT, and thought it must. Same leg, it seemed more than coincidence. But then the doctor told me I had something called planar fasciitus. Something to do with the ligaments in the heel of my foot, and totally unrelated to everything else. It could take 12-18 months to fix. Fuck, I thought, that's ridiculous.

I left bemused by it all: I may as well cut my bloody leg off for all the trouble it's given me. And after a bit I figured it probably wasn't entirely coincidental. I've been limping a bit because of the DVT, been favouring the leg. I wondered if that had set it off.

And so this morning I take my anti-inflammatory. It does the trick, the pain stays away mostly, and mostly I walk without limping. But part of the treatment is staying off my feet. Can't run, don't walk if you don't have to. Great stuff. Man, I feel so unfit and I can't do anything about it.

Not long from now I'll take my Warfarin. Sick of that too. And sick of not knowing, of being fobbed off. I need to get right. I can't live like this. I have to be mobile again. And I have to know what is happening, and have to know what to do about it. I want to live normally, as I did before.

My leg swells up and then down again without any apparent rhyme or reason - I'm told the clot is gone. My hands are puffy too though, and even my good leg is puffier than usual. I'm now wearing a stocking on my bad leg, a sight sure to get all those pretty girls hearts aflutter.

I was due to see another specialist in a few weeks time. Then I got a letter from the oncology department of the hospital. I cocked an eye at that, but know I don't have cancer. They were directing me to a specialist - the bloody same specialist I already had an appointment with.

That's where it stands. I'm cool, but I hate being sick, and I hate how this is dragging on, and hate how so much of it doesn't seem to make sense, and hate not knowing.

The big unmentionable

There's something else that I've avoided writing about, or even thinking about, and I'm not going to write much about it now - but it must be recorded.

About 7 weeks ago I got word that my Dad's wife, who had been struggling with pneumonia, had been diagnosed with cancer. Like many such diagnosis this was a shock. Sue is a fit and vibrant woman of about 60. Suddenly she has cancer, inoperable cancer, and reading between the lines, the prognosis was not promising.

I have spoken to my Dad again today to wish him a happy new year. In the course of our conversation we gradually came back to the subject of Sue. He told me that she had been suffering spasms, that she had been re-admitted into hospital on new years eve and subject to further scans and tests. Those tests unearthed a secondary cancer in her brain. She is being operated on next week.

I daren't ask the obvious question, but in my ever-expanding experience of cancer I know the signs are not good. My father knows that too. He is a strong, proud man, a man of great fortitude and intelligence. He is not one to easily admit defeat. He is hopeful yet, but he knows the enormity of what they face. For a few moments today there was silence at the end of the line as he composed himself before going on. He will fight all the way, and support her with all his strength, but too often it seems a losing battle.

I don't want to say more. It seems bad luck. And I should be more optimistic. It's just that she is the fourth member of my family in the last 6 years to be diagnosed with this...