Sore throat

Well, the Olympics.
What a show,eh?!
As Simon Barnes wrote in The Times: 'Did that really happen? Or did I dream it?'
And: 'My favourite moment of those 17 days? All of it. It's like a balloon; cut out a piece of it and you haven't got a balloon any more.'
And thanks to Julia (a. getting the tickets and b. pushing me all over the place in the wheelchair), I managed to get to 3 live sessions. Our final visit was an evening of athletics, but although there were no fewer than six medal events that evening, Team GB didn't land a single one, not even a bronze. A shame, but they did magnificently otherwise.

And how about me? A subject of Endless Fascination (yawn).
My mobility is still gradually improving, so the stairs are no longer as daunting an obstacle as they were, although I'm not quote mounting them at Olympic pace yet.
My vision is clearer too, though my eyes spend a lot of time smarting and stinging as if to complain at having to go back to work.
But my skin is still excruciatingly itchy, especially in hot weather and at night, which doesn't do wonders for the quality of my sleep.
And my mouth is still too dry to allow me to eat solid food, so I'm still getting my sustenance overnight through the NG tube.
All these things, and therefore my Quality of Life too, depend on the success of the ECP treatment for which I still make fortnightly trips to St Thomas's and will be for some months yet.

I often think of my Dad, who died at the age I am now, and it is impossible not to draw comparisons between his illness and mine.
He was a little under two months into his 57th year. I am just under three months into mine.
He had a lymphoma in a gland in his neck, a complaint closely related to CLL. Both are caused by malfunctioning lymphocytes.
Like me, his immune system had been knocked for six by drugs and disease, so what finally finished him was a streptococcus infection, or in other words a common-or-garden sore throat.

So I was more alarmed than I might otherwise have been when I woke up a few mornings ago with a sore throat. The GP responded promptly to my call and when he came to see me, happily advised me that there was no sign of any infection and the most likely cause of soreness was irritation from the NG tube. This rang true because I always have difficulty swallowing the few pills I take (most of my medicine is liquid) and they sometimes get lodged between tube and throat lining, which is very uncomfortable until they eventually dissolve and is probably the source of the irritation.

So a False Alarm then.
But it does reveal something about my state of mind.
Call me a Drama Queen, but this bloody malaise has gone on for so long now and the outcome is still so far from certain that I find it impossible to ignore the prospect of an unhappy conclusion.
And on this subject, there was another strange coincidence this week when the blogsite of my old school and university friend Richard Pemberton popped up on my iPad unbidden.
Richard died of cancer earlier this year.
Spooky, huh?!
But not an Omen, I trust.
Maybe he's just looking after me...