Will you still love me to-marrow - John Mycroft and Multiple Myeloma

The two things my dear friend Ruth at Cancer Care obsesses about are my bowels and how many times I have fallen over.  At least I'll have something to tell her next week.  I have spent the last couple of days crapping through a straw, as they say where I come from, which is odd as I actually get a week off the chemo this week.  So, my ever-loving and long-suffering Susan rushed out to CVS and bought a packet of Loperamide HCl.  Immediate result was pretty much nothing on the innards front but I slept 18 hours or so yesterday and, while I didn't fall over at all, my progress from point A to point B had a certain similarity to the path of a ball on a pin table as I bounced off doorways and grabbed at furniture.  My innate hypochondriac informed me that I was entering some vile second phase of my cancer and that I'd be lucky to see the week out.  Susan, on the other hand, read the info leaflet that came with the pills and it informed her that side-effects incl...

I think that is supposed to be a romantic song title but, in my case, it is bloody steroids.  So I have now been awake for 27 hours and am feeling fine - just wish I'd got up earlier.  Once I've finished this (which is likely to take a while as someone seems to have rearranged my keyboard) I intend to stain a single plank on the deck and then hold down a sunbed for an hour or two.  So if you smell barbecuing long pig, that'll be me. I think I have finished my educational excursions for the summer - just polished off a couple of online courses.  One was on scraping data from websites and I think the biggest thing I learned from it was that everything I have ever told my students about there not being any huge differences between Python 2 and Python 3 is complete cobblers when it comes to web scraping.  Still, I got it sorted out and feel in a position to teach it in my advanced programming course next year, if that course actually runs (last time I heard, "they"...

Well, this takes skill.  After spending the last 5 months at school wiping every surface with a disinfectant wipe and avoiding touching handrails ( a fun thing to do on the stairs when your knees don't both seem to be facing forward), I now find myself in the clean surroundings of my own home with a cold.  And it's 80+ degrees outside in the old money.  Result is that I've been awake since 3 and up since 4 (new rule, new rule - if I wake up in the middle of the night and don't get back to sleep within an hour, I get up.  The last 10 minutes of the hour can be a bit nerve-racking - is it better to try to get back to sleep (how do you do that?) or to try to stay awake? So here I sit at 5:25, having drunk a pot of tea, read the paper, checked ebay and the weather forecast everywhere I can think of (our promised damaging thunderstorms have disappeared completely from the forecast).  Other than an appointment at the audiologist at 8:30, I have nothing planned for th...

... for summer Yay - school's out and nothing to do until late August but barbecue and get sunburnt.  Ain't being a teacher grand?  Oh yeah, I forgot - I also have two new courses to set up and two of last year's to fine-tune.  And some odds and ends around the house (mercifully pretty small thus far and not involving ladders which I don't do at the moment.) So, how have I been? As you may have noticed, there has been a bit of a gap in the blog.  Put it down partly to laziness and partly to a number of comparatively crappy days.  Only comparatively crappy as I still haven't thrown up or lost any hair though both my appetite and my weight have been up and down - my weight has varied from 99 kg to 103 kg - you try drinking a gallon of water without peeing and see if your weight doesn't go up, too.  I've run out of freebie blood pressure meds from the doc so, unless he has been restocked by his local pharmaceutical salesman, I'd better scrounge a re...