The Big C

It looks like my sister is planning a rush wedding. Originally they were talking about spring 2009, but it now seems that the date is more likely to be January. 2008. As in three or four months away.

She's not pregnant. (I think!) She just wants all our grandparents to be there, and recent events have given the situation a degree of urgency. They've finally done the tests on my grandmother, and she has lung cancer. We don't know how bad yet, how advanced, how agressive, how long, but I think we are all making similar assumptions. Forget the statistics for 5 year survival rates, and think about numbers much smaller than that.

We might be wrong, but she's 79 and she's been suffering from various ailments for months, years even, without getting any medical help. How much of that is the cancer, and how much is other stuff we don't know, but it would be a miracle if it hadn't been there, festering, for some time. They're confident enough to diagnose it without having got all the tests back, so it must be a clear case.

The news didn't come as a shock particularly. She smoked for years, and it was probably a question of when it would catch up with her, rather than if it would. And if it wasn't that, there was clearly some sort of serious problem with her lungs, and would something else necessarily be any better? At least now we know, we can think about treatment or at least alleviating the symptoms rather than just watching her refusing to see a doctor. And we can do everything in our power to try to get her to that wedding.

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Speaking of illness, it now looks like Mike's going to be too ill to do the Great North Run on Sunday. That's a shame, because if he's not well enough now, he probably never will be. As far as I know, everyone else is still running for him, and it should still be a fantastic experience, but with a bit more sadness about it. There was an article in the Telegraph yesterday which flagged to me that he was pretty unlikely to make it, but I still lived in hope that he'd be having a good day on Sunday. But I'm sure he'll be with us in spirit, if not in person.

This one's for you, Mike.

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What with all this, I'm not the most cheerful person around at the moment. It's trivial by comparison, but the shortening days aren't helping either. I'm finding it harder and harder to drag myself out of bed to get to the gym, finding it depressing to need lights both on the way into work and the way home, and hating getting used to running in the cold again. I'm being a real grumpy misery guts, and I wish I could snap myself out of it. I wish I could take some time out to escape from it all, without feeling like that just leaves me less time to keep on top of everything else, or feeling guilty for putting myself first for a moment. Even if I could just spend some time with someone who could make me laugh for a while to take my mind off things rather than sinking deeper and deeper.