2012 in Review (for me)

It's time to write another post, as you can see, regularity is hard to achieve these days.  A lot has happened this year.  I suppose first off was the operation to remove my remaining testicle.  This happened on 17 January 2012 (my 47th birthday, in fact).  This was uncanny as the first testicle was removed on 15 July 2008, which was DAD'S birthday!

All went well from that (and unlike the first time, I wasn't concerned at all they'd remove the wrong one), and Sharon and I went on a cruise to New Zealand, stopping at Bay of Islands, Auckland, Napier, Tauranga, Wellington, Christchurch (Akaroa) and Dunedin (Port Chalmers).  We also cruised through three fjords (although they call them "sounds" - however a sound is caused by a river, a fjord is caused by a glacier, which is how they got them in the south of New Zealand).  I had a ball, and would go again tomorrow.  After this, I was scheduled for a single dose of chemotherapy (cisplatin, BTW) which happened in late March.


A fellow RNS patient, Mark  (who was an emergency dep't doctor at RPA) and his dad.  We got on so well.  Mark came off his pushbike going down Bobbin Head Road, breaking many vertebrae and ribs.  He was out before me.

Come early April, I could hardly walk.  My lower back was causing agony.  I checked into Gosford Hospital in severe pain on 23 April.  After Anzac Day I was transferred to Royal North Shore, as they HAD a spinal unit, not Gosford.  After some painstaking work by a team of microbiologists, it was found that an infection I picked up during my 3 month stay (February-April 2009) called candida glabrata was still in my system, and had in fact been there all along (ie for then 3 and a bit years).  It had gotten into the bones, and left lumbar vertebrae Nos 3 & 4 looking like rusty nuts.  The candida strain is a type of fungus, incidentally, and a relative of C. glabrata causes thrush.

Treatment was to be intravenous (IV) infusions of a drug called caspofungin which cost nearly $800 a vial (ie per day).  I started on 2 May, and went through to 2 June, getting 31 treatments.  I was started the drug on the ward, but eventually discharged, and visited a fantastic operation at Gosford Hospital called "APAC" - Acute Post-acute Care.  What APAC means is that you've been in hospital having acute care, and now you keep getting that acute care after discharge.

After the IV treatment, I started an oral medication called posaconazole which is quite new.  $800 a bottle, although you get ten doses (5 days) out of a bottle.  After three weeks I saw my Microbiologist at Gosford for a scheduled follow-up - he said a lot of damage may have already been caused, and the pain I was still getting may be due to that; or the fungal infection was still there.

After another three weeks I saw him again and said I was worse.  He said, the new medicine would take time.  Well, after another three weeks the pain was so bad I called an ambulance and went into Emergency at Gosford Hospital (yet again).  I went in at about 10:30am, via ambulance, and come 6pm I was finally admitted to Medical Ward 2 (which is in a new part of the hospital, so quite nice.  I'd been in M1 in April, which is a sister ward, next door - also new).  The nurse who arranged for me to get a couple of oxy-contin at about 2pm is to be very highly commended.  I really needed it then, as I'd dosed up before leaving home but it was definitely wearing off.  In the next week or so, after eventually taking an MRI and a brown fluid sample (where fluid is taken from the spine under CAT-scan guidance), it was found the infection was still well and truly present.

So I started back on IV infusions of caspofungin. I had a bit of a problem with the PICC line, which had to be removed and re-installed, and this happened on 24 August.  Later that afternoon, Sharon came to visit and told me she'd packed up all her stuff and moved out.  She'd been planning it for months, and today was the day she had intended to separate, for what might have been three or more months.  The house she was moving into (being bought by her Mum & Dad) settled and they'd been given the key.  It was a bit rough that I was still in great pain and in hospital, but there must be fifty ways to leave your lover and this was the way she'd chosen.  In retrospect it could have been much worse.

Three days later, the doctor asked me if I wanted to go home.  I was still really crook, and had I not been a "separationist" I would have stayed in hospital (gee, I'll be a "divorcee" in a year or so).  I had three oedemas - one on my left arm, from the first faulty PICC installation, and both legs were also huge, apparently a side-effect of the anti-fungal medication.  But at this juncture in time I came home (Mum and Dad drove me back, very thankfully).  I was depressed for about a month, which peaked on 27 September (our 14th Wedding Anniversary).

RIP, Pete.

What didn't help was the sudden death of my best mate, Peter Nicolas on Tuesday 4 September.  Pete was really crook - I had rung him while in hospital to say hello and he sounded worse than me.  When I got out, I finally got up to see him on Thursday 30 August and I found him lying in his chair and hardly able to move.  I came back to see him Saturday night, and he seemed a bit better.  On Sunday morning at about 4am he called an ambulance, the hospital X-rayed him, took a biopsy, said he had a 10cm malignant mass on his lungs, and he was dead two days later.  I had the unique privelege of reading his eulogy at the funeral.



Mindaree Avenue Wyoming.  Yep I
go down and up - without stopping!
 Lens foreshortens the slope, I reckon.

 About this time I realised I needed to do something about my weight, which had crept up to 120kg.  I had never been this heavy before.  So I started walking around this area, which is incredibly hilly.  Well the first time I did the circuit, it took 23 minutes. After a week straight I had it down to 18 minutes, BUT my right knee had been killed in the process due to the underlying arthritis.

So I reluctantly gave up walking, and decided to do exercise whereby I'd gain something.   I figured if I kept walking around the circuit, I'd get better at walking around the circuit, which is not very helpful in practical terms. So for the next few days I was gardening.  I even removed the stump of the dead lemon tree from the ground.  I then didn't like the finish, so I ground down the stump using a circular saw the next day, and now you wouldn't even know it was there!

This was still proving to be a bit hard on the arthritic joints, so I grabbed out the guitars (an Aldi-brand $99.95 steel-string acoustic with an inbuilt pickup and output control, plus my 35-year old Hayakawa starburst colour Stratocaster copy).  When I first started playing, which would have been mid-October I couldn't play an entire song.  My left wrist and the fingers were not up to it and needed to build up.  When I played the first full song, I yelped in tears with the triumph.

Well, the exercise you get from playing guitar is nothing short of aerobic.  I'd be in a lather of sweat.  Eventually I could play for an hour.  I started looking for repertoire.  "Wake Up, Little Susie" by the Everly Brothers is a fine aerobic workout.  "Khe Sanh" is a big effort, same as doing all of "American Pie" (unlike Madonna, who does an 8-1/2 minute song in 3-1/2).

On the weight side, I'm now 105kg, meaning a 15 kg loss (12.5% of body weight), which has been lost in 11 weeks.  This is very noticeable now.  Imagine carrying eight 2kg bags of sugar in two shopping bags, four sugars in each hand.  Big effort to get that back to the car, eh?  I was carrying that much around with me daily.  Anyway, the weight loss is going to be permanent, as my stomach has shrunk.  I'm lucky to get through a single entree sized dish now; I went to a dinner in December for Wyong Drama Group, and had three mounthfuls of the main after finishing the entree.  So the weight loss will continue in 2013 - far better than a resolution - I've alread STARTED doing it before New Year.


My Music Nook

 And on the guitar side:  I'm now a professional Busker.  I went out to Wyoming shops on 5 December and played and sung for about an hour.  Security came and told me to leave.  So I went to Gosford and played and sung for about an hour and a half.  I came home with $23 and I was hooked.  Suggestions were made that I should go to Terrigal, so I went out on the Friday night (7th December), and came back with over $150.  Wow.

After being out now for 12 sessions, my average is $32 an hour.  One night I got $60.69 an hour.  Last time I went out, I got $50 in NOTES - 8 x $5 and a $10!!  I'm refining the repertoire all the time.  I try to only do "money" songs now.  Something someone will hear, think to themselves "I love this song" and are inspired to put in money.  There's a lot of 70s stuff in that repertoire, but I do do Kasey Chambers's "Am I Not Pretty Enough" (which is truly a local song, written at North Avoca) and the Missy Higgins "Scar".  But things like "Mr Bojangles", "Standing on the Inside", "Harley and Rose" and "Sweet Caroline" are more the usual fare.  I do "Cows with Guns" as well sometimes :-).  I can play guitar and sing for over five hours straight now.  The exercise is brilliant.  Plus I've written a song or two which I must do something about soon.

That's my year in a nutshell.  I still get incredible pain on waking up each morning as there's a nerve getting pinched somewhere around the hips.  I am still going to the hospital every day to get an IV infusion (I've had over 150 now at great expense to the taxpayer).  I still can't really sleep in a bed - the Jason recliner-rocker is getting a good workout.  But I've never been happier.  I can't believe how I've been given this musical gift which is now bringing joy to the people of Terrigal, and they're rewarding me for it.

I have a talent, a wonderful thing, 'cos everyone listens when I start to sing, I'm so grateful and proud - all I want is to sing it out loud, so I say "Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing.  Thanks for all the joy they're bringing.  Who can live without it?" I ask in all honesty: "What would life be?  Without a song or a dance, what are we?" So I say "Thank you for the music, for giving it to me".