Coming home

C finally had her procedure on Friday, and according to the consultant, it went as well as they could have wished: C is certainly feeling, and indeed looking, much better for it. They fitted two stents in the 'biliary tree' (which I had not heard of before) and another, four inches long, in her duodenum. They have listened to C, have taken in account her two wishes to see out this summer – should it ever begin – and never to have to come in to hospital for further restenting. The position of the duodenal stent means they will not be able to replace the biliary stents should they fail again, so they have taken a belt and braces approach to the latter.

C is staying in hospital over the weekend as they wean her off the syringe driver that has been delivering round the clock anti-emetics and morphine, but the current plan is for us (my friend Phil is coming to stay at Sandford tonight) to go and break her out after tomorrow, at which point I'm hoping the medical stuff will be replaced by more pretty pictures...

another bulletin

C did not have her procedure on Wednesday because the equipment broke down. This means that three times in the space of the past six days, she has been kept nil by mouth for up to 12 hours or more (that's no water either, not kind for someone with a disease that leaves her dry-mouthed at the best of times) without any result. The hospital has simply failed her in their duty of care, despite the best efforts of the nursing staff and some of the doctors, and after her experiences there this time and last time, I'm convinced she will never go in again.
She was due to be the first patient treated this morning, and we hope she will be back home by Monday at the latest.

bulletin

Just popped home to water the plants (as if they need it in this weather...) get more clothes, cancel things, etc. They are going to replace Chip's biliary stent today in an endoscopic procedure, and I hope do something about the stricture on her duodenum which is the reason she's puking so often: I don't know whether this stricture is caused by the growth of her pancreatic tumour, which suggests a second stent just below the pyloric sphincter, or through inflammation of the pancreas as a result of an infection in the bile duct, which will be reversible with antibiotics.

In better news, there's no sign of growth in the secondaries she has on her liver, and no new lesions. All being well with the procedure today, she should be home by the weekend, to enjoy the monsoon.

What we did on our holidays & health bulletin

Yes we did have a lovely time in Hope Cove, until the last night, when C started to be very sick.  We had to get the duty doctor out to give her a stabilizing shot, and the giddy thing we would do on our 30th anniversary (see previous entry) turned out to be simply driving back home. She made it, though, without mishap, then virtually immediately began throwing up again. Since then she has been better for brief periods, but was significantly worse on Wednesday and yesterday, and she is now back in the Royal Devon & Exeter hospital. She was slated for an endoscopy procedure today, but was too ill, and will have it tomorrow: it's possible her stent has been blocked, or that there is an unspecified obstruction in her small intestine close to the point it leaves her stomach.

A week ago today we were both enjoying what we agreed was the best day's holiday we had ever had, drowning in beauty on the Devon coast: today, in the hospital, the conversation turned on euthanasia and funerals.

Her treatment has been complicated by the Retard Family's bunfight and attendant holidays, which have also cut off all local bus services from Saturday lunchtime to Wednesday morn, so I'm going to stay in my son's house in Exeter from tomorrow (he's off to Kent to house-sit for his Mum and Dad), meaning I'll have no access to the internet or my home phone for a while.

Anyway, here's some of the best of the 200-odd digital photos I took in the two days (as well as two 36-exposure films).

Our room had a balcony overlooking the beach

Hope Cove from the headland. The hotel we spent the first two nights is the large building on the right: on the third night we switched to one at a similar height on the opposite side of the Cove, which boasted a 10m swimming pool that we made full use of - C is an excellent swimmer

Here's one for those who wonder why I make so few appearances on this blog

Here's my darling on the South-West Coast path, sunning her knees and enjoying the lovely,
if incongruous, sight of an exposed headland smothered in bluebells

What though my wingèd hours of bliss have been,
Like angel-visits, few and far between

Romantics cant resist a clifftop garden, glittering sea and the odd wild rock (see below)

sweet dreams, darling girl, sweet dreams

scenes from the rollercoaster, part 93:

Yesterday, Chip felt awful, unexplained and immovable pains, nausea, hot and cold shivers, an inability to eat, deep misery – C dreading that this presaged another hospital bout, rather than the holiday she had planned for later in the week; we went to the GP in the late afternoon and got a broad spectrum anitbiotic for what she (the GP) thinks might be a urine infection underlying all the other symptoms, and C had a quiet evening zonked on prescription meds (most anti-nausea medicines seem to be small quantities of heavy-duty sedatives and anti-psychotic drugs) falling asleep in front of recordings of Homes Under the Hammer.

This morning, she suggested we take a walk up the hill behind our house, to the oaks where her ashes are to be secreted, and she positively zipped up the slope, without aid of sticks or asthma medication; we saw several hares, and a roe deer doe, and admired the wonderful view over the village and the extraordinarily blessed and verdant valleys and hills in which it nestles, with that special Devon colour combo of red earth, lush green and clear blue and white in a sky rinsed by the Atlantic, and felt privileged to be alive and here in the infinite now. 

the old oaks

Then, again at the instigation of the valetudinarian, we extended the venture by climbing to the top of the field, and over a fence into the grounds of Creedy Hall, the stately(-ish) home on the other side of the hill, where we walked through the Rookery Wood that tops it, admiring the natural gardens of mossy tussocks and nodding campion, shuttlecocked ferns and starry stitchwort, listening to the birdsong pinging down from above, all pleasures heightened by the thought that we were basically bunking in to someone's garden – although with C parading around in her sapphire pendant, cashmere and £2,000 shoes, I don't think any would have dared challenge her. It was glorious

Dressed for the country. The shoes are bespoke, and made from reindeer leather recovered
early in the 20th century from a Russian ship that sank in the late 18th century

And on the way back down the buttercup-strewn hill we stopped at the oaks, and Chip nominated the very hole where she wishes her remains to reside (and those of Kezzy, too). Neither of us believe for a moment that she will be able to appreciate the view once comminuted, but both agree that it's a fine and fitting place for her to end.

Later, we planted out some salvias that arrived in the post today, and some sunflowers C had raised from seed, had a fine outdoor lunch of smoked salmon and creamcheese on Finn Crisp rye biscuits, with cracked pepper and lemon; then I came in and wrote this, with moistened eyes, but, this time, not tears of sorrow.

Tomorrow, once we have taken possession of some oxycodone patches (C keeps throwing up the slow release tablets) we are going to the quaintly and ironically named Hope Cove, to stay for three days in a hotel on a low clifftop above a sandy beach looking out westward over the sea towards Cornwall: the weather forecast is for sunshine and 25°: we'll probably be home on Sunday, but as that day marks our 30 years as a couple, we may just do something giddy...

That's enough pics of C in the Rookery

Oh go on then, just one more, framed in campion

The way home

moving on

As many of you will already know, our dog, Kez, died at 9 pm on Sunday 6 May, aged 14. He had been failing for a long time, with recurrent bouts of inflammation in his gut, and went into a swift decline over the weekend: his refusing food – an unprecedented occurence – told us he was on his way.

K-Paws in his sleek, plump prime, complete with ginger eyebrows

And of course we were both heartbroken, each in our way, but even in the middle of that (or, to be more geographically precise about it, the middle of the beginning of it), we were both aware of pressure lifted: not just the background worry of a sickly animal in the house, but also of the various strictures he put on our day, in terms of feeding, pilling and walking him, of trying not to step on or fall over him (he had a lifelong penchant for plonking himself down next to people's feet), of having our walks curtailed because he didn't want to go or was simply Not Allowed.

So, in line with General Policy, we made points of getting the yellow book so we could visit some local gardens over the summer, going for walks with each other (or on our own) rather than with old, tired dog, and C surprised us both by booking a holiday – three days at the end of next week – in a hotel looking west over the sea in the quaintly-named Hope Cove. When we first got K in 2003, when he was five, he was chock full of Mainwaringish bristling bluster and hair-trigger barks, and couldn't be taken anywhere near a hotel because of his vigorous attempts to repel, with bleeding eardrums, all who dared to come within ten feet of our room. We could have taken him in recent years, I guess, as deafness has been his friend in the repelling-boarders line of his doggy duties, but we got out of the habit. Anyway, the three days end on 27 May, our 30th anniversary, which is nice.

Anyway, here's my darling looking gorgeous and feeling hugged in cashmere, enjoying the local walk:

C thinks she looks like her mother here, but I have to squint a whole lot harder to see her, rather than the lovely woman for whom I fell so hard 30 years ago

The way home. Every now and then, everything's right about a snap

The loss of Kez meant that C was without a pet of any kind for the first time since she was in her 20s. And then we noticed that a wren had built a nest in the broken-down brick 'shed' at the top of the garden, or at least we assumed so, because it would fly in and out of holes in the wall (one just under the eaves, the other at ground level) carrying grubs and insects in, and faecal sacs out. It seemed completely unfazed by our presence on the new, extended patio/rockery/thingy I've been making, and we watched it for ages. It was not long before C began to refer to it as 'our' wren.

Our new pet

new, extended patio/rockery/thingy

Meanwhile...

Anyway, so I had it in my mind to write a follow-up to the last post, called 'Garden Garden' about our love for and delight in the gardens we have made, the closest thing to children we have had together, but the more I thought about it without actually sitting down and doing it, the more ambitious and sweeping it became (much like the gardens themselves did, come to think of it), and what my meagre readership (lookship?) demands is news and photos of my darling, not conceptual art nor tales of horticultural derring-do: so...

The first eight or ten days after C got home from the hospital were magical, as the blissy weekend described in the last post turned into a week or more of sweet unseasonality, with the pleasures of spring and summer colliding in a kaleidoscope of sun-kissed colours and textures, and we spent all our time outside. A day or two into her convalesence, C was to be found in the time-honoured pose of several generations of her female line, with her arse appearing from a flowerbed.

 Her determination to eradicate all traces of dandelions from the beds, along with her decision to get some wear out of previously saved-for-best outfits – as well as favourites from her youth, once grown out of, into which she now slips sylphily – has made for some lovely sights in the garden.

Sadly, though, she finds it increasingly difficult not to overdo it, so she feels exhausted and has to take to her bed: she has also recently had problems with sickness associated with bending or twisting her body, and it's almost a blessing that the rain has set in: the dandelions certainly think so. Despite the decline in the weather, on the use it or lose it principle, she still takes Kez out every day for a stately totter down the lane and into the Millennium Green, albeit rarely much further: but that's down to the dog, 14 yesterday and still a source of much joy (as well as an inexhaustible well of stinky farts) to us both, rather than any lack of will to enjoy the countryside on C's part.

a walk in the woods

You will feed me - look deep into my eyes and relax – you will get me kibble...
Hypnodog rides again

With the weather poor, and C struggling to accomodate a new regime of painkillers while still maintaining a semblance of consciousness for the majority of the day, we've been spending a lot of time in the bedroom. This is no bad place to be, with views of wildlife through the window

Roe deer grazing under the old oaks at the top of the hill: C's ashes will be buried under one of these
venerable beauties – the oaks, not the ungulates

and no shortage of flowers inside:

spring stalwarts – never knowlingly undervased at our house

thank you Susan

Oh, and last  weekend,  we went into Crediton to visit the farmer's market and in the space of 20-30 minutes, no less than 10 people, mostly strangers, complimented C on how well and gorgeous she was looking, which of course she was...