Fame at last!

This blog has been mentioned in a website! Actually, better than that, it's a cancer charity site (http://brainstrust.org.uk/). Do go and have a look - there's lots to see and some very worthy aims too. I'm meeting the founder of the organisation this week and I'm really looking forward to it. I'm hoping that I'll be able to provide some help in some way or other. I found the organisation after reading an article in ThisIsLondon about a girl with brain cancer who was/is going to have her benefits reduced considerably: http://tinyurl.com/lze94n. The story in the article is terrible and is well worth reading. The irony of the decisions made by the agency, as far as I can tell, is that she looks okay to work - and this may be true. But that doesn't mean she's going to find a new job easily - if at all. That's me above, there, and as you can see (I hope!) I don't look ill - quite the opposite - but as you'll know if you've been reading this blog, I've got brain cancer too. I'm fortunate enough to be employed at the moment so I haven't had to worry about benefits and I'm very glad that I don't have to. I'm not sure what a potential employer would think about things if I told him what my current condition is.

So Lisa, the lady in the article, has my complete support and I just wish I could help her in some way.

I've had lots of complaints

...Apparently I'm letting my huge fan base down because I haven't posted recently. Anyway, there's not that much to report, which is good. I feel fine, I've not had a seizure for a while now, which is great, I'm back at work, which is beneficial, and at the moment, Andy has decided that I don't need more MRI scans until November, which is really good.

On the down side, I do have two irritating side-effects. The first is my memory. It was never good, even at the best of times, but it's really embarrassing at times now. I've taken to carrying a notebook and pen or a little voice recorder or other things so that I can record what I discussed with someone else and note it down somewhere. It has saved me a lot of trouble.

The other side-effect is my sleep pattern. It's still being less than perfect most of the time and I find I'm waking every hour or less during the night. This is usually after midnight but is most disturbing as it can take me some time to get back to sleep again. What's worse is that I find I'm nodding off in the office in the afternoon! It's just as well I'm not operating lethal machinery...

I'm going to seek advice from Andy or Charlie about this.

Time flies

There's a wonderful literary word which means using a word in the way that plays with the content of the sentence to give conflicting meanings. It's called "zeugma". The reason I thought about that word was because of my title for this blog entry. There's a well known joke sentence which states that: "time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana." It's believed that once a computer can understand what that sentence really means, we are close to artificial intelligence...

Anyway, I just spotted how long it's been since I posted something so I thought I'd better. I'm not dead, as you can probably now gather. I've been a bit remiss about posting things because I've been quite busy. I've gone back to work and I seem to be doing okay. I've had good news from the Neuro and co and although the last MRI scan still showed lesions and little white patches which intimate cancer, this is no surprise and certainly not anything that Andy is worried about. I don't have to have another scan for 6 months.

And that's it, really. My sleeping pattern is still somewhat disturbed but I think that may have as much to do with the mugginess of the weather at night at the moment as much as anything else.