Still here

(Excuse typos this is not going to be much proof readong)

Without looking at the date of the last post I know that it has been a couple of months since I last posted. There are a few reasons, trying to cut down on what I am doing and spend time not looking at a couple of million liquid crystals (not really working), being exhausted and just really not in a place to write.

The last is strange really, it should be a good way of releasinhg the tension and yet everytime I have sat down...  Nothing, staring at a screen or looking at words that have been written and just thinking they are nowhere close to how I am feeling and what I need to say.

We're all OK in this house. The little guy is doing well, and still letting us sleep in a way that annoys my colleagues with children (for some reason complaing that he woke us up at 7am on a saturday morning is not appriciated by those people who count 6am as a lie in). Physically we are all in tip top shape.

My op has been delayed, yet again, for planning reasons unknown. The care given by the team at the VU is great, the planning sucks beyond belief. I have decieded that I'll beleive I am having the op when I am the table and not before - it's hopefully healthier than getting worked up (in a good way) only to be told that, nope, whilst we said August, very maybe September we are now saying very maybe October, but we don't know.

Work has settled down. I wasn't happy earlier and nothing is going to change the cause. But, I still love my job, I'm just no longer prepared to make myself ill for it. As I said to my manager great for my work life balance (I now try to work my 36 hours and not a minute more, rather than the 46 to 50 I was doin) and Christmas is going to be spent (outside of those 36 hours) with family, not firefighting major problems for 18 hours a day for 9 days in a row, as it was last year. This has also been said to my manager.

But those are not the issues either.

My dad is very sick. He was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year - about 2 weeks after the little guy was born actually.

It was caught early and should not have been a major problem. But it has been. Delays in getting the operation (more hospital planning screw ups) meant that it had spread locally before they could operate. They got everything, but it meant chemo.

And for more than a week now he has been feeling like giving up as the chemo has reacted very, very badly with him. In the words of the doctor who stopped it, it was killing him. He is now in hospital with a bad infection trying to fight both that and the remains of the chemo that has not yet flushed from his system.

And it's a rollercoaster. One day he is doing great, reading hundreds of pages of a book, and the next he is non-communicative and scaring the living daylights out of my mum.

The only good  news is that the professor at the hospital has said the emergency cat scan he had is clear. The bad news is that the oncologist still wants him to have more chemo and we don'tknow why, and dad is refusing it because of what the last lot did.

It's a very strange feeling, I look at the little guy and am so happy, and then I have this as well where I am crying on my keyboard.