Week 14 – Sat – Sunday 10th Dec – Am I sick?

We have just spent another lovely weekend touring Melbourne and catching up with friends – some of whom we haven’t seen for years.

The problem I am experiencing at the moment is that I feel quite well!  It is a great problem to have but has prompted me to question “am I actually sick?”

In fact Jan has developed some sort of chest infection and is coughing a lot, which obviously makes me nervous but what to do when your carer, hospital advocate and wife ends up sick?  Who is the carer now? I have taken on some of the cooking and caring but have not taken the step of donning the face mask 24/7 – perhaps I should.

I keep waiting for the first signs of Jan’s illness to appear in me but so far so good.

So who is sick – Jan or me?  And what is sickness?

The dictionary tells me it is being ‘afflicted with ill health or disease or affected with nausea’.  Perhaps it is a state that we are constantly cycling in and out of all our lives.  As our parents get older (and ourselves also) we seem to spend more time discussing our ailments, tablets and ill health and less on our good health!

My stemetil tablets have taken care of the nausea so under the definition it is back to ‘ill health’.

And this is where the problem lies, I don’t fell sick – I don’t show any signs of being unwell but the doctors tell me that the leukemia I have will re-appear within 9-12 months if I don’t proceed with the next phase – the Stem Cell (Bone Marrow) Transplant – and they also tell me the transplant will definitely make me sick – nausea, diarrhoea, difficulty in eating, swollen mouth, irritable bowel etc etc.

This is all very confusing!

I would prefer to keep going as is – no headaches, no pain, no nausea, no shortness of breath, eating well, sleeping well and keeping fit with walks and bike rides every day.  Enjoying life.

So can you be sick and not feel it?  Well I don’t think so.  Perhaps unwell or ‘affected by….’ Is a better description of my condition.

I will go with being affected by (I hate the notion of suffering as I am clearly not suffering at the moment) leukemia.

Weekend catchups

We biked along the Yarra to Richmond for our first catch-up on Saturday with Andrew , Jan’s brother (known as Dreamy in our family!!) .  These two are very close and enjoy their discussions – a lot of which revolves around Dreamy’s young family.

We were then lucky enough to catch up with Ruth Bailey who made a special trip down to Melbourne to see us (and slip in a bit of Christmas  shopping I think).

 

The last time I saw Ruth was when we were sailing at Hamilton Island just before my being affected by Leukemia. Her husband John was the white knight who organised the aero-medical flight from Launceston to Melbourne.  We had the time to catch up on lots of family comings and goings.

And on Sunday we took a drive down to the Mornington Peninsula and caught up with an old Sheridan family friend Rod Symmons and his daughter Georgia. Unfortunately for us Rod’s wife Di was enjoying a grandmother/granddaughter weekend away with Georgia’s daughter Mietta.

And after that we motored down to Somers to see some long lost friends Leigh and Andrew Williams.  These two met way back in the 1980s when Andrew was jackerooing on our farm at Condobolin in central NSW.  We had years of time to catch up on so the afternoon went very quickly.  As you can see Leigh is the chatty one!