I hate gardening and I hate DIY!
Maybe I'm yet to reach the age where I can look proudly upon a well trimmed hedge or an immaculately wood stained shed or maybe I'm just a lazy sod.
However some tasks are unavoidable hence yesterday I found myself on the roof of a building I have an interest in applying coats of rubber roof paint, it seems to be good stuff, it's definitely water proof, but seems to be turps, white spirit and acetone proof as well.
Not great timing, as yesterday I had the meeting with a consultant and today I had a meeting with my MP as referenced in my last post.
I stopped using lifts many years ago and tend to attack flights of stairs with Vigour. Nova Health care are situated on the 4th floor of St James's Hospital, not a problem, I reached the 4th floor and took a few seconds to compose myself before going through the double door.
“Did you use the stairs?”, the receptionist enquired cheerfully as I approached the desk, I'm clearly not as fit as I thought... I filled in a short form and a medic gestured me to a side room to take my vitals.
He sounded French or similar and when I apologised for the paint on my hands he said that he thought it was a tattoo, which makes me think there must be a lot of seriously s*** tattoos in France.
He put the blood pressure band around my arm and the heart monitor clip on my finger, the dial immediately jumped up to 3 digits and he looked a little puzzled.
“I've just ran up the stairs”, I explained
“Why?” he said accompanied by a Gallic shrug and using a similar tone of voice to super full bladder lady.
He decided to take a blood sample first before taking the heart and blood pressure readings, which by then had returned to normal.
The consultant's office was spacious with a nice view of the city centre. She asked me to relate my story and was checking it against her records. She showed me an image of my prostate from the MRI scan and explained that although I was deemed high risk because of my initial PSA the tumour in my prostate was fairly small, easily locatable, of intermediate grade and she was confident of treating it using Brachytherapy which she specialises in. She went through the planned procedure and confirmed she would also be planning the EBRT. She opinioned that my desire to have the pelvic lymph nodes radiated was borderline overtreatment and that another option would be to treat lymph nodes later if cancer appeared there, This surprised me as I'd not heard of anyone on the forum been told similar and the standard mantra seems to be that initial treatment offers the best chance of something approaching a cure. Perhaps attitudes are changing or perhaps she was influenced by the addition of Abiraterone to my ADT.
I started a thread about Abiraterone in the general section of the forum and will be adding more details there, So short version is that it will be costing via Nova Healthcare £520 per month. This includes cost of the drug itself plus extra testing that will be needed as it has been associated with impaired liver function and blood pressure issues and I was specifically told that it wouldn't be tolerated with my level of alcohol consumption which is approx 35-40 units per week..
...but that's for another day is I haven't even got the prescription yet and I'm off to the pub to watch the first leg of the play-offs, I will post about my meeting with the MP and update the Abiraterone thread tomorrow, hangover permitting.
Edited by member 17 May 2024 at 12:36
| Reason: Not specified