dreadful white stuff

 

This was yesterday. Benign scenery, we walked for a while and it was sort of nice. 

Right now, it's snowing heavily. The more serious snow, the kind that stays on the ground, which is frozen. I grew up with long winters like that and always disliked it, all of it, the skiing, the tobogganing, the ice skating, the snowball fights, the wet mittens, the frozen toes, the runny nose, the amount of time needed to get ready to go out, to come back in. In this part of the world, however, the valley of a very large river, snow doesn't come often and never for long. But the people freak out nevertheless. Schools are closed, public transport shuts down, that sort of stuff.

The strangely good news, the forecast for next week is almost tropical, with temperatures way above even for a normal January. 

I had the pleasant experience of yet another colonoscopy, this was number 10 over a period of almost 20 years. It's not my favourite pastime but needs must etc. I was introduced to a new term, the so-called burned-out stage of this chronic inflammatory disease. Apparently, after 20 years of coping and struggling with inflammation in the various regions of my formerly healthy physical self (ears, eyes, lungs and colon) my body has handed over the large intestine and basically said, there you go, I've done my bit, taken all the drugs, followed all the guidelines, you win, I give up. 

End-stage or “burned-out” ulcerative colitis is characterized by shortening of the colon, loss of normal redundancy in the sigmoid region and at the splenic and hepatic flexures, disappearance of the haustral pattern, a featureless mucosa, absence of discrete ulceration, and narrowed caliber of the bowel.

So basically, the days of careless eating whatever and whenever I want to are over for good. In fact, they have been over for a good while but now I've got it in black and white. I am still eating food, I still enjoy it, but I have become one of these tiresome fidgety eaters, picking and separating food stuffs on my plate. R has started to make cooking for me into an art form, will not accept that I could happily survive on porridge and various other gruel-type things, alphabet soup and apple sauce. 

There's still more diagnostics to come, a couple more suspicious symptoms to clarify, and there's still talk of surgery. This is not something that scares or surprises me. I am an old hand at this.

My sister send me a book to read for distraction in these, as she finds, trying times. You will find this book is very moving and eventually uplifting, she claimed. She is serious. The main character, a successful young writer, is coming to terms with a diagnosis of terminal colon cancer and hides from his partner in a retreat center (scenic, forest, lakes etc.) to search for the meaning of his life, while she, the partner, suffers a miscarriage. When I got to this stage, I skipped to the last page, where she has left him for his best friend and he is moving to a houseboat for his final peaceful days, but with a potential life saving cure on the horizon or something like that. I read it diagonally. You've got to hand it to her, my sister knows what it takes. 

Olaf says hi!