a much-needed holiday

Have been quiet for a while - mainly because was being a whirling packing dervish and feeling very frazzled from CT scans, chemo and the like. Turns out a week in the South of France is exactly what every cancer patient needs - it should be available on the NHS.


The NHS was a little worried about my holiday and wouldn't let me go without some Neupogen injections and lots of antibiotics and antivirals just in case I got some bacterial infection or shingles etc etc. Fortunately none of them were needed, although I did get slightly concerned about the possibility of cellulitis after 11 mosquito bites.

This was a very last minute holiday - I must thank the other Caroline (my godmother) for telling me to just book the flights and see what happened with CT scans, rather than waiting. So I booked the flights in her kitchen and did some jiggling of CT dates (and begging). Thus I ended up on a fantastic sun-soaked week with Caroline and Julia! True to form, we ate LOADS of yummy food: below is steak with chips and mushroom and ratatouille. And red wine - of course.


Other food of note is gluten-free pizza (below), garlic bread, lots of risotto and an abundance of salad and fruit.

And a lot of frappuccinos...


To look at these photos you'd think we did nothing but eat.... SO NOT TRUE! We also sunbathed (with suncream - and I wore my hat all the time so no scalp-burn) and swam and read lots of books - Caroline even finished her ECG book *cough*geek*cough*. We went for a walk AND we did sit-ups and press-ups (I am pathetic at these). Fortunately we got out of doing anything too much like exercise by using the chronic fatigue and cancer excuses, phew. Seriously - LOOK at this improbably long swimming pool:

So thank you very very much to the two Taylor ladies for a wonderful week which I really needed :D am now tanned and chillaxed - and miraculously no fatter. Odd that.

(and this is the state of my hair at the moment - falling out a bit but still there)

I shall do a proper blog post later about - erm - Hodgkin's and PET scans, but right now I am supposed to be meeting Jess in town (for yet another visit to Chocolate Utopia) so au revoir mes petites choux-fleurs! (as Minti would say). Mwah mwah.