DUVET DAYS

Sign made for the door, which seems to keep people at bay!

Short rations this week. We are having a few duvet days on return from the hospital on Friday. The Doctor gave K the day off on Monday and decided that 35/36 treatments was probably sufficient. K who had been having a rough time was relieved at this, as the bottom had dropped out of his world for ten days or so … or more accurately, the world had dropped out from his …... least said. Thank heavens for Imodium. Each day that passes makes things a little better though but he still needs to adhere to the horrible diet for a couple more weeks.

So, dozens of books, DVDs on the laptop, umpteen cups of tea, two knitted jumpers and three woolly donkeys later, we are very glad to be home for good. HOORAY!

Kind friends have kept us plied with good food and company over the weekend, but we feel in need of a period of P and Q to catch up with ourselves. We will write a fuller blog when we are back in the swing of things.

ON THE HOME STRAIGHT ...

Greek dancing hasn't changed much since Minoan times!

It has been Panegyri this weekend and all the Greeks are holidaying big time. I tried to align it with one of our UK Church Festivals like Pentecost or All Saints, but it is not comparable. The festival is to celebrate the Dormition of the Virgin Mary and rates second in importance to Easter here. The internet stopped working too – a sure sign that lots of people are on line greeting one another by Skype. The weather has been really hot and steamy, sleeping is not easy and mosquitoes are being pursued with the full force of my armoury of plug ins, spray cans and swatters. We are also trying a new product from the UK called “Incognito” which is working very effectively and is a totally natural and organic product. We are impressed so far (and I am not on commission).

While all the rest of the village was celebrating with family, I attacked housework with gusto and got all the road, terrace and floor sweeping done, followed by mops to deal with a few weeks gathering of sand and dust around the house. It looks much better but again, all our terrace flowers have expired without constant attention and we are wondering whether we have got the right sort of compost or earth to keep our garden happy. Fortunately the geraniums seem to be indestructible but the vine was blighted from early on, either by hot winds or rain at the wrong time for the fruit to develop properly; such is life.

The moon rising over the mountains

On Saturday morning, Panormo was heaving with tourists and locals. As all the streets and alley ways are narrow and rustic, the big lorries delivering water and fresh foods after the holiday Friday when everyone comes home to spend time with their families had formed a giant Chinese puzzle of drivers forwarding and reversing into minute gaps available while others shouted “Ella, Ella” and folded and unfolded wing mirrors as required. I nipped out early in the morning for some fresh supplies and got completely boxed in by cars and lorries, so zig-zagged my way to the quayside car park and walked back up to the village, stopping at the little church on the way to light a candle. My brief glimpse of the sea as it glinted in the morning sun was tempting, but I did not have long to stop and I am hoping to catch up with diet and exercise after all the hospital incarceration is behind us. I keep my trainers with me to walk wherever I can around the hospital grounds, but the circuit of the campus or a trip down to the nearest pharmacy is enough on hot, busy roads with ambulances, buses and trucks thundering back and forwards all the time.

Pacific Dreams on the Laptop at the Hostel

As far as the poor patient is concerned, well, we were warned. We have reached the trickiest part of the radiotherapy treatment and poor old K is spending lots of the time rushing to the loo since nothing he eats or drinks – even with the beastly low residue diet seems to make much difference. A prescription of Imodium did little to help and it is now getting hard to judge the right time to make the hour's journey in the car from the hospital to home because there is no place to stop on the way. 6 more sessions and counting ….. thank the Lord for Tena pants and all the home nursing tips I learned last year!

All this means that we have been closeted away a lot and doubly glad to have our TV set with us, because even if the internet is down, we are running through all our DVDs and watching all the Directors' Cut versions and deleted scenes, so that we don't get too weary of the same old films all the time. Effectively, we have missed out on two summers running and I am longing to return to some sort of normality and a chance to celebrate. The five days at the hospital hostel drag slowly and the two days at home intensively washing, ironing, cooking and cleaning form an oddly disorientating routine. I had been up since 5.00 a.m. this Sunday morning making bread, a cottage pie, some pork patties (akin to sausage rolls, but without the resource of sausage meat and without onions which aren't allowed), doing a mammoth pile of washing and ironing before the temperatures became too hot at 40C. Sleep had been impossible so I thought I would start on all the chores early. Having finished the cooking and looking forward to my morning coffee, I started to attack the resulting mound of crocks in the sink.  Meanwhile, the village neighbours were calling to me through the window ... “Where are you today? There are still leaves that need sweeping up on your doorstep!” Ggggrrrr! Kimon explained that I was cooking for the next seven days but I had to show my face with a dustpan and brush, if only for a minute. Being a Greek housewife isn't for sissies.

MOVERS AND SHAKERS

Not from Art School - this is displayed at the Archaeological Museum

The Art School has opened again. Tim and Janice, our teachers have returned to Crete after an exciting year or two off teaching in Peru.

So it was wonderful to take the day off from radiotherapy minding to get home for 36 hours midweek and pootle up to Kastellos to catch up with the Art Class crowd. Some had been in the process of having homes built, others had been having a few health problems too, but it was GREAT to see everyone again while we tackled “dry art contour drawing” with gusto and shared news along the way. The morning ended with large drawings in charcoal and chalk and very dirty hands! Since I have been living, breathing and sleeping homecare, nursing, hospitals, doctors and medical miscellanea for such an age, I was trying to keep a lot of updates low key and avoid boring everybody and straying into the realms to “too much information”. No matter how hard I tried to steer away from hospital traumas, it was nearly impossible, but I did my valiant best.

The weekend was raging hot, but it was lovely to catch up with friends on Saturday for a belated birthday and “hooray-I'm-back-home-in-Crete” meal with our pals Stuart and Kathy.  We also spent an energetic hour trying to release a sparrow that had fallen down the chimney and was flapping about inside the log burner every time I walked past.  This is the moment when you realise that having mosquito netting over all the windows and doors is a bit of a disadvantage.  Our idea was to catch the sparrow in K's fishing net and deposit him outside.  In the event, the bird flew straight through the holes in the net and round the house for a few minutes while we grappled with mosquito screens but quite quickly exited through the "scream door" in the front porch, none the worse for his ordeal.  

We telephoned the UK estate agents about the sale of the house in the UK. It seems that they have loads of viewings but not much real interest. I suppose I will need to get there and make some decisions about making the house more attractive. I thought the last house sale was the one to end all house sales, but it seems not. As I want to return to the UK as soon as the current treatment is done, it is probably as well that things are not proceeding too rapidly and there is somewhere to stay. We are not sure whether K will make the trip or not, but I hope so.

Gregory's coffee shop is a haven of near normality ...

We found a small harbour and cafeneon, not far from Heraklion.  An ideal place for K to
dream about having a fishing boat and to spend a morning.

I got back to Heraklion on Wednesday to the hospital with freshly made bread and a few supplies. Thursday, we queued for aeons to get the definitive low-down on what is happening next as regards radiotherapy. What with the language difficulty and everyone in a rush, K was not quite clear what was happening and we have been given so many versions, we wanted to dig our heels in and get the facts straight. Firstly we were told by the Urology Department that 4 weeks radiotherapy would proceed with hormone treatment, then when we arrived at the radiotherapy department we were told that there would be no hormone treatment but there would be 7 weeks of radiotherapy plus a little chemo. Then the idea of chemo was dropped. Then there was some mention of this session of radiotherapy stopping at the end of the week but differently focused treatment would start at some later date and so on. Confused by all this? Yes, we were too. The Doctor and Radiographer were very defensive about our questions, so we explained that we did need to know exactly what was happening, about the hostel booking and that no one had explained the process to us clearly at the outset. We thought it best not to mention that we never did receive a diet plan either and have been relying on one published by Nottingham Hospital for patients having radiotherapy to the pelvic area. Thank God for the internet and the advice of UK friends; we would have been completely in the dark otherwise.  

Anyway, all the Greek patients wait around for entire days to get seen while English patients are regarded as being a bit of a pain. How dare we have the presumption to waste important people's time by expecting answers to questions? It does not help to see British TV adverts for, say, Macmillan Nurses or Cancer Care where medical professionals seem to have unlimited time for social niceties, one-to-one explanations, help and support “at a time like this” … the milk of human kindness uppermost ... and we ponder whether there is any truth to this representation of care back home or whether we are imagining la-la land. One poor lady we know from the hostel had received chemo treatment in the morning and had been waiting since 7.00 a.m. to see the Doctor. It was now 5.00 p.m. The thoughtfully provided water cooler had run out of cups days ago, so she had had nothing to eat or drink all day waiting for the Doctor to see her. She did not dare leave the queue to miss her turn although she had tried to scoop up water from the wash basin tap in the loo. (I wouldn't fancy it, even when well and healthy). I left K in the queue and toddled off the the shop to get bottles of water all round and bought a few packs of cups on my next trip to the supermarket. This is so normal in a place which is understaffed at the best of times whilst the holiday season can wipe out any of the rudimentary systems in place. From my vantage point, it is very hard to find out what the systems are unless there are kindly other patients to tell you because nobody else has the time. The absence of ONE member of staff is really telling and the poor lone doctor left working this week must be at breaking point.  We have to keep reminding ourselves that the economic crisis in Greece is not his fault and he is at the sharp end of it, like everyone else here.

How all these artifacts in the Museum survived centuries of earth movements is a bit of a mystery!  Hot bath anyone?

Hey ho! All these grumbles were interrupted by my bed shaking like a jelly on Friday morning and after New Zealand and another last year, I knew instantly what it was …. EARTH TREMOR! 34 km deep and 4.7 magnitude. Kimon did not feel it in the basement but the hospital is the only place I have felt them in Crete.

We will be so glad when this is over and we can have a rest from white coats for a good, long time. 12 sessions to go and we are praying that the machinery holds together, since every day of delay costs extra.  

Kalo tiki!