I have not been back to the doctors regarding my blood pressure status. Not because I am hard of hearing – quite the contrary, especially with my prostate cancer story and how it came about.

I just wanted to change the narrative.

I wanted to get fit both mentally and physically. I now run two and a half miles a day. I am waiting until I can make the run comfortably before I can increase the distance. There are two particular obstacles that make it such a challenge. There is one hill which is a couple of hundred yards long that has a gradual slope which took me a number of attempts to finally complete it. Further along the run is my personal Moby Dick. This is a hill that is shorter than the other hill but in two parts. It steps up into a hill that you cannot actually see approaching cars coming up from the other side. As much as I like running in the road on this particular hill, it would make me early morning Uber road kill.

At first I would only just walk up it. I looked at it and said that’s never going to happen. Eventually I managed about a quarter of it. After a few more attempts I got half way. Once I even made three quarters. I then took a few days off to give my knees a break and found that I was back to getting half way. One morning I thought I had scaled it I thought I had got to the top. Alas when I stopped I realised that there was another step to the flipping thing. It was a bit like scaling Everest in a blizzard and thinking you are at the top and celebrating only for someone to whistle from above and say

“Coo-ie hello. Nah mate the top is up here”.

I digressed. The plan is to increase my fitness and thus bring down my blood pressure as I don’t want to be medicated and I want to be fitter so it’s a no brainer.

I am in a better place than I was the last time I wrote. Still a crippling, more expensive place but a better place mentally at the very least. At the worse I didn’t appreciate the stress I was under. I was beginning to suffer from stress incontinence almost daily and I thought that I would have to wear pads again. Which had me really sad and that would have been a massive setback. Then in the last two weeks it’s gone again. The last week of August brings up a number of important dates. I have a certification exam, I come to the end of my probation at the new job and I have my next prostate cancer appointment at hospital. The latter means I need to start planning when to take my next PSA test and get back on track with the undetectable reading.

I introduced a ‘no mobile’ day, where I would turn off my phone for the whole day. I was looking forward to trying it and just having a completely indulgent ‘me’ day. I have given a handful of people my work mobile number in the case of emergencies but other than that I would be incommunicado. The first week started off fine until I realised that I left my wallet at home – habit as I pay with the phone – and I could picture the phone on my desk where I left it. That resulted in a breakfast and dinner of fruit greedily gathered from the twice weekly office fruit delivery. Learning my lesson I left the phone at home again but had my wallet. This particular evening, I had the monthly meeting with my business networking group. This evening it was in the middle of nowhere on the other side of London. Eventually I got there or so I thought. The address was a mass of scaffold and closed shops.  I got home a number of hour later only to find the meeting had been cancelled in the morning.

“Didn’t you get the text that was sent out to everyone?”

So now I just have the phone free evening, in the safety of my room.

The radio show goes very well, with some great reviews. I have done the generic prostate cancer show and I have done my own personal story. Currently I have been doing a series on ‘Wotless Fathers’. It started off with my own story and then I had some incredible guests who made my personal story seem like happy editions of ‘Little House on the Prairie’. 

I was interviewed live on air during the week for a friend’s local radio show in the afternoon. You can hear it here if you want. This was a first for me as the nearest I had got to a radio interview before, was being interviewed and recorded over the phone for a radio show. Just before the show he asked me if there was anything I was uncomfortable answering. I laughed and said it’s more a case of if you don’t want the answer then don’t ask the question. He also managed to press the hair trigger that is ‘natural remedies’. What followed was a three minute semi-rant about what I thought about all of these people that claim to have a cure. From the wholesaler telling his story based on fart which is then sold on to the people selling it. I hit on my friend that was sold dreams and ideas until when she finally admitted that she was really ill but by then the doctors could do nothing more. I finished up on my absolute latest rant on the stupidest video yet to come up on my Facebook feed. Take a look at the latest cancer cure someone discovered in their kitchen,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLd9HybmSY

I mean perhaps I should not be so cynical. Mr Edward Jenner’s efforts, the father of immunisation, led to vaccinations and the hundreds of millions of lives that were saved. Alexander Flemming discovered Penicillin by accident, that’s another couple of hundred million lives that were saved. So maybe there is a chance that these two nitwits have discovered something that the whole of science has missed.

As I went through the video I just spoke quietly to the screen,

“Where is he then?”

You saved a 79 year old client, that had been sent home to die.

“Where is he?” I was unhappy to say the least.

“So why not, not take the chemo and try a natural approach instead” female nitwit says.

“It works” Mr nitwit talks.

Hmmm hopefully you would not have died in the meantime or the cancer has not spread even further. I shall be polite and not repeat what I actually said to the tv.

Any minute now they are going to wheel out this 79 year old client, sent home to die. He will then perform 100 press ups in front of us. This scientific miracle. Or perhaps he is holding the camera and that’s why he cannot address us..

“Where is he?” I was now poking said screen with my finger and cursing louder.

Oh the Baking Soda must be Aluminium free. I mean just because you are dying of cancer doesn’t mean you should take on extra Aluminium in your diet, course not. I couldn’t work out if the guy was just a short idiot or an idiot on a chair during this momentous video.

“WHERE IS HE THEN?”

“Oh it doesn’t taste bad. That’s all you need to do”. Mrs Nitwit points out again that she is not a doctor and she is not telling anyone to stop chemotherapy. Which is a complete contradiction to what she said a few minutes earlier.

The best bit, Mrs Nitwit left near to the end.

“But if you have a few days left to live, you have stage 4 cancer, this works” Mrs Nitwit exclaims.

It’s this kind of dangerous rubbish that disgusts me and gets my back up so quickly. I channelled my anger into a simple message on the YouTube channel of Nitwits Jenner and Flemming.

“Just a question. The stomach acid will neutralise any alkaline substance that comes into contact with it, rendering this concoction useless. Can we see one or even get the name of this 79 old man or any other that was miraculously cured please??”

Basic ABC, anti-nitwit chemistry. I will let you know if I get an answer.

Spoke to dad’s wife last week. She said that he had been vomiting and there was blood in it. Of course he refused to go to the hospital. I am aiming to go and see him in early September. When I last saw him he was an active, stubborn man in his late seventies. Now he is just frail but still very  stubborn man.

I know it is likely to be the last time that I see him.

It has played on my mind a lot. Is it really better to have an idea of when the inevitable is coming rather than be taken by surprise? No doubt seeing him frail will be one thing and then do I try to get my questions answered again?    

A few days after starting this particular blog I scaled my Moby Dick. I got to the very top of that impossible hill. I punched the air to the annoyance of a couple of manky foxes that scattered but I did it.

I have, so far, failed to repeat it but a Moby Dick isn’t worth half as much if its easily obtainable.