WOYWW 330

What’s on my workdesk this Wednesday? As usual I’m between projects! – so it’s a dumping ground. Well, quite a tidy one really – I just dumped the stuff on it last night when I was going to bed.

Working round the desk: top left you can see the first card in my 2015 Card Factory. Next to that, at the back, is a pile of pieces of packing foam that came in the post with a parcel the other day – I shall be blogging about this in a day or two if you can restrain yourselves in your curiosity! The little green scrap of card beside them is part of that.

In front of that, the Turkish Delight box no longer contains Turkish Delight unfortunately (several years ago it became part of Shoshi) and it now contains my drawing pens.

Beside that is my new Florabunda Zentangle book that I won on Neil Burley’s blog and on top of it are the drawings I have so far done. Again, I will be blogging about these in due course. I am having such fun with this, and when not feeling too well but well enough to do something, this is something I can do from the comfort of the recliner.

As I can with my adult colouring – on the right of the desk you can see my latest effort (not my favourite picture but quite fun to do), and again I shall be blogging about that.

Beyond that, on the right, are the purple scraps from the purple goodies I made for our neighbour recently. I’m about purpled out now, and it will be nice to move onto some other colours, much as I am a fan of purple!

Health Update

I saw the oncologist as usual last Thursday, the day before my chemo treatment (and also went up to the unit to have my usual bloods). She was, as always, most concerned about the peripheral neuropathy, a side effect of the chemo which has to be carefully monitored because unchecked, it can lead to permanent nerve damage and lifelong symptoms – something we obviously want to avoid. She said that unfortunately the only way of mitigating it was to reduce the chemo dose and since this has already been done twice, I didn’t think it would be possible again. However, in view of the fact that I only had 2 treatments to go, and research shows that people undergoing chemo post-surgery as a mopping-up operation do just as well on a reduced dose at the end as those who do not, she proposed reducing the last 2 treatments by 50 percent! I was pretty amazed at this. So this is what happened on Friday, and all went OK.

Saturday I didn’t feel too bad because of the steroids, but on Sunday and Monday I felt terrible and fairly demoralised, thinking that the reduced dose wasn’t making any difference. The peripheral neuropathy was much better, though, and I soon left off my gloves. I was able to do a few short stints in the studio over the next few days which pleased me a lot, and by yesterday I was feeling a lot better. OK, I feel spaced out, weak and shaky but not so desperately poorly in a general sort of way as I would normally be feeling at this stage in the cycle.

I am highly delighted to be feeling so much better, and able to do some things! I am now looking forward to feeling a lot better after my final treatment on 16th October, and getting back in the kitchen again and starting to look after my hubby after all this time that he’s been looking after me! He has done a great job but I feel the time rapidly approaching when I want to start cooking real food again instead of ready meals, and sorting the kitchen out!! I expect the resumption of my domestic duties will pale after a while but how I’m feeling now about resuming them, now the end of all this is in sight, has to be a good thing! I am feeling very upbeat and positive.

Have a great creative week, everybody, and happy WOYWW.