Confused, Confuddled and Perplexed!

30th June 2018

Random Computer Gremlins?

LDGA members

Showing my daughter the
LDGA projects for children

I have written a post for today twice already and I am now drafting my third attempt. Think I may have to look into another platform for my little rambles through my and other people's gardens...

We went into Letchworth today for the Armed Forces Day and got my daughter's spectacles fixed. We ended up giving lots to charity and I talked to the group of gardeners locally (ldga.org.uk) and joined their group, giving me access to the local garden supplies trading shop and visits and coffee meetings locally. As well as a group they run for children which appealed to my youngest. All in time for my summer of incapacity...

The garden is filling up with different colours again: blue clematis, purply pink calla lilies and purple spherocephalon alliums (sp?).

My voucher for the local beer shop also bought me a rhubarb cider! I may have to look into home distilling again: rhubarb gin and cider would make use of the huge stumps of rhubarb which either get turned into rhubarb crumble or stewed for putting on our porridge, which is not a hugely successful use of the fruit, if perfectly tasty!

Here's hoping this post won't get lost!

Clematis up in the apple tree

Weeds run amok in our front garden...

Tropical June!

27th June 2018

Overheating

This month has been overhot. I’m British and we traditionally complain about the weather? But my MS has been in overdrive. I have the stress of a mastectomy and the overdrive to try and finish some of the jobs I started after our extension was finished and now will need that shower to be finished or they might not let me home... That was something I hadn’t considered when trying to get things organised: if I can’t step over the bath side I need our new shower to be operational so that they can send me home. I don’t want to end up in hospital any longer than necessary! Blimey! Dan was thinking he’d get the outside of the house painted but the shower room needs grouting!

I nearly forgot? We had a garage sale and made money for charity and sold some brownies and cakes. My books didn’t sell as successfully but I wasn’t wanting to give stuff away. Unread books (mine) still in cellophane do not sell for 20p... I know what I paid for those books originally, even with Staff discount, so I’d feel happier giving them away to friends than professional boot sale operators. The day started out warm but ended up hot and I ended up pink. But think of the Vitamin D overload! I ended up with lots of things to pack away after but I was glad I raised some money and can donate to the MS Society.

Life in a roller coaster!

21st June 2018

Stop the Train I want to get off!

Life feels really hectic at the moment. And I am not really coping, trying to be something for everyone and not managing that very well. Last week was better, I had my mum to help and sort out a lot of my stuff in the house and for the forthcoming garage sale. But really in attempting to take my mind off the looming surgery it’s actually made it seem like I have too many things going on and I am being stretched in all different directions, not least in terms of providing options for keeping the kids occupied over summer holidays.

I want to keep things as steady as they can be but even the plans I want to make cost money and we don’t have much spare.

Everything seems to be happening on the same days and I try as hard as I can to hold up this facade of coping, but I’m not. I have to undergo pretty serious surgery in a month and I am scared beyond words: I am petrified.

I hoped really that I’d go see my consultant today and she would tell us they had reconsidered but she said 4 consultants all thought it had to be done. The cells are going to be consistent through my milk ducts and with the 9cm cyst going across the breast I don’t really have any other options...

I did make her laugh, however, when I described my reaction to the plastic surgeon’s doodles; normally, her patients swoon rather than vomit! 

Please find me superhuman strength to get through the coming months because it’s going to be really hard. I typed this initially with tears streaming down my face. This is HARD. 

All Caked Out in An Open Gardens Odyssey!

17th June 2018

All Caked out!

Path and tree seat were a nice combination.

Slate forming this water
feature makes it curve slowly.

This was a very characterful tree.

On the buses...

Redcurrants behind nets.

Contemporary Peace roses have a red outside.

I never thought it would be possible, but I had too much cake! Starting with rhubarb and ginger, and ending with gluten-free fairy cakes, I was craving something savoury when we hit garden no. 14 which had the barbie on! We went from a small delightful Oriental garden to several enormous gardens quadruple the size of ours, with a few our size in the middle. We saw angular and straight, curvy and circuitous, random and highly ordered. There was something to take from them all, not least the bulbs of a marvellous creamy iris which one lady kindly tried to dig up for me!

There were amazing colour combinations which inspired me to be brave and bold and the crowded borders made me realise what grows here and what combinations would work well. Having mum with me meant that I had the names of things supplied and make me able to list the day’s favourites; orange geums, purple smoke bush or continus, and boy, does my auto corrector not like those, as well as pretty cranesbill blue geraniums and ceonothas bushes.
We managed 16 of the A to Z of Letchworth, and I managed 13,000 steps before I got home and collapsed flat. I've not done over 6,000 for a couple of weeks.

I shall be planting like mad in my new greenhouse x 

In Preop Limbo...

17th June 2018

Birthday week and Granny clearing and sorting our house out!
It's been an eventful and chaotic week in our house and we have sorted a lot of garage sale items. The sale is next week...

Allium

The week of my birthday was not restful but a lot was achieved. I slept a lot because I think the thought of the surgery has hit me for six. Gardening was on the backburner due to other things taking priority, but the kind gifts of family have enabled me to buy some things for the garden and dear friends from far away have treated me to Ardbikie Gin and Gardener's balm for my hands. Somebody is following my blog!
My clearing of a corner for a compost bin was abruptly halted when my husband's car was written off in March... and the cleared stuff had never reached a green bin, but it was collected by the refuse lorry on Thursday. Yay!
A large amount of couch grass beside my rhubarb was cleared and a greenhouse was assembled today! This was my dear husband's attempt to get me growing from seed and saving me a fortune in pregrown plants. My brother gave me an Amazon voucher which has been spent on some of my favourites; blue poppies, chocolate cosmos and seeds and plug plants.
I've watched a lot of the garden shows on TV this year with envy, but our budget and free time is not about that this year.
We will try to enjoy our month until I go for surgery, as yes, I have a preop date the first week of July and Surgery is scheduled for mid-July, a few days before the school suumer holiday. I go to see my consultant on Thursday and I must prepare my question list...

Pondering...

Rhubarb just keeps growing.

A favourite shot I stole
from my Scottish friends...

11th June 2018

Telling people good news or bad?

Reactions to my surgery have left me bemused this weekend. I announced my hospital visits on FB and my blog and old friends by text/phone. We live in such a world that so much of our communication is digital and we feel sure that the message is out there, but this weekend proved it truly isn’t. We really are distant ships (even tankers?) passing in the night.

I’ve been blogging for a year, and I have had over 6000 views of my humble little page but many of my friends don’t seem to know about it, or read it. It has a gardening bent so that probably puts most off (it didn’t get me any tickets to the RHS shows...) and it is populated by flowers on the whole and incomplete captions, but I do try to write about other things and my breast lump was a big thing, taking over my sometimes muddled MS brain in a way I couldn’t have foreseen.

But this has been ongoing now for some time and it feels exhausting when someone says ‘but I didn’t know?’...

And creeping through a number of comments, and something my dear husband also said ‘but you’ve got MS, isn’t that enough?’ Well MS didn’t give me a Get out of Jail Free card, and the MS forums are full of people struggling with a full pack of Jokers, or multiple selections of debilitating and nasty conditions closely linked to their auto-immune systems failing to cope. Maybe there is something that could be affecting us all, but the search for innumerable medications seems to be forgetting to look at the causes, and whether our lifestyles are causing some of the problems?

Lastly, from family largely, there are the ideas that DCIS doesn’t need operating because it is currently benign. I am not going to make this go away by meditation. I don’t have the funds to eat wholly organic or the inclination to subsist on vegetables and grains. Much as I hate being negative, that simply is not the way I - me, myself and I - will conquer this current challenge! Offer me help and support by all means, as I do know we’ll need it.

Love to all you readers out there.

Bees love these foxgloves.

Endearing myself to Surgeons!

9th June 2018

Purple and pretty

Plastics...

I haven’t been so embarrassed before but I’ve never had to go to see a plastic surgeon before. It’s all a bit overwhelming really but I am flustered to relate that I was being doodled to in a charming dr styley doodle in my notes kind of way when I felt my temperature rise and the gorge rise in the back of my throat. Get me flat! A tray was found (not a papier-mache cup) and the nurse was summoned. Oh dear! I had been described how the operation will proceed, and it is proceeding post haste, by July no less.

No hanging about when the cells could turn nasty at any second! I have to think but it’s all thinking about how to make sure my girls are least disrupted... rather than thinking about me? And that was something the surgeon was concerned with as he doesn’t know how the op will affect my MS. Otherwise I am a perfect candidate for the DIEP flap, and he showed me pictures. It was the bit about keeping veins alive when tissue is swapped over that was the point he abandoned his descriptions for overdramatic me. 

Four days in hospital may stretch if I relapse? I am going to have to think about help and what can be done in advance. It will be worse than a Caesarian?  But there is something he’ll do to repair the muscles that didn’t pop back after childbirth.
We need to finish and tidy the house! Need that shower room to be functioning rather than the old bathtub. Garage sale to clear stuff! Oh boy seriously flapping now...

Resting...

7th June 2016

Flummoxed and grounded!

I had a biopsy yesterday. I took my 2 paracetamol in advance as instructed, but no-one can anticipate that the next day will be spent feeling like Anthony Joshua has used you as his practice punch bag for Olympic training! Seriously floored today, and wondering how I managed to also cope with small child needing emergency GP appointment when we returned from QE2 yesterday. I also called off Invigilating for the GCSE today as it would have been pretty distracting if your invigilator conked out?

The outshot of the extreme pummelling by the radiologist, using the ultrasound device I last saw during pregnancy, could be to be sent to Harrow for a specialist scan. I have a rather large cyst which currently is positioned over the ducts where the precancerous cells have been found. Harrow is one of only a handful of hospitals with this equipment. Who knew my diagnosis would see me being sent all over the local area?

I have enrolled my mother to come down and help next week to try and get some things sorted before I end up being sent for reconstructive surgery. Although given the discussions yesterday, I honestly don’t know if my surgeon is going to say anything different should now be considered when I see her on the 21st. The more complex the discussions, the more I need my other half to be present, as MS brain fog/cognitive difficulties are not the best brains to decipher my options when emotional lability takes over... Mum can also help me to make sure my birthday is not about all that technical medical jargon but is about improving my garden!

I also read an interesting piece in The Guardian by an oncologist who got breast cancer. Very honest to say that she has now developed empathy and an understanding of what it’s like on the patient side...

Allium Christophii hiding under the
one perennial I thought I had exterminated last summer....

lawn before trim

And it’s that I did some strimming and tidied up the front meadow. My strimmer will be light enough to use during recuperating I am sure! I filled the mowers collection box on one trim of the front... But allowing mares tail to take over? Never! I’ve chewed up a lot today in the mower. And I shall be down on my kneeler with snippers I promise.

NorthHerts has brought in a garden waste collection fee as I’ve mentioned, and I managed to add the cuttings to my overflowing compost bin. The area I cleared prior to my lump being diagnosed will have to be one of mum’s projects next week. Yes I have roped Grandma into a week of helping with the lure of birthday celebrations!

Heavily pruned last year
and we are rewarded by blossom!

I like it but i didn't plant it?
Or is it a penstemon seed from last summer?

dog rose?