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.

Who can stay miserable on a glorious day?

This is inside our shed...

Mid May 2018

And it’s threatening to be hot, hot, hot!

I have finally spent some time in the garden - at my daughter’s school they have great big raised beds for every class, and I helped the kids weed for all of fifteen minutes but I made my daughter very happy. Nothing like that for lifting my melancholic gloom.

I came home and decided that must be what I spend at least an hour doing, but I get home and I get distracted from the task I set out to do. The garden is getting cleared on Tuesday. A helpful company I have discovered through our gate man (yes we have terribly sturdy new gates from a local carpenter, Michael who I also found online at Next Door dot com!) called Love Your Junk is coming to clear the puddle of stuff outside the house. Yay,yay, yay! Life is moving, some of it in the right direction.

We have beautiful acquilegias coming up all over, the bulbs I got last year have been amazing and I need to plant the two trees I got in the supermarket. I can’t be gloomy!

The news is full of Royal Weddings and one wonders what nasties the government is slipping through? It’s difficult to find out when the mainstream press is owned by far flung billionaires with their own oh so money grabbing agendas. People with MS sometimes hit the headlines but often for the wrong reasons. The half? sister of Meghan Markle has MS but she is not coming to Windsor. She has made her own headlines but I haven’t read any of it - it’s not going to be something I am agog about.

I’ve also planted some things today. We got some bulbs at Knebworth and a couple of trees from Morrison’s (well we have lost a horse chestnut so we can grow something quite big.) I’ll probably get queried over my placement of the trees but I am an organic gardener - I grow things where I like!

And after gardening I had lunch with a fellow MS Warrior who has gone through a recent lumpectomy at the same hospital as I attend. We talked for ages and it’s good to have someone watching out for you who has knowledge in common. We are similar but different. Which is what makes for good shared experiences. I almost missed the bus, but all was well chez moi.

Side gate

Alliums were added...

Side gate

Things are still emerging from the earth.