Five days after chemo

Barts was a building site and as usual a bit airless and overheated. Asha stripped off and started applying liberal quantities of foot massage cream to various exposed parts of her mummy. She even got to hear ba-boom through a REAL stethoscope "just one ba-boom" she assured us, not two or three, just one heartbeat! Needless to say the foot massage was twin Sue's brainwave, who has been here for the few days. Utterly brilliant and covering all the bases - housework, kids, heart to hearts and so much else. When she went on Monday Ali felt quite wobbly.

Two units of blood went in after the three chemo chemicals and it was all done by the early hours of Saturday morning. Any immediate side effects seemed to be dealt with when they eventually got the anti-sickness drug authorised. Someone had forgotten to get a doctor to prescribe it so it was a horribly long two hours with Ali waiting and retching at midnight in full view of all the ward.

5 days later and Ali is feeling frustratingly routinely wiped. No amount of horizontal semi sleeping through the day will energise her. Except yesterday she got up and felt her old self. Then she crashed again with a mix of repeated retching (but nothing actually comes out of her stomach) sweats and ache around her torso.

The children are doing well and keep us focused on the"really important" details of life. Asha is counting down the days to next wednesday when she gets to wear her navy blue school clothes (well nursery actually - but "big school nursery") and so transforms into a school girl. Kirin is surrounded by motherly toddler girls who smother him with affection for two days each week at a parents co-op all day nursery - so he's high!

And me ? (Chris!) - I have even been able to get some community work done as an experiment in "what does it feel like to be doing phone calls which aren't just phone calls to arrange childcare or to talk about... arranging childcare...!"

Me being able to reappear in the Office is all because we are now being carried through the weeks by this remarkable bunch of people in our community which is what makes "urban village" life a surprisingly beautiful and intensely moving experience. We are being cooked for, we are being given time away from our kids so we can be more ready for their full-on energies when they do happen to us at the end of a day! Only shame is that so far most of our time away from the kids Ali has been flat on her back on the bed or sofas (today briefly- on grassy Springfield Park).

Where do we go from here? bone scan on Monday - 5 hours at Barts. Then pre-chemo blood samples given Wednesday then chemo part two on friday - this time we have an appointment time and a chair - no bed. It's supposed to need only a few hours.

It's hard. Ali's week has been a bit of a blur and negotiating the stairs one of the bigger challenges of a day.

But Nell turned up this morning - (87 years tomorrow - happy birthday!) - just to pray and sing a few old fashioned hymns...and that brought us close to God. (It also made us reactivate the other bit of the blogsite - "put your hands together" - see right hand column) ...So life is good - "under the mercy".