Progress report

I've had a good day. My meditation went especially well this morning. I've dropped 4kg in the past month and my pants fit better. I had a great breakfast of the world's most delicious muesli and spent the day meeting and talking with interesting people. I had a cup of coffee in a very pleasant cafe with my friend Richard. I've felt ridiculously fit and well all day. Preposterously well. Absurdly, egregiously, farcicaly well. There was a fleeting moment of anxiety as I headed into Mr. North's office but it was dispelled somewhat by hearing him conversing with his nurse immediately before the appointment. He was describing a Monty Python skit and laughing like a drain. He wouldn't do that if he had to shortly put on the black cap before passing sentence on me, would he? No, apparently not. His news was good.

I have some measureable PSA but it's now heading down into margin of error territory. Over the past few months it has a) stopped growing and b) started to drop. An active cancer doesn't do that. An active cancer doubles and keeps on doubling, and the doubling rate is what you have to watch out for. Mine has shrunk because of either the radiotherapy or the lifestyle changes or both. What's important now is to keep on bolstering my immune system in order to see the nasty little blighter off for good. I will kick him when he's down and keep on kicking. I will flood that little dark place with light and keep on seeking the light.

This morning I thought a bit about healing and cure. They aren't the same thing. For a few weeks now I have known that I am healed but I wasn't sure whether or not I was cured. Today I have good reason to believe I am both.

For this and for all I've learned from it this past year, thank you, thank you, thank you, my Lord.

Comments

Brian R said…

Thanks be to God.

1 April 2009 at 17:39

Dan Gurney said…

Yeah, and hooray! That's good news.

1 April 2009 at 18:35

Anonymous said…

Yay, that fabulous news Kelvin!!
God is awesome!!
Arohanui - Biset

1 April 2009 at 21:02

Alden Smith said…

What blessed news indeed - so happy for you Kelvin :-)

1 April 2009 at 23:01

gregcarroll said…

Brilliant news!
If we don't see you in person before the trip ...have a much deserved fantastic time. I know Clemency is sooo looking forward to it.
Greg n Jane

1 April 2009 at 23:05

Kate said…

I'm feeling happy reading this. It feels good to me that the world is likely to have you in in for a longer rather than a shorter time :-)

3 April 2009 at 14:39

Anonymous said…

I can't imagine better news than that you are well.We all have so much to learn from you and with you. Take life by the scruff and go with it, enjoy every moment, every step as you complete the tasks ahead. My first real prayer was thank you, thank you Lord on a wonderful beach one sunny morning - thank you Lord for all your miracles in our lives.

Craig.

6 April 2009 at 19:08

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire. Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...

Kindle

Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on. I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...

Available Light

Search This Blog