Hello!

Missing in action again for ages. I actually can't believe its been that long. I'm SURE I wrote more recently than that. . .
Anyway, my best news is that I am still well enough not to have the dreaded drug treatment. I saw my consultant on Thursday and she agreed that I could still postpone starting it. I've been finding out a lot more recently, as there has been some publicity about the NHS refusing to fund new drugs for Renal cancer. The problem is that even these new whizz-bang drugs don't CURE the cancer. What they do is offer more people longer in a stable condition. The aim at the moment seems to be to find some sort of cocktail of medication which will turn RCC from a terminal condition into a chronic one, like they are managing to do with AIDS. You don't get better, but you can live with it for a long time. Currently available drugs can give 15% of patients some time and a very few of them 5 years. The new drugs can give 70% a better chance - doubling the current length of survival. These drugs are currently VERY expensive (£500 a week FOREVER), and there is no long-term survival, which makes it a bad bet for NHS funding.
Now I don't object to the Government deciding that it is too expensive for the country to keep me alive. What I DO object to is that they are too craven to tell me so, leaving it to the local PCTs to decide, so that SOME people DO get NHS funding, and some don't, and it's the poor bloody doctors who are forced to make the decisions, not the elected politicians. It seems to me that there should be centralised funding for drugs like this which are going to be expensive because they are still carrying their research and development costs - and in my case, because I've got a comparitively rare form of cancer, so there will never be real "mass production" of treatment.
I'll get a scan in August and we'll take it from there. Meanwhile I pass two milestones - my 60th birthday (9th June) and the third anniversary of my diagnosis (21st July), niether of which I was expected to reach. That's the bonus for being a stroppy bitch!!
I have actually been doing some crafting, too, and I really will drop by soon and post some pictures. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - you've heard it all before! I'll show you. . .maybe.