Royal wedding

The church bells are ringing, the blackbirds are singing and people are hanging out the bunting. It's a great day for a lovely wedding.

microlight

Went microlighting - never done it before - at a local airfield here. It's not like gliding because the controls feel different, but it is like gliding in an open top glider like the Baby Grunau I used to have. You can feel the wind on your face and whether you're flying straight or there's a slip wind. You also have to wrap up in a way you don't need to in an enclosed glider, so they lent me this amazingly cosy flying suit, all lined and zippable. You sit behind the pilot (in a glider you sit in front) and you talk via headphones under your helmet, so it's more technologically enabled than is gliding.
It's nice weather now to fly like this, though I don't reckon I'd want to go very high or fly in winter weather.

Rotten Romans

We took two grandchildren (and son) to see the stage performance of The Rotten Romans today at the local theatre. I have to recommend the 3-D visual effects in the second act. They lend you these plastic lenses that polarise the visual effects and then they start the second act with doves flying through the air, and apparently right up into the circle where we were sitting, which was very effective. But more effective was the later hurdling of posts and arrows and other lethal armaments - the children in the row in front of me jumped so much they nearly sat back a row and onto our knees.

New job

I have a job, a new job, a job that starts on Thursday, a job I can do, a job that uses my research skills, my experience of teaching in Higher Education, and my computing skills. How's that!

It's a job that requires me to focus on communications and usability of a web-site, and to bring in more participants, specifically doctoral students as a pilot study round a particular part of the site. It's a part-time temporary job, partly because they're working on renewing the funding, partly because we don't yet know each other, partly because I'm still preparing for my viva, and don't know when that will be, and partly because I want some spare time in case I need extra treatment.

So how's that! I'm cancer-rid, and stitch free since yesterday and I have a job. Go me!

Yeuchy

I feel yeuchy, but I guess all is well.

Team of medics

I saw fourteen medical professionals yesterday:

1. staff nurse, Stef, who took blood pressure, pulse, temperature
   
2. a reassuring junior surgeon who likes her job because she sees people get better and that's what she went into medicine for. She drew in black felt tip pen on my breast, marking it with a big black arrow and the acronyms WLE and SLN for wide local excision and sentinel lymph node biopsy
   
3. a senior surgeon, but not my own, who told me they'd get me on the conveyor belt
4. a breast care nurse who told me that surgery was the first step to recovery and my cancer is oestrogen positive and that means I'll probably get hormone therapy tablets rather than chemo.
   
5. an anaesthetist who wanted to know about my dentures and crowns
6. three people in x-ray to do ultra-sound, insert a wire into the cancer, then x-ray it
   
7. two people in nuclear medicine, one to inject a radio isotope and one to photograph it reaching the first (sentinel) node of the lymph glands
   
8. another nurse to fetch us from one place in the hospital to another
   
9. another anaesthetist or nurse when I walked down to the operating theatre
10. my own surgeon - we made eye contact, not conversation
    
11. three anaesthetists as I went to sleep
12. two different anaesthetists when I woke up, one shouting "It's negative"
    
13. a different staff nurse on the new shift
14. a different breast care nurse who left me with a leaflet on arm exercises

I suppose that they all work together as one team.