Before I begin

It's a bit of a boast, but here goes anyway! I invented the Blog!! Or at least, when I published my very first blog page, I had never heard about blogging myself and I'm fairly certain the term hadn't been invented yet. According to the Oxford English dictionary, the word 'blog' was first used in 1999, while I wrote the text below on 10th April 1998, the day on which the "Good Friday Agreement" on Northern Ireland was signed. At the time, then, there was no such thing as a blogging site, so I published these thoughts on a website that I drew up in primitive and very clunky HTML, fully intending to update the website on a regular basis with stream of consciousness insights into my life and times. I never did.

But for the record, here is the first entry on my website, written on that far-off Good Friday:

This is a paragraph which will in time be part of a project which will set out my current thoughts about life. It is not my intention that anyone in particular, or in general, will see these words, but, should they happen to do so, so be it. It is for me, my first exercise in publishing. I have written for a specific audience before, and I have on a few occasions, written for myself. I have always imagined myself writing for a wider audience, but I have had neither the courage nor the time.
 
The Internet has changed that. Now it seems there is no conceit in writing down my thoughts. For those who browse by, and are arrested for an instant, theirs is the choice. Move on, at no cost, at no embarrassment to either of us, or stay. Indeed, if some of the dark introspection which will follow these opening remarks provokes in the traveller the need to respond, or indeed to communicate, let him or her do so. My e-mail address is attached.
 
Here I am in the middle of a beautiful forest near where we live, in my little car, wondering quite how I got here. My wife and the girls are all riding in a sponsored event, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to see them all on horseback together at the same time for the first time. It’s Good Friday, and there is a real prospect of peace in Northern Island. I feel strangely uneasy. Things are going too well for me and that can’t last. It is indeed a good time to reflect.
 
I like the idea of smoke, mud, rain and manure all mixed with ISDN lines, scanners, laptops and networks. Working from home is a great success for me.
 
It all started back in Windhoek in Namibia, where for the first time, I was able to get home for lunch. There was a quality to those lunchtime encounters in that bright desert sun, that added perspective and value to my working day. On the one hand, I was planning visits to Lusaka to meet freedom fighters and politicians to talk about an independent Namibia, feeling inadequate and frustrated, while my daughter, two years old, was telling me about the really important things in life. And my wife was at her best at lunchtime, despite the morning sickness.
 
I suppose it continued in Boksburg, where our home was in the middle of the factory. Perhaps the agony of the change in South Africa was a little too close for comfort, as the struggle manifested itself in incessant industrial unrest, continuously threatening to break into uncontrolled violence, simmering all around our house.
 
The girls were still too young to understand, but my wife couldn’t get away from it, and I wondered constantly whether I was risking their safety for the benefit of remote shareholders. But even there, the hard reality of the working day interwoven with the intimacy of real domesticity, profoundly affected the quality of my management decisions. It made me more independent, removed me from the ‘group think’ of so many office environments. It made it easier to see the context, the fundamentals forcing all of us to do the things we were doing.
 
It didn’t make the decisions any easier, and when the time came to close the factory, another victim of 'the struggle', the implication for the families of all those redundant workers was all too immediately apparent. As I stood at the gates, and shook the hands of the departing workers, there was a curious lack of vindictiveness in their genuine good wishes.
 
I have often wondered whether the proximity of home and hearth affected not just me, but also the workers themselves. Perhaps they forgave me those awful decisions, because they too were aware of my vulnerability. Perhaps, my own values were that much more transparent. Not much good as a negotiating tactic, but perhaps a little more authentic than the usually sterile work-place relationship. Perhaps they were fatalistic about our trials and tribulations, convinced that we were acting out a necessary evil in the struggle, all much more perceptive and educated than me, caught as I was in an almost uncontrollable urge to apply straightforward management science, imported from overseas, hermetically sealed, a testament to my professional competence. They saw me not as a manager, but as a man with a family, and they could forgive me.
 
Since then, a long, arid period of isolation between work and home. Ten years, three countries, three completely different environments, but a constancy of isolation. In retrospect, there is a similarity about those outwardly very different environments that I hadn’t noticed till now. In all cases, it again comes down to a lack of authenticity, a need to put on airs, to fill a role based on the needs of others, their own perceptions of the right way for me to behave. This led to a curious duplicity, an industrial schizophrenia. I talked to a friend about this. I know that he at least had difficulty seeing me in a work context, because my domestic behaviour seemed so inappropriate to his perception of the sort of manager I had become. He was right, of course, and hence my current satisfaction with the latest arrangements.
 
It is forcing me to unify my two selves. This isn’t easy, and I’m sure there are a whole lot of people who are finding the result a little uncomfortable, but for me, it is a process of discovery, a much deeper questioning of real and present values. I do have to smile sometimes when I am asked about it, because most people feel that that the adjustment to a virtual world is about a loss of personal contact, about the difficulty of combining work and relaxation in the same space, about the technical challenges and about isolation. It is not. It is about an inner journey. It is indeed about ISDN and manure, but not just on the outside. It is about integrating oneself, and I have just started on this journey. It will be a fascinating process, if only for me.

So there we have it! Actually, it turned out to be a rather disappointing journey, at least in the professional context. Those words were written at the high point of my career. Even as I was inventing the context for the first completely virtual, multi-national team in the 100 year history of the major international company for which I worked, in my virtual isolation I was losing touch with my colleagues, the luddites in head office. I remember hearing from an ally about an up-and-coming young turk, who thought my ideas were "completely nuts". He went on to become one of the most senior people in the company and my career plateaued and then, as the cancer took hold, gently declined until I retired....

If only I had really had the courage of my convictions!

But then again, from my present perspective, it doesn't seem so important after all....

Break Over!

Well, well, I do feel a bit of a fraud! I have just been reading through my previous post, written melodramatically, hours after the operation in the dark of night and with the anaesthetic still coursing through my veins, and here I am, barely a week later, just back from a very pleasant walk in the Surrey hills in delightful autumn sunshine, my second in two days! So how was the operation? What operation?

Well OK, that’s going a bit far in the opposite direction. But there is no doubt that the surgeon did originally have me a bit spooked! I’ve just been looking at the list of all the things that could have gone wrong, gleaned from a carbon copy of the consent form that I signed just before the op. Of course some things don’t change, like the doctor’s hand-writing and the fact that the organisation not only still uses carbon copies (!), but also keeps the original for itself (patient, know thy place!). The list of things that could have gone wrong wouldn’t fit into the space available, so he scrunched it all up into an even more impenetrable jumble of illegible hieroglyphics. It’s probably just as well that I couldn’t decipher it all or I would have been even more of a raving hypochondriac.

Not only was I out of hospital the day after the operation, just hours after I wrote the original note, but I was back in to have the pipes removed barely five days later. Even that was a non-event. The Urology Practice Nurse just let the water out of the balloon that held the catheter inside my bladder and then just pulled the tube out of my tummy! She didn’t even stitch the wound! She told us that the body would seal the hole all by itself and all I’ve got to show for it is a small dressing that I need to change on a daily basis (and a new tummy button)!

Of course, some of the side-effects may not show up for a couple of weeks yet, depending on whether there is any damage to blood vessels around some of the organs in the vicinity of the prostate, but I feel sure that this won’t be a problem. With all systems already functioning better than I could possibly have anticipated, I think it is all over bar the celebrating! And the surgeon doesn’t even want to see me again until 9^th November, so he can’t be very concerned!

Which does bring me on to the question of whether the treatment will actually work? My problem is that my cancer was quite advanced when first diagnosed in 2003, with a good chance that it had already moved beyond the prostate itself. It was too late for them to take the prostate out and so I was given a serious dose of radiotherapy and put on indefinite hormone treatment. Things seemed to be OK until earlier this year when my PSA (a prostate cancer indicator) started ominously to rise from a very low base. My urologists recommended HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) as a non-invasive treatment to kill any cancer still resident in my prostate, and I have just been through this procedure.

The trouble is, prior to going into hospital, they did a bone scan which showed an area on my sacra-ileac joint that might be, or might not be, a “hotspot”. The radiologist won’t confirm it and the advice is to wait and see.....

There is no use in second guessing this, so I might as well get on with my life!

This will include getting back to walking; and thinking about other things along the way...

Recovery

OK, so it's 03:30 in the morning and I can't sleep. Not that I haven't slept, just that when I woke, I was caught by a surge of adrenalin, and my thoughts conspired to ban any chance of gently rolling back to sleep. So maybe writing this will help restore some order, or at least bore me back to sleep!

I suppose the first thing to note is that I am not really in pain, though a forensic analysis of the sensations coming from my nether parts has revealed one or two minor observations which are possibly worth mentioning. Just as the surgeon predicted with ominous certainty, the overriding sensation after the surgery was one of an overwhelming desire to pee, coupled of course with no possibility of relief, because my bladder is connected to the outside world by plastic pipe and logically there isn't any pressure in there at all. It's just an illusion, possibly, and forgive the hyperbole, a bit like the sensation amputees must have when they feel pain from the non-existent extremities of a lost limb. Modern surgery tricking the ancient brain... But this early morning, already the sensation has abated. I am much more comfortable. Drugs or time? Does it matter?

Even so there is stuff going on down there. I reflect now on the look in the eyes of one of my urologists when he warned us that this is a “serious” procedure. I suppose I couldn't help being seduced by the idea of the “constructive interference” of the ultra-sound waves into thinking of this procedure as less invasive than old blood-and-guts surgery. On reflection though, he was in effect frying the cells in my prostate, albeit with exquisite precision, in a manner not unlike using a microwave to cook a piece of steak; just using ultra-sound waves instead of electro-magnetic waves. Hardly unintrusive.

Still, on with the journey. On the surface, not too much discomfort at all. I had rather dreaded that with pipes coming out of me, every time I moved there would be pain, but they trussed up the interface with such a welter of dressing work that nothing much moves at all, and so no problem there; at least not yet! But as I journey much deeper, I can certainly feel that a battle has been waged! There is a sort of lump of sensation right in my core; not pain, not heat, just discomfort. I'd have difficulty locating it in 3-D, but it is there, despite the absence of nerves. I can easily live with that and no doubt it will anyway pass.

The nurse came by in the middle of the night to empty my bladder-bag. She told me I had passed one and half litres which was “good” and that the colour was much “better” (i.e. less bloody). It amazes me how quickly one's dignity descent allows one to talk so pragmatically about such intimate things, but then again, this isn't the first time. And it hardly compares with having a baby. In every sense that I can imagine, this whole procedure is trivial by comparison, with the exception of novelty. Perhaps that is the only reason that writing this makes any sense at all.

That and the characters. I do find it interesting that there are these little pockets of expertise building up around the various centres, where intrepid surgeons are exploring ever-newer techniques. Always I am struck by the relative youth of the consultants, as if they cannot possibly have the experience to deal with the uncertainties implicit in the novelty of their trade. But then again, that is of course why they can do it. I warmed to the fellow who did this operation; so much less James Robertson Justice and much more  a cross between Jude Law and Johnny Depp. He has a slightly naughty sense of humour, which is engaging and reassuring, though on reflection, I can't think why.

Which brings me back to the start of this reflection. I suppose the source of my sleeplessness has little to do with physical discomfort. It is clearly much more related to the unpredictability of this novel procedure, coupled with the dawning realisation that what they were doing down there is fairly brutal. More Flanders' trenches than shock and awe, no matter how modern the equipment. And so, what is the collateral damage, and how much accommodation will be required in my thinking and way of life? And beyond all that, there is still the issue of the ambiguous, potential hot-spot on the bone scan, which, if real, may render all this peripheral, after all.

But those are dark thoughts, and they are to be banished with irritated vigour. One step at a time and now I'm going to listen to something stimulating on internet radio. After all, the good thing about being tied to a bed is that I can sleep when I feel like it, not just when it's dark!