Treatment Is Rough

First of all, a huge thank-you to all who commented on my Blip Day yesterday, would love to answer each one, but not sure I have the patience with the internet repeatedly disappearing. 

A very disturbed night with Mike not at all well, but seems he turned the corner early this morning, and we were grateful for a lie-in after that, and a very slow day since, making various teas and concoctions for him.

Ermelinda made her way up our awful lane after work, for tea and pão de queijo, and a catch-up, this was our gate before she arrived, loved the gold light as the sun went down.

Gratefuls:
- Mike getting better, without having to take antibiotics (he'd already had three courses for his tooth)
- my sister, Leyna (in Texas) diagnosing it as a kidney infection; I was much happier knowing what it was and what to do about it - we really didn't want to have to go to hospital - it's an hour away and jammed with Covid patients, apparently
- Ermelinda arranging a digger from the town council for us, to smooth out the lane, and dig a cistern - hopefully next week...

The Body, ch 21, When Things Go Very Wrong: Cancer, p389-396
Cancer is the malady most of us fear more than any other, yet much of that dread is fairly recent...
Partly this was because people in the past didn't live long enough to get cancer in great numbers…
Today some 40 per cent of us will discover we have cancer at some point in our lives. Many, many more will have it without knowing it and will die of something else first...
... cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission...
Cancer is actually not one disease, but a suite of more than two hundred with lots of different causes and prognoses...
Lifestyle is a huge factor in determining which of us gets cancer. More than half of cases, by some calculations...
Environmental exposures are also a significant source of cancers... More than eighty thousand chemicals are produced commercially in the world today, and, by one calculation, 86 percent of them have never been tested for their effects on humans...
Viruses and bacteria cause cancers too...
One thing is common to all cancers, however. Treatment is rough.