Happy New Year

No blogs since the hospital. Sorry. But forgive us, we’ve been living life.

The last moments at hospital were incredibly emotional. Minutes after writing my last blog I had my tubes pulled out and we were told we could go. I couldn’t leave straight away as the dam broke on my emotions and I just bawled my eyes out. I cannot begin to describe how I felt but intellectually I knew I had passed one immense milestone and now had a new battle ahead. I was overjoyed, exhausted, thankful, fearful, proud and high. And everything else.

Helen helped. I enjoyed the hug.

We arrived ‘home’ in time for the BBQ prepared by our family. The place was full of their friends who were all a delight to be with. Bugger just coming out of chemo, I was ready for the evening (and early morning). In hindsight I know I was being supported by the dexamethasone but I had all the other crap running in me so I think I did pretty good.

On Saturday we all went out to the park to play with Patrick the dog (who’s now gone back to being a guide dog) and throw ball/frisby. For the first time in ages I was actually ‘running’ around which is a huge improvement. I still feel incredibly lanky as the strength in my legs has more recovery to come and the nerves in my lower body are still reeling from the Vincristine administered during the first 5 rounds of chemo. It’s more improvement though so I’ve just got to keep going.

After the park we dropped Chris off for a return visit to his old martial arts instructor. Very interesting watching him for a while. Afterwards I managed to geek the rest of the family into hunting down a geocache in the park next to the hall where Chris was training.

On Sunday Helen and I drove into Melbourne to visit the Royal Botanic Gardens. By pure luck it turned out that a Corpse Flower had recently opened after seven years so we had a chance to see it before it closed. Fortunately it didn’t stink.

We had a nice random walk through the park while I played with my Nexus 4. One thing I did was to record a track of of where we went. I have since applied that track to the photos we took with the camera so they are now all ‘geotagged’, ie, the photos have data embedded in them to show where they were taken. The pics from the Nexus 4 get this by default but it’s nice to have the better image optics of the camera coupled with the position recording.

Just for experimentation here are the same pics in Google Maps and Google Earth (if you have it). No idea how it’s going to come out.

After the park we met up with the family in China Town where we bought them Dim Sum for lunch at the Crystal Jade restaurant. It was a new experience for most of the family. We ate a lot and it was delicious.

After lunch we headed over to Fitzroy Gardens where we viewed the conservatory, Cook’s cottage (that had been dismantled in England and rebuilt piece by piece here in Melbourne) finally stopping for coffee before returning home. We’re now thoroughly in the modern world as we used our Nexus 4s to get us back to the car and then home without incident.

On Monday we were understandable pooped so Helen and I rested for most of the day (physically) while mentally got stuck into more planning for the near future. We’re now reasonably sure we have time to squeeze in Sydney and Hong Kong on the way to visit my side of the family in South Africa. It’s amazing how much time you can spend researching places to go.

We celebrated New Year in in style with the family at friends of their in a spacious apartment overlooking the river in Melbourne. Russ drove us all to the nearby station where we caught the train into Melbourne (free for the evening) and walked to the apartment. There we met many of the folks from the family BBQ as well as new people. Great company again. We watched the New Year in from the apartment gardens four stories up. The fireworks were impressive, all along the river. We had a clear line of site onto one launch site and the rest we could see over the buildings. It was fantastic.

We managed to get back before 3am but not long before. We elected not to stay up.

First day of the New Year has been one of recovery and lot’s more planning. We’re still not finished. We hope have everything worked out by the 3rd as Sam is due to fly in then and we hope to spend time with him, not our computers.