well that's a shitter

I wasn't going to post today.

I didn't pre-write any posts over the Easter weekend and I have to confess I'm struggling a bit with motivation (in a general sense, as well as in terms of writing a blog post), plus I'm way behind on reviewing rental DVDs so I couldn't just slap one of those up either.

However, browsing the BBC site I've just encountered some rather crappy news - Ian Banks has final stage cancer and is not expected to live for more than a year or so.  Here it is on the BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-22015175 ; and on the Guardian website - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/apr/03/iain-banks-gall-bladder-cancer

I'm a big fan of Banks - his Culture novels are some of the best SF I've ever read, and I enjoy his mainstream stuff too - so this is particularly crappy.  He'd actually just started writing new Culture novels having not done any in a while, but it seems that the most recent (Hydrogen Sonata) will be the last.  A great shame.

I don't think I've ever blogged about it here, but my mother died from Cancer.  This was some time ago, but when hers was diagnosed it was "late stage" as well.  Cancer is a complicated (and odd) disease, but late stage is basically where the original cancer has spread to the degree that it's uncurable - and I mean that in a definitive sense.

My mum's original cancer was breast cancer, but by the time it was diagnosed it had spread to a quite catastrophic degree - it was in her bones, lymph nodes and liver.  It was actually the liver that delivered the final blow as it was essentially total liver failure that she died of.

Interestingly with my mum it was actually several years between the point she was diagnosed and the point she finally passed away and you get to late stage by having it for a long time without detection.  She didn't have chemo (there's little point when it's like that - it may add a few months but you feel awful for ages, so it's just not worth it), but I seem to recall she had a bit of radio-therapy, though nothing major.  I think they just wanted to knock a bit of it out to help extend life a bit and so she was in less discomfort.  She also had some other experimental treatment, though I don't recall what this was - whether it helped or not I have no idea.

One thing about this period that was different to what you'd expect was that she wasn't really in pain as such - she was fully active until the very last week and without being told you wouldn't even have known.  That's part of the problem with this sort of cancer - like Banks it's something that is discovered by a symptom that isn't directly related.

So my mum had breast cancer, but there was no big lump in her breast (it was a load of tiny cancers and she wasn't quite old enough to be having regular screening anyway) and it was actually a fractured bone in her spine that was the point of discovery.  She'd been riding with my sister while on holiday and been thrown off.  It wasn't a big fall particularly, but because the cancer had weakened the bone it fracture so she was in a lot of pain and went home on the train (I recall this day vividly) to see our GP.  That triggered a battery of tests to try to ascertain why the bone was so weak, eventually leading to the discovery of cancer.