I always welcomed hearing the friendly female Geordie accent of my specialist nurse Claire, regardless of what she would tell me, which often turned out to be not such good news. She just has this friendly and comforting tone to her voice that can make even bad news seem palatable. We could laugh together even in circumstances which, on the face of it, we’re not matters to be taken lightly. Maybe it was black humour, which people often use to deal with difficult situations, possibly something I perfected during my 30 years as a police officer, and no doubt is in the armoury of those who are at the sharp end of the health service!
So this particular conversation went something like this:
“Hi Brian, it’s Claire, is it ok to speak”?
“Yeah sure, go ahead”
“I’m afraid the biopsies we took showed traces of cancer cells”
“I’m not surprised, I was expecting that to be the case”
That was the introduction to a longer conversation which took place during my last European venture back in May, when I was driving north through Austria en route back from Tuscany, aaah…. memories of Tuscany! 🤗
My return to England was greeted with a scan, the results of which were described as “Worse than we expected”, which led to four months of palliative chemotherapy. That took me until the end of October, but during that ‘down time’ I couldn’t help but ponder when I could embark on my next Euro trip. Despite thinking inwardly that ‘I’m not going to get ahead of myself’, midway through chemo I couldn’t help but start to plan. I’d got into my routine of the chemo cycle and could deal with that, but was prevented from European travel until this course of treatment was completed. What lies beyond for me is very uncertain, the cancer is deemed as inoperable and my oncologist foresees periods of treatment and periods of non treatment until…..well, your guess is as good as mine.
So I set to dreaming of when and where I could go once the shackles were off. During the winter months a return to Spain was the obvious choice, so I got back on my planning horse and did the necessary research resulting in a ferry from Portsmouth to Santander at midnight on Boxing Day. My final destination would be the Costa del Sol, but unsurprisingly for me, you may think, I had plenty of other ‘must sees’ across the country well before I arrived at the warmest and driest part of mainland Europe.
My biking mate Ken has agreed to meet me out there in early January, so for him, we booked a week’s return flight Newcastle to Malaga and I would time my arrival there to coincide with his, which would give me eight days of meandering down through Spain’s interior, perfect.
I’ve rented the same apartment that I stayed in at Estepona a year ago, I’m familiar with the area, not only because of that last trip there, but many years ago Rachel and I spent ten weeks in Andalucia in our motorhome. Hopefully the weather will be very favourable and I can show Ken some of the places I know, with the car’s roof down we probably can’t avoid the (unfounded) assumptions of passers by!
I have plans for after Ken returns, which at this time are ‘subject to change’. All will be revealed in due course, but in any event I’ll be back in Blighty late January.
Watch this space…….
