To blog or not to blog

Time restraints dictate a short blog today. I’ve been to the hospital for the first of two check-ups this week. Today’s visit was to see my oncology consultant, the one I have somewhat unkindly re-named Dr Dolittle due to his apparent inability to arrange the tests he says I need to have. He came up with another one today – a 6-monthly CT scan. It remains to see whether this actually happens 6 months after the last one (ie due sometime in August) or if I’ll still be watching for the appointment letter amid my Christmas cards this year! I’m a bit down about it because for the last few weeks I’ve not been ‘pending’ any tests, but now there is another on the horizon. It is good that they keep such a close check on things, but will be even better when they don’t think they need to! Still, looking back, this time last year I was in the High Observation ward, with tubes and monitors and needles and oxygen masks  and a real chance I’d not make it to the end of the day!  What a difference a year makes.

Maybe it is a good thing that we experience time in such a linear way. I’m not sure how I would have coped with the last year had I been given the benefit of hindsight, or if I would have lived my life differently in the years leading up to my cancer diagnosis. I hope, not that differently.  I’ve always believed that we make the best choices available to us at the time. They may not seem to others to be the right decisions, and hindsight may prove them to be disastrous, but at the time they were what we honestly believed were the best for us. That is a basic tenant of NLP, NeuroLinguistic Programming, something I have studied in a little depth and which presents models for the way people represent the world. But our minds are wired up for linear time and we don’t get second chances to go back and change what we have done in the past. I guess to that end I would say I don’t have regrets. Regret is a compound emotion anyway and can always be broken down into more base elements, such as anger, shame, embarrassment and so on.  And why regret things that you can’t change? Learn and move forward. Try to not make the same mistakes again. We don’t have a time machine to go back and fix things!

Consequential, linear time is certainly less confusing than having to deal with temporal paradoxes that being able to jump back and forth through time may bring, likethe possibility of killing your own great grandfather, thus preventing your birth and the possibility of your travelling back in time to kill your great grandfather. We all sometimes want time to run faster when we’re bored and slower when we’re having fun, and perversely it feels like exactly the opposite happens in both situations. Still, Albert said that E=mc2 and so I guess we’re kinda stuck with things the way they are. The world’s greatest minds ponder such things, parallel universes, quantum mechanics, branching possibilities where every choice leads to BOTH eventualities being followed. Tis the stuff to make your head hurt and maybe something I’ll consider for a future blog!

So time and tide wait for no man; a truth that seems as relevant today as ever when I consider that it would have been the birthday of Jon Pertwee, the Third TV Doctor Who. (I emphasise ‘TV’ as there were actually three actors who had played the Doctor before Pertwee took on the role, William Hartnell was the first incarnation, followed by Patrick Troughton and then Jon Pertwee, but Peter Cushing also played the Time Lord in two 1960’s movie adaptations. Pertwee’s Doctor was the first one I really got to know, although Tom Baker remains ‘my’ Doctor. Ah well, we’ll see what the new guy is like soon enough, when David Tennant shuts the TARDIS door for the last time in the New Year (unless rumours that he’ll be back for a movie are true!). I could write plenty about the Whoniverse, but that will also save for another day when time permits. Sadly, Jon Pertwee, like many of the other doctors, is no longer with us, gone to the great blue police box in the sky.

I need to mark another passing though today, with mixed feelings. We were very close, David more so than I, but it doesn’t mean we can’t both feel a sense of bereavement. You see, yesterday, David lost his Mohawk. Shaved it right off. It is gone. It’s passed on! It is no more! It has ceased to be! Expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It’s kicked the bucket, it’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! It now lies dead and decaying in our bathroom bin. It is an ex-Mohawk. So, you can forget your Michael Jackson, your Mollie Sugden’s Pussy and Farrah Fawcett; I demand a tribute concert in the O2 arena, endless documentaries on the TV, outrageous signs of public mourning and at very least two minutes silence.  I’m thinking there may be a musical and film rights to consider…

David’s Mowhawk: 2005-2009 RIP