Cancer – Page 2 – It's shite being Scottish

Snake oil, medicine and the exclusion of nature

Inexorably, history moves on. The trick is to find a way of joining in, of being the change, participating rather than being swept along.

Medication, collateral damage and the night

…. an addendum to mountains, messfam and mindfulness

Nighttime is the worst.

Continue reading “Medication, collateral damage and the night”

The wee small hours

One of the last duties my father felt necessary to perform in this life was to ensure I knew the tragic circumstances my mother had endured as a girl, before she and my father knew each other and while she was still living at home as a student.

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Merry Midwinter

The disconnection of nutrition from health that is perpetuated by modern health care systems seems to me utterly insane

It was bound to happen one day. Continue reading “Merry Midwinter”

A false alarm

Ever since the diagnosis, it has been impossible not to make sense of every twinge, minor pain or anomalous experience as possibly related to the disease. It is a continuous struggle; try as I might, until there is evidence supplied to the contrary, in the worst recesses of my imagination everything is always related to the cancer.

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Letting go

He used to visit when my mother was alive but she shooed him away, not because she did not like cats, but because she was scared she might trip over him. After she died, every time I came to the house he would visit. By the time I moved in, he seemed to have already decided that this was where he wanted to be. I reopened the old cat flap so he could come and go as he pleased. Every time I came home from one of my adventures or from working in the city, he would be close by, waiting for my return with long stories and much purring. Continue reading “Letting go”

Always living with(out) cancer

According to the eponymous tradition of Scottish philosophy, common sense refers to an ability to perceive the properties or qualities of objects using separate sensory modalities. The classic example used to demonstrate the principle is the fact of the cubeness of a cube being both a visual and a tactile experience – we can both see and feel that it is a cube. The common sense is that which makes it thus possible for vision to confirm touch and vice versa. It is the basis of learning directly to perceive higher orders of abstraction than raw sensory experience, and of using these to navigate about complex environments. Continue reading “Always living with(out) cancer”