PGT Day 19 - Doctor, Dentist and Deluge.

Another surprisingly dry and bright start to the day afforded me the opportunity to continue riding my clean and shiny FP7 rather than my mudguard equipped Angliru which I expected to use for today and the next few as the wet, stormy weather squatted resolutely in our summer. As planned I rode my routine medium size commute to work, opening post and briefly lingering over email in the office before heading home to shower, change and head for an appointment at New Cross Hospital. There, at the appointed hour (or an hour after the appointed hour), I was to consult with my surgeon, Miss Soulsby, for the first time since she discharged me from Ward D2 in January, six days after removing a tumour from my bowel. It's a strange relationship that one has with a surgeon. For most people having somebody carry out a life saving procedure on us is a very rare occurrence and leaves us with a debt that we can neither repay nor fully express our feelings about. Yet the skilled surgeon carries out many such procedures, and has that relationship with, and holds that debt from, many people. It's easy to see how a God complex could develop, but Miss Soulsby retains a calm and gentle manner and is free of obvious ego, talking easily and freely - even whilst examining me in the most, ahem, intimate areas.

I'm delighted to report that she is entirely happy with my recovery, and after detailing the monitoring plan to which I will be subject for the next five or so years, and despatching me to provide a couple of vials of blood, I was heading home and into a rain belt. Once there I re-clad myself in Lycra, decided that the rain wouldn't amount to much, and jumped onto the Angliru to head to Stourbridge for a six monthly dental check-up and visit with the Hygienist.

For the first few kilometres of the journey the rain increased slightly in heaviness until, somewhere around Kingswinford, the heavenly sluice gates were cast open and spewed forth a deluge of water. Suddenly the edges of the roads were fringed with unavoidable, metre wide streams. Sheets of water careered down off house roofs, overshooting gutters and adding to the roadside rivers. Within a few minutes every item of my clothing was thoroughly waterlogged and water sloshed around in my shoes. And yet my face was cast in an inane grin - there comes a point when you're so wet it doesn't matter anymore and then I usually find myself heading into the puddles (today they simply couldn't be avoided anyway), splashing through the water like a big, happy kid. Today both air and water were warm too, which just served to make the sensation of getting drenched all the more pleasant. I just hope that the water was largely clean as I deposited a puddle of the stuff on both dental chairs that I sat in!

My teeth, mouth, tongue and jaw all received a clean bill of health which, combined with my positive consultation at the hospital earlier, let me with a lovely feeling of well being. I stepped out on to the Lower High Street in Stourbridge as the sun broke through the clouds. The rain had stopped a few minutes earlier and the roads were already drying in the warm air and light wind, leaving me to enjoy a relaxing ride home through the urban borderlands of the Black Country. En route I considered the health related events of the past few months and set them against the realisation that I had been blessed with positive outcomes. It's been three or four months since my first tentative post operative bike ride, but today I rode my bikes with that old feeling that I could happily twiddle along for hours on end and without ill effect when I stop. In short I felt that I was back to how I was before the symptoms of Bowel Cancer first started to affect me.

Then I counted my many blessings, thanked God and made a large mug of coffee.

"What a long strange trip it's been"  

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