Radioactive Granny

This will be brief. Granny at house of Beloved Son has managed to get rid of Barbie site on house laptop and replace it with this. Beloved little girls are off to school, their mum out running (no desperate housewife here). Youngest granddaughter may be developing IT skills, but she doesn't need Barbie site at right this moment.

Granny is a radioactive pincushion. (Don't kiss babies for 24 hours. And by the way you will have radioactive pee.) All this in view of fact that Tuesday was all much as she feared. But still nowhere disastrous. Little stranger less vicious than last time's. Good. Interview with nice but tough ?Palestinian ?Syrian female surgeon had its scratchy moments. (Why, for instance, can you get a verdict in one day in Bristol, whereas here I've been back and forth 4 times over nearly 5 weeks? I've taken that on board, says surgeon, before telling Granny, equally fiercely, that is she not to go running back to the Canary Islands in the foreseeable future. ) However, prospective date for ridding Granny of demon stranger (plus unfortunately her right tit - no getting out of that this time) was moved from 5th October to next Tuesday. It pays to be stroppy. Not least - as demonstrated by her dear psychiatrist friend in a now much quoted study - stroppy patients have better outcomes. Good. It means her intended trip to Australia for family wedding in late October is still on. Better still.

Yesterday then was spent running from bloodtest to bone scan (hence the radioactivity and the needles) to pre-surgical nurses flourishing questionnaires -' Do you have diabetes, epilepsy, high blood pressure, extra-terrestrial antibodies etc etc. (Guess which she made up.) Answer to all this, no. Those sessions therefore quick. The whole experience not quick. In betweenwhiles Granny retreated to fancy Italian coffee-shops (this is Kensington, darling) and sat in a stupor surrounded by preserved-in-aspic lunching ladies with little dogs.

But now here she is. A bit melancholy and achy but so she always is first thing. Last night she watched wonderful Werner Herzog movie on BBC 4 - about mad(ish) inventor and his exceptionally beautiful little airship - like a plump white fish- floating over jungle and waterfalls in Guyana. Herzog movies are always about mad/melancholy obsessional explorers, mental or physical, always have ecstatically beautiful shots of sky/waterfalls/birds/reflections accompanied by etherial music, this time - mostly- Guyanian ethnic. You could say he parodies himself. But it works. And worked on Granny who needed a shot of beauty and got it. She herself floats hazily over life just now in a rather weird and wonderful way; this past month has been beautiful - more real than unreal, more unreal than real - nothing like deathly things to plug you into life. She is also, daily, reduced to weeping, almost, by sense of being loved all over. Five people have urged her to let them look after when she comes out of hospital. She is spoiled for choice.

This weekend she will spend putting music into her especially acquired IPOD. (You can get 1000 songs on that, enthuses the young, male salesman. Um, says Granny, I think I'm more into symphonies -sorry, Mark G. Young male salesman looks flummoxed and retreats; returns to say 1000 songs translates to 50 hours playing time. So that's alright). That way she will be able to insulate herself from the merry chatter of the ward - when they are not groaning, cancer patients tend to attempt the chirpy, she has found in the past; alas, she isn't good at that. The rest of the time she will enjoy her about to be wrecked cleavage. Everything low cut, darlings. And how. (And how. She's not bad for her age; really.) She may thereafter even resort to plastic surgery - with more reason than most. They do nice artificial nipples these days, she's been told. She will, though, leave her eyelids and nose and forehead furrows alone. Not least she wouldn't get them done free.

Next week, mostly will be spent in hospital so don't expect much in the way of updates. NHS hospitals don't run to Internet Cafes yet. And though you do get your own phone by your bedside these days she doubts she can plug her MAC into it. No private patient she.

But never fear. She will be back. SHE WILL BE BACK.