Saturday 13 July 2024

Sometimes you’ve earned your cake even if you haven’t done any running…

Yes, I haven’t even run an inch today, nor in the last fortnight actually. Why? Well it all began with a cough!

Oh the cough. One hacking, gravelly, sounding like a person-with-a-40-year-smoking-habit cough. The ghastly, spluttering monstrosity started about 8 weeks ago. I thought half term would see it off, but it did not. Upon my return to work, I struggled to function, clinging onto a huge water bottle and gasping for breath every time I tried to get a sentence out in the classroom. I visited the Pharmacist, polished off box after box of Lemsips and consumed my own body-weight in honey. And still I barked on!

“Have you got the 100 day cough?” colleagues would ask,

“Could it be pneumonia?”

“Have you considered TB?”

Everyone had a theory. And everyday I was wiped out; fights of stairs looked like mountains, my back and chest ached all the time and I felt as if my motivation to do anything at all, even eat, had evaporated.

So, about 4 weeks in, I went to see my GP. I was prescribed precautionary antibiotics plus a steroid spray and was sent for an xray.

Two days later, I awoke at 3 am,  making the most horrendous din. In my head I sounded like an angry seal, the offspring,who came racing in, claimed that I sounded ‘in human‘ and ‘like a siren’ as they found me careering around the room seemingly gasping for breath. It calmed down after 10 minutes but I was made to call 111 who labelled this as ‘Stridor Breathing‘ and, having heard my other symptoms, ordered me off to A and E …whereupon we waited for 7 hours before being discharged home.

Later that same afternoon however, I was summoned to the GP… and it is here that everything changed. My x-ray results were on the screen. The GP read them out quickly to an uncomprehending me. He immediately called radiology  and, via speaker phone, I heard them telling him that yes, I did need a follow up CT scan and that it was marked as ‘urgent’.

“Why did they say urgent?” I asked, still a little at sea.

The GP mumbled about something needing to ‘rule our the worst’. Upon arriving home from work, less than 24 hours later, I found my GP actually at the door hand delivering an appointment for the very next day. The light was beginning to dawn.

‘So when you say urgent … you really do mean it!‘

I spent half an hour the next morning being CT-ed with iodine ink.

Now I began to feel alarmed. I re-read the x-ray report.  It told me that I was on the ‘2 week pathway’. I looked that up. One word. Cancer .

I sat, with a cup of tea, my usually busy mind feeling as if it had been replaced with a blank white board of blind panic.

Not a great week followed. It became difficult to focus at work. I didn’t tell my mum, who was ill. I couldn’t tell Small Boy, who was mid-A levels. My closest friends were terrific, and my boss took me off some duties, which helped enormously. But mostly, I just steeled myself for a long and lonely wait.

But such anxiety is difficult to recall now because… thankfully me this tale has a happy ending. The ‘all clear’ letter arrived by post. The Lung Cancer team discharged me back to Primary Care, with nothing more than a recommendation for a steroid inhaler, and I was overjoyed to be sent!

So, come on, no jogging but surely I’ve earned this week’s cake? And what a belter it is, none other than a Cissy Greens Chorley cake.

‘Is that the same as an Eccles Cake?’ I hear you cry.

Actually, not quite. There is less fruit in the Chorley cake and shortcrust pastry replaces the flaky casing of the Eccles variety. And therein, to my mind lies the secret. With a generous helping of butter, that crisp but crumbly pastry is a triumph, melting seamlessly into the soft rich fruit. For me, a self confessed non-sweet-toother, this is cake heaven. Fellow tasters suggest a 9,  but, as I could happily devour a full plate of these beauties, I’m going out on a limb with a cheeky 9.5 and a bold claim that ‘this will take some beating’.

And next week, providing my wheezing is fully back under control, I’ll be back to running and cake sampling to test that out…