Life in Culebrón

In Alicante, on the quayside near the hotel, going down to the Casino there's a little bust of Archibald Dickson and a plaque to commemorate him and the crew of the SS Stanbrook. Archie Dickson was of the same stuff as the men and women of the boats patrolling the seas and oceans looking to save the lives of desperate people fleeing for their lives today. Archie knew what was right. The Stanbrook is small coal fired ship just 70 metres long, 1400 tons and 11 knots top speed. Archibald Dickson is from Cardiff, 47, British Merchant Navy. His ship owners have told him to leave Marseilles and pick up a cargo in Alicante. A Spanish Navy destroyer, controlled by the rebellious forces, which are just about to crush the remnants of the legitimate government, tell Archie not to enter Alicante. He hoists the Red Ensign just a bit higher, grits his teeth, crosses his fingers and takes his ship into Alicante. He doesn't like being told what he can and can't do. The quayside is heaving ...

Done it then. The prescribed treatment for my throat cancer and inflamed lymph nodes was three sessions of chemotherapy in Elda and thirty three sessions of radiotherapy in Alicante. Today I had the last session - everything finished. The medics tell me that I'll still feel sick, not be able to eat through my mouth, continue to have skin peeling off my neck, and whatnot, for a month or two yet. My next appointment with the oncologist isn't until 11 November (not at 11am) and the next time to speak to the ear nose and throat people who did the original biopsy isn't until mid December. But, for the moment I won't have to get up at 5.30 am to be ready for the ambulance to take me to Alicante every weekday and nobody is going to poison me with vile chemicals or bombard me with particles for a while. Of course nobody has suggested what will happen if it hasn't worked. I don't know whether they wade in with more of the same or if they give it up as a lost game and jus...

I've been riding around a lot in ambulances recently. I remebered an earlier blog about ambulances, back in 2019. I re-read it and it's much better than this one. It flows more easily and it's reasonably interesting in a Big Chief I-Spy sort of way. The sort of simple information with which you can amaze your friends and confound your enemies. So far as I can see there have been no basic changes to the legislation since I wrote that blog but that didn't stop me publishing this rewrite. This piece is about the ambulances that are contracted by the Generalitat Valenciana, the Regional Government in, the region I live in. Every now and again Valencia put a contract out to tender and anyone interested enough to bid has the potential for providing the ambulance fleet for the requirements of the region. There are other ambulances, private and NGO ((Non Governmental Organisation). The private clinics and hospitals need ambulances to move their customer/patients around and othe...

October 9th, is Valencia day, a regional Spanish  "bank holiday" to celebrate the day that King Jaume I entered the captured city of Valencia to bring it under the reign of the Kingdom of Aragon in 1238.  In 2006 my friend Pepa told me, that on Valencia Day, one of the typical things to do was for lovers to give each other little handkerchief-wrapped bundles of marzipan sweets in the shapes of fruit, piulets, and tronadors (even having seen pictures, I don't know how to translate those words into English). So, on that first 9th October in Pinoso, I sneaked out to buy some from a local bakery, as a bit of a surprise for Maggie. I found all the shops were fast shut. It may be the tradition in the Valencia province of the Valencian Community, but it isn't here in Alicante. It's like paella. Up in Valencia, they have that bright yellow stuff with big prawns in it and round here we have a muddy brown-green paella with rabbit and snails. Ours is much better. I get most ...

I wasn't going to do this again. Not for a while. In fact I have a very slight blog ready to go about ambulances, but a number of people have asked or sent me messages so, I'll do my best to make it short and sweet. Yet another update on me and throat cancer. Nothing has changed in the treatment stakes. I've now done 25 of the 33 sessions of radiotherapy. An ambulance collects me from home and deposits me back here a few hours later. It can be as few as four hours from start to finish and as many as six and a half. The treatment takes about twenty minutes and the rest of it is waiting or travelling time and the occasional medical Q&A. Yesterday the ambulance from Alicante brought me home via Biar. Locals can gasp and chortle.  I've done two of the three chemotherapy sessions. The third and, hopefully, final session is on Monday 14th provided that there is no medical reason for not going ahead - apparently things like anaemia, lack of platelets, reduced kidney functi...

I well remember our first ever fiesta in Culebrón. After the Saturday evening meal, under the pines, outside the social centre, the activity shifted to the paved square where there was a stage for the "orquesta," the showband so typical of Spanish small-town fiestas. As soon as we arrived at the square, I headed for the bar to beat the rush. There never was a rush; people went to the bar, but getting some booze down their necks didn't have the same urgency as it seems to have for us Britons. It's the same when a drink is finished; I, or we, go for another, but Spaniards don't worry too much about getting the next one in. They'll get around to it in a while. I presume we Britons still say that Spaniards don't get drunk, or at least that it's very unusual to see them falling-down drunk. Point Britons at free or cheap booze and we will—at least I will—and I've always thought of myself as the person on the Clapham Omnibus, take advantage. I used to com...

My sister said that my nephew reads my blogs. He's just about to set off to Colorado because his new wife has a job there. So here's one to send him and her on their way. Just for those who haven't been keeping up, I have throat cancer. The Spanish healthcare system is looking after me. However, because the Region of Valencia is being run by a very right-wing local government, one of the insidious little side effects seems to be that lots of patients are being passed for care in the private sector. I suppose they natter as they play golf together. Of course, I may be completely wrong. It may be because the private hospitals have more capacity or because they're doing lots of two-for-one offers. The private hospital is for the radiotherapy. The thing where they strap me to a table and direct particle beams at the cancer in my throat and neck. The idea is that the rays damage the bad cancer cells but that my other cells are strong enough to fight back. Or at least that...

I was backing up the computer last week and there wasn't a single new photo to add to the photo album. This is distinctly odd. It means that I didn't go anywhere or do anything away from the daily routine. It's true my life is a bit off kilter at the moment and I wasn't much in the mood for galavanting but nothing? It also set me thinking about some of the things that we have done over the years Tourism accounts for nearly 13% of the Spanish Gross Domestic Product—cars, the main Spanish export, account for about 10%, and agriculture just a tad under 9%. Tourism is becoming a problem in Spain, not really because of the tourists, but because of the people who make the most profit from them. In places like Barcelona, Mallorca, and Málaga, there is so much money to be made out of tourists that investment funds and the like have got in on the act. They buy up a block of flats to let out to tourists—if people have to be evicted in the process, so be it—because they make stack...

I left the last blog when I had done two or three sessions of radiotherapy down in Alicante at the private Perpetuo Socorro hospital. The chemotherapy in Elda still hadn't started because I am, apparently, veinless, and they couldn't find a way to get their chemicals into my blood. On Thursday of last week, they sorted that out by installing more permanent access to my bloodstream via a probe that leads to bigger, better veins in my chest. The same day, they spent four hours, first pumping saline into me, to make sure I was hydrated, and then pumping in some chemicals which, in my layman's understanding, are designed to be powerful enough to kill off nasty cancerous cells but not quite violent enough to kill me. It's all a bit of a faff. Lots of the days have been exceptions for one reason or another, but the process is something like this. I am scheduled for 33 sessions of radiotherapy. There is one session on each working day. I did number five today, so by my reckoni...

So, we left the story with me in hospital, being fed on gruel and camomile tea, having had a stomach tube fitted. The hospital kicked me loose on Monday with only two scheduled appointments for the week at that time: one with a nutritionist and the other with a cancer doctor, an oncologist—both in Elda. Because not everyone has the advantage of living in Culebrón, I should say that our local health centre in Pinoso (5 km away) is linked to Elda Hospital (25 km away), but sometimes, for specialist services, patients are sent all over the place. The hospital I'm going to in Alicante for the radiotherapy, Perpetuo Socorro, is a private hospital about 55 km from home. The nutritionist was a bit of a hoot. She gave us a box with 30 tubes to connect my stomach feeding tube to a pouch full of a Complan type food. That box was bulky but light. She also gave me a scrip for the feeding pouches, and the bloke in the chemist offered me a sack trolley to take those to the car. He also showed me...