Photons on the Prostate - XIV

Beyond radical radiotherapy

Three months ago today, I began radical radiotherapy for adenocarcinoma of the prostate. It is just six months after I received a confirmed diagnosis, and it needed immediate active treatment after consultation with a multidisciplinary team on options for surgery or radiotherapy.

I worked through the duration of radiotherapy and for a month after the completion of the treatment. However, increasingly, I suffered more impactful side effects that started with chronic fatigue, and issues with my urinary system that limited most outdoor activity as I needed to be close to available conveniences, and one unexpected effect was the way those elements appeared to affect my voice.

My voice became weak and strained, usually determined by my energy levels that was quite sub-optimal most of the time. While against what my body was telling me, I tried to continue as normal, I really had to take a break and have added domestic support that being at home did not offer.

Time off to recuperate

The decision to travel to South Africa while somewhat frail was not taken lightly, but I knew the essential support for my recuperation was best under the watchful care of my partner. I availed myself of all the customer assistance provided by the airline for my journey, no sense of determination could have propelled me through the experience.

I can attest there has been considerable progress, the occasions of fatigue are less frequent, the urinary issues while still needing medication have eased, the sound of my voice is much better with a few relapses, and the painful discomfort that needed opioid medication has completed gone and I have now totally weaned myself off codeine with minimal adverse effects.

The weather in Cape Town might have contributed to my recuperation. I can begin to consider a return to normalcy, which might take a process of reengagement. Much as I try not to have that preoccupy me and concentrate on recovery, there is a world to return to in the New Year.

Looking ahead

I am grateful for the support and care I have received through the period from anticipation when I first had exploratory tests in February, through further investigations, diagnosis, and treatment. My long-suffering partner, close friends, extraordinary neighbours, siblings, and colleagues compassionately accommodated my vulnerability with understanding.

Each time I present an update, I appreciate how it was fortuitous that we caught a high prostate-specific antigen (PSA) reading when we did because at the advent of my treatment, the PSA reading had fallen within the normal range, but for the fact that an MRI scan leading to a biopsy had detected Stage 2, yet malignant prostate cancer.

The need for men especially Black men over 45 to pay attention to their prostate health. Do the checks and have the tests, catch things early and have the best options for recovery.

Blog - Men's things - Prostate Cancer blogs

Blog - Photons on the Prostate - XIII

Other references

Prostate Cancer UK: Black men and prostate cancer

MedScape: International Prostate Symptom Score (IPSS) Calculator

Urology Care Foundation: Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH)

NHS: Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test

Prostate Cancer UK: The PSA blood test

Nickel Blogs - Blog by blog for 21 years

A House, A Home - Anna Wilson

The first brick

I thought the 8th of December 2003 was a weekend, but it was a Monday. Now, I cannot recollect what I was still doing in a Berlin hotel the day I wrote my first blog. I must have been on holiday.

I had been sharing some of my views with a closed circle of friends by email, but it was not efficient, and frankly, some were rather fed-up with me clogging their inboxes with musings and rantings. Did one not ask that I be more authentic, and by that, suggested I was putting up a façade?

Blogging was becoming a trend, it was the subject of an interesting report I caught on CNN when it was the global news outlet pumped into every international hotel room. Quick research on how to start a blog landed me on a website managed by a small outfit in Scotland, and http://akin.blog-city.com/ (now defunct) was born.

Building homes

Even blog hosting sites could not stay the course as I received an email in late 2010 that the service would close in January 2012. That began the process of migrating what we now call content to Google’s Blogger and https://akinblog.nl, over 1,500 of them, a manual activity and what I lost in the process was the engagement and many link references.

Brick by brick, blog by blog, I built a house and a home of thoughts, views, opinions, and perspectives. I have been writing about what I have experienced and how it might affect me or others for 21 years. It is as easy as it is hard. I have 4,177 blogs, including this one, with over 8,300,000 views to date.

A place of blogs

I am commemorating today with a song written by Anna Wilson for Habitat for Humanity International because every sentiment expressed in that song applies to this home that my blog has become.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has visited my blog for whatever reason, some interacting by leaving comments or engaging me directly. I found a quiet corner and you came to say hello, I appreciate you all and hope you will continue to visit and interact with my blog and me.

Here’s to many more anniversaries. In human terms, the 21^st signifies the key to life and the anniversary gift is nickel. Let’s keep building homes for every expression of humanity, brick by brick.

Nickel Blogs - Celebrating 21 years of blogging

Nickel Blogs - In view of 21 years of blogging

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of telling better stories

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of going against the grain

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of articulating the identity spectrum

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of articulating the identity spectrum

Finding a place to be known

Negotiating the identity spectrum has been a feature of my blog, though when I consider the situation, it has always been a feature of my life. However, having a blog has helped articulate the issues around how identity is more defined by influences than by progeny.

I can think of the many experiences and realisations, the earliest being when I first arrived in Nigeria, barely a 5-year-old and I noticed there were more people like me than where we had left. How was a little black English boy to know that Nigeria would be different?

English, people have issues with that, I am supposed to be Black British, yet on those atrocious forms, I would write in Black English. That aspect of being English became ascendant when I had to tackle the question of where I was from when I lived in the Netherlands.

The many questions of where

“Where are you from?”, they would ask. I answer, “I am from England”. The next question usually was, “Where are you originally from?”, The answer, “England”. Confusion or frustration clouds their faces with a further inquiry, “Where are your parents from?”, The answer, “Nigeria”. Enlightenment, “So, you’re Nigerian”, “No, I am not, I was born in England.”

The best question in that vein was, “What is your birth country?”, I answered, “England”, and my interlocutor asked no further questions. This brings me to the other matter of my accent, it started as a typical Brummie accent influenced by associations in Nigeria especially in schools that had a large international pupillage.

Strange juxtapositions of identification

It's funny that most of the Caucasian kids were Nigerian-born, and many of the black kids were foreign-born, with foreign accents, too. However, reading an article by a friend of mixed-race parentage revealed another interesting thing about identity. Those of mixed-race parentage were othered from afar. We looked like everyone else until we began to speak, and then we were put aside, too.

It was like we never really belonged where we thought we belonged; we had to work out how we wanted to be identified. For instance, how do you tackle a statement like, “You’ve always thought like a Westerner?” I was 42 years old, which was what my father said in a conversation.

The privilege and the opportunity

In my case, I have found both privilege and opportunity by the accident of birth that is not of my making, how it has helped me navigate situations in life and at work cannot be covered in a blog. Too many examples come to mind.

Maybe, I am more fortunate that working with my sense of identity and the quality of my education has taken me to interesting places.

I have little time for identity politics, but woe betide anyone who attempts to pigeonhole me in dockets where I neither identify nor wish to place in. Such is the life of a Third Culture Kid.

Some additional context

A Third Culture Kid (TCK) is a person who spends a significant part of their childhood living in a country or countries that are different from at least one of their parents' passport countries:

The child's parents' culture is the first culture.

The host country's culture is the second culture.

The child's own cultural identity is the third culture, which is a fusion of the first two.

The child adopts some traits from each culture. [If I may add, some kids even live in bubbles different from the nominal culture too.]

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of going against the grain

Developing a life of views

It would appear even to me that my blog has developed some unintended characteristics, but these have become some of the elements that give context to what I write.

For instance, one regularly occurring theme is the Thought Picnic which began just like when the blog began, in a hotel room on one of my travels. I was in Antwerp during my news junkie days when another of those Israeli-Palestinian conflicts was in the news.

The world news channels gave an Israeli representative a global platform to which she relayed to my unmistakable hearing, “We have to tell the world our truth.” Not the truth, but their version of the truth, which in its narrative was as far from the truth as the opposite cardinal points of the compass were from each other.

I found myself carted away in my mind’s eye on a picnic into a wilderness left to my thoughts to contemplate the seemingly intractable issues of the world around me. Indeed, I wander away in thought, into things that seem silly or complex. Those who have wondered what goes on in my head want to venture in there as I warn them it is probably no place for the sane.

Becoming an alien to the contemporary

You might also wonder why I have a theme titled Essential Snobbery 101; it is hardly about snobbery but a reflection on how norms have changed over time that some of us despite adaptations still find certain attitudes and behaviours unbelievably strange as to wonder if we have been visited by an alien civilisation.

There are themes dotted around this blog of 21 years, they are informed by perspectives and outlooks that might differ from how people would generally view things. There is a surfeit of commentary on the issues of the day, and where I have an opinion, I dare say it is rarely on the well-trodden ground of thought.

Challenging the orthodoxy brings conflict and controversy, however, celebrating independent thinking should never go out of fashion. Even when I was involved in syndication, remaining unaffiliated and so not beholden to a corporate policy mattered more to me than gaining a wider audience.

Nickel Blogs - 21 years of telling better stories

Celebrating life in abundance

21 years can seem like a lifetime, yet it is just over a third of my life. In that time, one can look back at the many things that have happened, the things done, the people encountered, the places travelled to, the events and activities that could be life-defining, and that becomes a chronicle of life.

I count my blessings and celebrate the joy of living. To have lived through two episodes of life-threatening cancer 15 years apart and still have a story to tell makes me one of the most fortunate people alive.

I take nothing for granted, the life I live is by the grace and mercy of God, medical interventions notwithstanding, the guarantees offered count for nothing if you do not have a greater assurance for results.

For writing better stories

Then what do you do when you have a blog and experience episodes of cancer? You write about it, document the treatment and side effects at diagnosis, and provide some thoughts in the aftermath.

Yes, my blog contains life stories and experiences, both the toughest and the triumphant. I am still standing because there is much more to reveal in my life, and I have better stories to tell.

Whatever inspired my blog at its inception has now turned out to be a reckoning of how favour had greeted me in too many places to mention, especially where I have neither worked for nor deserved the abundance of good that has come my way.

You would notice I rarely use the word lucky, rather, I am fortunate; 1: bringing some good thing not foreseen as certain: auspicious 2: receiving some unexpected good. Definitions according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. If anything, I have been remiss and negligent in recording the many instances of this glorious divine goodwill accorded me.

Nickel Blogs - In view of 21 years of blogging

It might be a low-key affair

I obviously had great ambitions for celebrating the 21^st anniversary of blogging in a week’s time, but that takes both organising and promoting, activities I cannot say I have the skill for.

Nickel Blogs - Celebrating 21 years of blogging

As it goes, I might just settle for a celebratory blog and a review of things that have caught my attention and interest over that period. The blog itself remains a personal blog even as I find that it garners a global readership and has been achieving record monthly visits for most of this year.

While storytelling has not gone out of fashion, it is a shame that personal blogs of a non-profit nature have waned in significance. As I have alluded to, other forms of expression and media platforms have taken hold as global attention spans have become more engaged with the stimulation of different senses for thrills.

Longevity can be impactful

The other day when I introduced a colleague to my blog, the first thing that caught their attention was the collapsed year archive that read as far back as 2003. Some people even thought I had a journalistic background; I have rarely done anything in the arts and humanities since my secondary school days. However, I do have an interest that might eventually inform a graduate programme.

If anything, the longevity alone can be interesting. I have not made many changes to the blog even though some static content does need to be updated. I won’t even ask anyone to wade through almost 4,200 blogs, but the “Random Post” button on the desktop or non-mobile version of the blog can lead to interesting topics.

Meanwhile, I will post a few thoughts until the anniversary. Thank you for visiting my blog.

Thought Picnic: Time

Time is not a property

Time is a gift we usually do not use properly or cherish its utility. The time we should make for ourselves, for others, or for things. Using time judiciously without wasting it, for ourselves or for others.

The reckoning accounted for in the scheduling and keeping of appointments, giving little room to tardiness out of consideration, courtesy, and respect. We get away too often with not being punctual and having excuses for why we have failed on our part.

There are many facets of time and timekeeping, having an agreed datum for a time reference, that time is not just ticking away, but correct on every timepiece in whatever location, so no one is confused about what the time is. If any time is askew, it should only be in a reasonable margin of error of the magnitude of a few seconds and never more.

Time is a generous gift

Beyond the exactitude of time, the most critical use of time is finding the time and making the time to cultivate relationships, to create wholesome and life-enhancing connections with ideas, people, and events.

After the fact, we find ourselves regretting not seizing the opportunities that time has afforded us, but we are allowed to pass until it is too late. We give time to the negative in holding grudges and offence when should be constructively changing the paradigm for the beauty of fellowship.

Certain things are irredeemable, yet until we have tried our best at redeeming them, we let things lapse and ruefully review in the dreamy unreality of a parallel universe that could have been the universe we inhabited if we made better use of time.

Time is a gift; it is a present we need to be more grateful for and be profusely thankful that we are given a measure of it to make the best of life and living.