Thank you to those of you who have commented or sent me messages after I put this blog on hiatus in April due to illness. I thought I would post a brief update. I was hesitant to post details previously, because I didn’t/don’t intend to turn this site into a personal blog about my health.
For those of you wondering… I was diagnosed with cancer in April 2023. I decided to stop my weekly posts to the blog for a year at the time, as I knew I could not commit to new posts reliably while I underwent treatment, and that has turned out to be the case.
I have spent about seven weeks in hospital since my diagnosis. Back in May/June I underwent 27 sessions of radiotherapy, combined with oral chemotherapy, which often resulted in me needing to nap for a few hours in the afternoon. I was in no state back then to e.g. research posts, though it would have been a welcome distraction.
I’m scheduled to have my twelfth and (for now) final cycle of intravenous chemotherapy just after Christmas. I have coped much better than I thought I would with my treatments (i.e. there has been no nausea/vomiting, mental fog or general feeling of being unwell), though have had some setbacks along the way; the worst of which has been a fracture in my spine (an unforeseen complication of radiotherapy).
Scans have revealed that I am responding well to treatment, although I still have some way to go, including further surgery.
I am not going to pretend that the last eight months have been easy, but they could have been much worse. I intend to resume my 1992 and 1983 chart recaps in April 2024, when - hopefully - I will be in a better position health-wise.
When I return, I have a stack of newly-uncovered singles that peaked outside the ARIA top 100 from 1989-1992 to add to my earlier posts. See you then!
