108 – Celebration of Friendship, Staying Alive Part 8: 30 November 2024

In blog 106, I referred to our trip from Adelaide to Port Lincoln on Tuesday 30 April 2019 and to how Ann Ryan and Sue Chapman went with us.  The Port Lincoln trip was to celebrate my 70^th birthday.

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An earlier celebration of my birthday took place in the evening of Saturday 27 April 2019 at a restaurant overlooking Adelaide’s River Torrens.  In hindsight, I see this evening was the last occasion when the nearly complete friendship group gathered to have fun without the shadow of Margaret’s illness hanging over all of us.  Margaret looked very healthy in the restaurant.

Finding this photo of Margaret from just before she became deadly ill, has filled me with longing for a past that can never be relived.  Margaret looked so very healthy, yet even then, the cancer had probably already started its initial growth spurt.  During the 4 ½ years of life that Margaret then had left to her, she never again looked as healthy as she did that night.

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 Nes Fernandez also looked very healthy that evening.  The photo above is Nez on 27 April 2019.  Nez had a heart attack in 2013 and came close to death.

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The group of friends gave me a small statue of the Buddha as a birthday present.

 

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While in Port Lincoln, the four of us stayed in a rented apartment on the beachfront.  Margaret’s mobility was limited because of the neurological damage in her spine, but she and I had a wonderful time.  It was so very good to be with people who we believed – wrongly as found out later – were our very good friends.

Anne Ryan is on the left and Sue Chapman is on the right in this photo.   I took this photo on a walk along the beachfront at Port Lincoln.

 

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One of the reasons I love Port Lincoln is because of scenery just like this.

These waves were rolling into the shore just south of the town of Port Lincoln.

I took this photo just above from nearly the same spot as the preceding one.

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 Margaret loved being in Port Lincoln and her enjoyment of the trip was obvious.

  

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I never had any repeat of a sneeze attack of the same severity as that in Morialta in about July 2019, but my sneezing never went away.  It steadily accelerated.

I began to always carry two fresh handkerchiefs in my pockets and I always had to throw them into the laundry at the end of every day.  Usually, two handkerchiefs per day were not enough to soak up the great volumes of liquid produced every day by my nasal system. 

The sneeze always came several times per day and they came every day.  I never had a day when I was sneeze free. 

My stitch line from the heart operation continued to be under great strain and I had to take increasing care whenever I drank or ate anything.  If I suddenly sneezed while eating or drinking, whatever was in my mouth became a projectile which could easily hit anyone near me.  I began immediately clutching my chest whenever I detected a sneeze was about to make an appearance.  I felt it might prevent the chest from splitting open.  

Life became increasingly hard, but I did my best to ignore the sneezing.  I had no idea what was causing it, but I hoped vainly that if simply ignored it, it would eventually stop.

I was wrong of course.  

There was no possibility of the sneezing ever going away on its own, but I did not know that in mid 2019.

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Magaret watched me closely.  She knew I was in trouble, but she could not think of anything obvious that might be causing my sneezing.

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Apart from the sneezing, another disturbing symptom appeared in about September 2019..

It became increasingly impossible for me to breathe through my nose. 

At first, only one nostril appeared to be permanently blocked, but as time went by, it became impossible to breathe through either nostril.  I started exclusively breathing through my mouth.

Breathing through the mouth has at least one overwhelming factor in its favour.  Mouth breathing does enable air to get air into the body; but it is a poor substitute for breathing through the body part specifically designed to allow air to get into the system.  

We have noses and air passages because these are the main body parts designed to allow us to breathe.  Breathing through the mouth permanently is a little like relying on the backup generator for your main power source instead of relying on it for its primary function – as a backup.

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I have meditated for an hour every day since 2013.  As part of my daily meditation, I began to tell my body to unblock my nasal passages.  It was difficult, but at the end of an hour of meditation, I was usually successful in being able to breathe through both nostrils again.

Unfortunately, my mediation therapy was never successful for more than ten minutes after I had finished meditating.

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I was in trouble, but I tried to hide this from Margaret.

We had a holiday in Ireland coming up and I would not permit sneezing and breathing difficulties to get in the way of our holiday