Lola did indeed make it home, full of energy and ravenous, on Sunday night. As she has a saline flush running for 12 hours following chemotherapy, it is usually late before she manages to escape Addenbrooks and often she gets in around 10pm. It seems that she needs to wind down before she can go to bed and this involves Wii challenges or episodes of 'Outnumbered'. Sometimes there's a danger that I'll have to go to bed and leave her chilling out.... I am so relieved to see her that I just relax and need to sleep, she on the other hand is completely wired!

She is needing fewer doses of anti-sickness this week which is great, and has managed school for half a day yesterday and until 230pm today. I can see her tiring as the week progresses though. Her haemoglobin levels will be falling sharply by now and she is begin to take on her 'Bride of Dracula' pallor which inevitably leads to a transfusion... I'd place a bet on Friday. Thanks to a great deal of dogged determination on the part of Miss Heyward, Lola has finally been asssigned a home tutor who will face the challenge next Tuesday afternoon. I thought perhaps Lola might show reluctance at being pursued into her home, but so far she has expressed tentative curiosity. Not sure she'd ever admit it, but i'm sure she misses the challenge of learning enormously. Good luck Miss Smart

I made loads of phone calls today, hopelessly optimistic that Birmingham may have set a date for surgery. Apparently, we are unlikely to know for sure until the week before as, despite being top of the list as a child, anyone needing a biopsy takes priority. The surgeon needs to see the MRI and CT images and a radiographer at the Royal Orthopaedic prepares a report on these. Then the measurement x-rays taken back in October are sent away so that the prosthetic arm can be made... takes about a week. I hope we get to see the prosthesis before surgery. I think it might help Lola to know what will replace her humerus... and I think it will help me too!

The CT results were back today too. Another moment of confused positive/negative information which was difficult to make sense of! The scan shows 'no change' and the team are pleased with this result. It seems that the pulmonary nodules on her lungs remain visible but have not changed in any way. My understanding is that, were they to be metastases of the cancer then there would most likely have been a change in their presentation, due to the chemotherapy. As there is no change it is possible they are just normal clusters of cells and not cancer at all. As the largest is 0.2cm.... absolutely tiny... they do not qualify as metastases anyway in the Ewing's Sarcoma protocol... confusing stuff! However, the hospital cannot ascertain for sure what the nodules are as they are too tiny to find in a biopsy. Instead they will just be monitored for change. All this information is, I think, quite good!! Amos returns from his holiday on Feb 1st and things will all be much clearer i'm sure...

On a completely different note, sometimes I feel that not working, in fact not leaving the village that frequently, my mind is beginning to shrink and, apart from a whole repertoire of medical terms and procedures, I have less and less to talk about (doesn't stop me trying, obviously!!). Not today though... today, just for one brief 6am moment, I was the bringer of (potentially calamitous) up to the minute information. I witnessed, at first hand, the fire at the Suffolk Food Hall... impressed?!

I promise I wasn't just driving around in the early hours looking for something to talk about.... I was returning from dropping Joe at Stansted Airport at 5am (how devoted?), and loving the empty roads, when I was stopped on the Strand by the enormous water hose which lay across the road and down into the river. Have to admit, i didn't actually see the flames... just a lot of smoke and fire engines! Still, I like to think I saved a lot of people wasted journey time to their mid-morning cappuccino and croissant by my timely Facebook posting........!!