Nadine is taking between ten to twenty pills and stuff every day: Something that enables her stomach to take all the others, painkillers, cortisone, some medication for the days after each session of chemotherapy, vitamines, a laxative,… Plus the homeopathic stuff to fight the side effects of all the other medication. And, not to forget, there are also some ataractics to prevent another steroid psychosis.

It’s my job to prepare her four mixes of pills for the next day every evening. From a system theorists point of view, I’m always wondering how this variety works together without causing god knows what – but it seems to be balanced pretty well.

P.S.: The song is called ‘Serious Drugs’ and is sung by Scottish band BMX Bandits.

We’re having back some routine now: clearly scheduled therapy sessions, daily walks, early bedtime, constant mealtimes plus me going to work three days a week. When I’m off, family members and friends take over and spend a few hours with Nadine, taking care that she gets a proper lunch and some entertainment. In the picture above you can see our friend Valerie preparing an organic pumpkin soup.

All our helpers so far did very well and we received lots of offers – we currently have more requests than vacancies. One problem is that we don’t have that many keys to distribute so that our ‘staff’ has to ring the doorbell. Unfortunately, Nadine won’t hear that when she’s asleep – and she falls asleep quite often in the late morning. As she won’t hear her iPhone either, I cranked up the volume of our landline phone. If you come around, make sure you got the number handy.

If you put the songs on this blog in a playlist, they sum up to almost 80 minutes. That’s exactly the length of an audio CD and they would fit on a good old C90 tape too. What started as a playful addition to the messages became some kind of sport – I admit that I felt a certain urge to find a suitable song to every post. One reason for that was that Nadine loved the surprises and the songs. Another reason was my nerdish perfectionism…

But in the long run I won’t be able to keep up the standard of a song for each post. Honestly speaking, I’m quite surprised that I found so many suitable ones to last for a whole month or the length of an audio CD – I expected myself to run out of ideas sooner. Okay, not every song matched with the content of it’s post exactly and some relations were a bit far-fetched. For my excuse, let me quote Damon Michael Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy:

“songs are never quite the answer, just a soundtrack to a life”

And that’s what they are supposed to be. A soundtrack to Nadine’s life that gives her comfort and energy and can be used during chemotheraphy and other tasks.