16 Thursday Apr 2009
To my surprise and delight National Geographic Intelligent Traveller blog has published my contribution to their I Heart My City series. You just copy & paste their list of questions into an email and return it to them with your responses. Which I did. But it was still very exciting when I saw Marilyn Res’s tweet announcing it yesterday.
My fifteen minutes of fame. 🙂
06 Monday Apr 2009
Posted in cancer, chemo, food & drink, friends, neighbours, restaurants, sevilla, work
When Susan took me out for lunch on Friday (the day after going back on chemo) we tried this recently opened pizzeria called L’Oca Giuliva, right across the street from my house. And I knew straight away that this was going to become the new takeaway pizza joint for casa az. Not that I actually order many takeaway pizzas – in fact, hardly any at all – but they are curiously very good “chemo comfort food”. Especially when, like yesterday evening, I’d just woken up from a four hour nap, was feeling peckish, but was still way too groggy to even make toast…
24 Tuesday Mar 2009
Have decided to get creative about this …
Had the latest PET scan last Thursday, after having been “rescued” by my new oncologist a few days earlier. She was the first person since all this started last May to point out that CEA marker tests were totally useless in my case (they always ended up “normal” even when IÂ actually had tumours) and also suggested that CT scans were probably not going to be that helpful either. Hence the latest PET scan. And well, it wasn’t very good news …
19 Thursday Mar 2009
Posted in cancer, food & drink, friends, health & happiness, hospitals, photos, sevilla
That’s Pilar, aka “mi Pili”, and one third of The Team.
Yesterday I had my third PET scan, which had been recommended by my new oncologist last Friday. Susan (Pip) couldn’t come with me for this one as she has a friend from the US visiting, and so I was very lucky that my friend Carmen was available. Based on the last two PETs, I told her we would probably be out of there in about three hours. Wrong! We ended up there for six hours, so I definitely owe her one. Though she said she didn’t mind at all as she had nothing planned that afternoon and had brought books and some stuff from work, plus when we were both waiting together we talked, played Hangman on my iPhone, went for a snack, and had quite a good time…
17 Tuesday Mar 2009
Posted in health & happiness, plants, sevilla, spain
This weekend the first orange blossom (azahar) was spotted in the centre of Sevilla. This is always the first sign of spring for me, though it never becomes “official” until you see the ya es primavera banners across the windows of El Corte Inglés.
For the next three weeks or so the streets of Seville will smell like heaven. I used to wonder why I found the fragrance of orange blossom so soothing until I found out that azahar has many therapeutic qualities, including its use as a natural sedative. Other therapeutic properties of orange blossom oil (aka Neroli) are antidepressant, antiseptic, anti-infectious, antispasmodic, aphrodisiac, bactericidal, carminative, cicatrisant, cytophylactic, cordial, deodorant, digestive, emollient, and tonic. It takes about 1000 lbs. of orange blossoms to make 1 lb. of Neroli oil, which no doubt accounts for its rather hefty price tag.
But as lovely as Neroli is, it is no comparison for the delicate scent of orange blossom in the fresh spring air. Wish you could be here…
[ from azahar’s Sevilla ]
casa azahar 