You can't make an omlette without ...

... breaking eggs. Or in this case, ovaries.

I always hoped I would find a reason to blog this picture - the bizarre result of trying to poach an egg so fresh that it's still warm when you crack it.

For some reason, any time I think about my own egg-production department, I imagine a couple of hard boiled eggs.

My egg-makers have been on the blink for a good while now. The kind of blink that's exquisitely painful at times, and rather dull and boringly uncomfortable in between.

2 years ago I had a fairly interesting lump on one egg-factory. At the time they thought it was a teratoma - a rather exciting kind of tumour that's all hair and teeth and nails - which my friends referred to as my "supermodel" for the few weeks between diagnosis and removal. Anyway, it turned out to be a far more boring complex hemorrhagic cyst. A big scab with veins basically. Ewwwwwwww.

Since then I've grown a fair few more of these little babies, though none as spectacular as the first one. One of the more interesting (ha ha) aspects of these cysts is that they form in the 'corpus luteum' - the shell of the egg once it has been released. They're supposed to dissolve unless you get up the spout - corpus luteums make progesterone - running this part of an early pregnancy until the placenta is big enough to take over. So, sometimes my body thinks I am pregnant.

That might be kind of fun if it lead to interesting symptoms like only being able to eat pickled onion monster munch, and having enormous breasts, but sadly it just gives me random nausea, and, much to my doc's fascination, a linea nigra - a line of pigment from the navel vertically down. They are quite impressed with that aspect!

Anyway, yesterday I had the lovely lovely doctors, nurses and surgeons at Royal Surrey Hospital sort me out, hopefully once and for all. They detached my hardboiled eggs from my bowel which they were stuck to, and from the abdominal muscle on one side too. They've drained one cyst, lasered my ovaries to remove scar tissue and treat polycystic cysts (technically you can't have both little cysts from PCO and big cysts like I get, but I've never been one for following the rules) and they've done something called segmentation which basically gives you more surface area to expand over so the remaining scar tissue gets stretched less. You wanted to know all that, didn't you!

There was no magic computer this time! Pants! But I managed to hook up a java app on my phone to chat, though drug-addled and one thumbed on a text pad it was kind of frustrating, but it was absolutely invaluable to have a virtual visit from lovely Ms M last night.

So, I'm not long home. Feeling pretty rubbish, and a bit spaced out from morphine (they were reluctant to let me out with it, but I couldn't stick another day of no blogging ;) ) and sporting a lovely badge courtesy of lovely Badger!

Warm as toast

Today I bought 3 hot water bottles. They were on a special offer at Boots ... buy two, get one free. It was lovely to sit on the sofa in the dark with my housemate, watching Cracker (recorded) and have a couple of hot-bottles each under some fluffy blankets a friend bought us. I am almost relishing the prospect of a winter with no central heating. We have a huge woodburner, and some dodgy sixties underfloor system which is effective but cost the previous occupier a whole kidney in electricity. So - blankets and the woodburner are the bigger part of the plan. The office has a small night-storage heater which can keep our fingers from freezing to the keyboards.

I say all this, feel enthused about it, now, in the warmest October since records began. Londoners are today still in short sleeves and sandals. Most peculiar. I believe people have an uncomfortable relationship with this much good weather - it's like they don't believe they deserve it. Especially in the city - where there is no investment, no personal risk. "We should be near a beach" said one guy I encountered in a waiting room this afternoon ... it seemed it was not so much that he wanted to be by the seaside, but that if he had chosen to invest in being near a beach today then his courage would have been rewarded. He would have earned his blue sky by putting himself in a place where it made a difference.

Perhaps I do feel that I've made that investment. Certainly, dry, warm and windy now means washing on the line, where once it meant sitting in the pub garden rather than the main bar. I listen for clues about when to walk the dog, when to bring the chickens in and out, when to chop wood.

Apparently tomorrow morning will begin with a light fog, lifting after lunch. That sounds like every morning to me!

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