She cycles, She cycles

My wife Sue has recently taken up cycling and has just set off for her first proper cycling adventure - riding to Norfolk, from Middlesbrough, solo, over five days. I'm really proud of her - she's been training really hard over the past few months and is now much fitter than me. She has just started writing a blog of her own about her cycling exploits. You can find it at https://shecyclesshecycles.wordpress.com
Please visit it and if you like it (you will) you can click on 'Follow' in the bottom right of the screen, to get an email each time she adds an entry

More weeds and wildflowers - Yarrow and Sneezewort

             

Back in June I wrote a blog-post about a group of plants called Umbellifers  - the Carrot Family

(What is an Umbellifer? - and how to tell two of the commonest ones apart). In it I mentioned a couple of species which are sometimes mistaken for Umbellifers. One of these was Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), pictured above.

Even if you don't think you know Yarrow, if you live in the UK you will certainly have seen it - its feathery leaves and white, umbel-like flower heads are a very common sight in lawns, grass verges and weedy roadsides across the whole country. If you are a gardener you may be familiar with some of the cultivated varieties, including some pretty pink or yellow flowered forms.

Despite its appearance, Yarrow is actually in the daisy family (the Asteraceae, formerly known as the Compositae)  - if you look closely at the flower heads you can see that it is made up of lots of little 'daisies', but with white centres as well as white outer petals. Also, and perhaps surprisingly, each of these little 'daisies' is not actually a single flower, but a flower-head made up of several tiny flowers (or 'florets') - this is also true of daisies themselves and all the other members of the family, such as dandelions, thistles and sunflowers.

The first part of the scientific name of Yarrow - Achillea - is a reference to Achilles, the  character from Greek mythology, whose soldiers apparently used it to treat their wounds. The specific name - millefolium - means 'a thousand leaves' and refers to its feathery foliage. This is also reflected in one of the old names for the species, Milfoil.

Yarrow has a close relative in the genus Achillea, called Sneezewort (Achillea ptarmica). This is much less common in the UK than Yarrow and is usually found in damp grassland, although the plant in the photographs below was growing on an overgrown roadside verge in the North York Moors, and very close to some Yarrow, making it very easy to compare the two and look at the similarities and differences. The individual flower-heads look quite similar although they are bigger in Sneezewort and the way they are grouped together does not look so obviously 'umbel-like'. The leaves, on the other hand, are quite different, being long and thin with little teeth, rather than deeply divided and feathery.

  

My First Tattoo

Today, at the age of 48, I got my first tattoo. And my second and my third.

This surprising occurrence (to those who know me) took place at James Cook University Hospital, in Middlesbrough, after I went in to have the ‘Planning CT Scan’ two weeks prior to starting my radiotherapy.
First, a bit of background. If you’re reading my blog for the first time you might not know that in January I was diagnosed with B-cell Lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, and subsequently had five months of intensive chemotherapy treatment, necessitating me spending rather a lot of time as an in-patient in hospital (a new experience for me). The scan I had after the chemotherapy showed that I had had a ‘very excellent response’ to the treatment and that I was in ‘complete metabolic remission’ - meaning that the cancer had, to all intents and purposes, gone. However, just to be absolutely sure that there are no stray cells hanging around from which it might grow back, I have to have three weeks of radiotherapy treatment, starting on the 14th of August. 

And so, back to today’s scan and my tattoos. The scan is so that they know exactly where to target the x-rays (radiotherapy being basically a concentrated beam of high-energy x-rays (my radiographer friends might be able to correct me here)). Before I had the scan I had to lie on a bed with my hands clasped behind my head.  Underneath my top half was a weird sort of air-bag filled with little beads (like a bean-bag).  Four staff members, two on each side, pushed the ‘bean bag’ up against me while the air was being pumped out of it so that it formed a rigid shell around my torso, but I was still able to get in and out of it. The point of this was to make sure that I am lying in exactly the same position each time that I have the radiotherapy. Once that was done they used a black marker pen to draw some dots on my chest (one on either side and one in the middle) and then I had the scan. I have had several CT scans over the past few months and am getting quite used to it. This was one of the ones where they inject a special dye into my veins which will show up on the scan and it was over in a few minutes. 

After that came the great excitement of getting my first tattoos. They had told me in advance that I would be having these and I was looking forward to being properly ‘cool’ and ‘down with the youth’ for the first time in my life. So what have I got, permanently etched on my chest? An eagle and a couple of hearts perhaps? Or maybe three bees to commemorate the jokey name that I gave my ‘Bee-cell Lymphoma’ in the early days of my diagnosis? Sadly it was nothing so good as any of those - it is just three little dots so that they can make sure I am properly lined up when they zap me with high-energy x-rays in two weeks time. 

P.S. And to answer the question which I’m sure some of you are asking - it only hurt a tiny bit, and it felt just like it does when you have a blood test and they say ‘Sharp scratch’ before pricking you with the needle.