Sarah’s Myeloma Blog

Amazed to see people outside close friends and contacts are visiting my site!

The following comments are really in response to what Gregory has said, as it’s quite common for people to come up with this argument.

We are not in a post-industrial era in world terms - merely that in this country Thatcher began the process of destroying manufacture and subsequent govts have broadly continued the policy of allowing jobs to disappear and be moved abroad. We still need manufacturing in this country - and in fact still have quite a lot going on, but not in the big workplaces of the past. These have moved abroad. We were told by govt that this didn’t matter - we could have a solid economy based on services, info technology and the city - this has been exposed as a lie. We do in fact need large scale manufacturing instead of having to rely on imports.

Thatcher set out to destroy trade unionism, not because it was irrelevant to the economy but because it threatened capitalism. Capitalism suffered a set back after the war with the arrival of nationalisation and the welfare state. Now it fought back. Since the 80s the city has reclaimed its ground through deregulation, privatisation etc, supported by governments who have passed anti-TU legislation and become friends with big business. With a few exceptions workers didn’t defend themselves adequately and membership of unions fell, especially in the private sector as we lost our major industries.

Having said that just under half of all workers are still in a workplace where there is TU representation. In the public sector 60% are unionised. The hourly wages of unionised workers are over 15% higher of non-unionised workers.

Unionised workplaces, where workers are happier with their wages and conditions and management is good will be more productive. Workers in co-operatives have a stake in their industries and are incentivised - but where bosses take huge bonuses and workers are not listened to, they will not be.

It is nonsense to say that most workers could or even should boost their earnings in the ways suggested. Why would I as a teacher, or nurses or firemen want or have the time or energy to do that? Why should people working hard in factories, transport or energy have to? We are entitled to decent wages, pensions and working conditions in the jobs we have. Only fighting through our unions will get us those - unions are more necessary than ever. We have been told too long that individualism is what counts - in fact we are most powerful, most productive and happier when working as a collective. Individualism won’t help us when our pension scheme collapses, hospital wards close, bus services cease to run,  or the lights go out because we are dependent on foreign energy sources.

Time for a fight back - kick capitalism while it’s down and demand the political parties start to follow our agenda! Lets have a debate about how we should do that.

Thought bit was time to start some musings, but will keep them short as I’m tired from gardening!

Very amused at all the angst in the papers over the weekend on how we need to get back to some sort of kinder and more responsible capitalism - as if that has ever existed! About time people went back to Marx! Capitalism can only be challenged and contained by workers. Currently workers in Britain and America are not providing that challenge and they will be the ones who pay for the disorder in the markets with unemployment, cuts to services and pensions etc. Improvements to our lives have only happened when we have fought for them - when capitalism has been scared of people working together. Fear of democracy - especially proper worker’s democracy as opposed to parliamentary democracy which boils down to a vote every 5 years - got us education, the NHS, housing etc.

There will be plenty of people getting rich on the latest debacle, but telling us we need to sacrifice ourselves to save capitalism. The only sensible option for workers is to fight: we need to be challenging pay restraint for a start, instead of buying into capitalist lies about wages causing inflation etc. As workers get less money in wages they spend less and demand falls, exacerbating unemployment.

Our political parties offer nothing except more wage restraint, cuts in spending (except on war and bailing out capitalism) and privatisation - more money for capitalists. Voting for any of them is a waste of time. Now is the time to work together and rebuild our unions - get involved!

I haven’t had time to develop arguments in detail, but comments are welcome!

It does look as if the comments are working now. To make one: if you click on the page or post you want to comment on eg ‘Comments on my blog’, you will see it says just to the right of that title  ‘2 comments’ (or no comments or however many have been made). Click on that and boxes will appear below. You just need to put in your name and email (website not needed) and then type in what you want to say in the box and submit. It’s a long business learning how to do this for us novices!

If you want to comment, you should be able to do so now. We’ve been fiddling with the settings to make it easier, although if spam starts to arrive, we’ll have to make it harder to comment without prior moderation. Remember that your comments will be seen by everyone!!! So don’t write anything you don’t want seen by others. We’re still working out how to do all this, so if it doesn’t work, send me an email to tell me.

Just want to say to students who are just off the uni - good luck! It is always a bit daunting to start with, but you will soon settle in and doing the subject you enjoy is always fantastic! Also, the new people, the social life, the cheap beer etc…. Let me know how you are getting on if you have time.

As I said in my last post, my consultant and Leicester (where the transplant experts are) have decided to have another go at collecting my stem cells. This time it will mean a different chemo regime, involving at least 3 different drugs and 4 or 5 days in hospital (called ESHAPS regime for those who are interested). This is used for other cancers too and is apparently good for tackling myeloma as well as stimulating the stem cells. Then it’ll be back to the injections and another stint in Leicester.

This time I will have a line put in my chest before the treatment starts (it’s done under sedation as an outpatient so should be fine). I don’t know all the dates yet, but everything is more and more delayed as there are others in the queue and everything also depends on when Leics can fit me in. I’m not even sure if I’ll get the transplant before Christmas now - the earliest slot available is the end of November - and that might not be me!

Anyway, nothing is happening next week and I’m at least glad of a bit of a break as I have felt shaky and tired and my digestive system definitely needs some recovery time. I think I didn’t realise that all the treatment would take it out of me, and have possibly overdone it a bit. I may also have had a virus, as my blood counts were a bit low last week, but are recovering this week.

Anyway, at least things are moving forward again - so positive in many respects.

Having gone ‘live’ yesterday evening I now need to organise the pages of my blog and get to grips with managing and editing. I’m a bit tired, as I was up reading for a while in the night and up early this morning, so don’t expect much today!

On the myeloma front, my consultant has told me that Leics advises trying stem cell collection again, using a different chemo to stimulate the cells. This is called ESHAP and may involve several days in hospital while I have the necessary drug combination, before the injections and cell collection. I’ll learn more next week - although I found some patient advice about it on the web, which looked useful. However, it may not be exactly the same locally, so I’ll just enjoy not having treatment for a week or so.

The kids seem to be OK with my convict look, but I still get a bit of a shock when I see myself in the mirror! It’s definitely cooler in the day without a scarf on, but when I went outside on a slug hunt late last night my head certainly felt the cold!