Home again, home again...

Well, I'm home.

I've had my head drilled into and had a bit of brain scooped out; I've been sleep-deprived and dosed with morphine and steroids; I've been crushingly bored and weirdly elated.

I've also had some excellent, highly-skilled medical care, paid for automatically by the insurance policy into which I've been contributing by taxation for the last 25 years or so, and I've seen some people around me who are in much, much worse positions than me who are receiving exactly the same excellence for no other reason than that they need it.

Please bear this in mind when anyone suggests any nonsense about harsh, unfortunate but oh-so-terribly, hard-but-necessary, under-the-current-conditions decisions to be made in connection with dismantling or undermining any of this, and then enquire nicely if the person suggesting it is adequately insured on a private basis to cover the stitches they're about to require themselves.

Because thanks to all that I'm back sitting on my comfy couch with little more than an itchy scalp, an unbalanced haircut and a slightly exotic scar. And it feels great.

There's still a way to go. I'm on a self-reducing course of steroids, I'll be on anti-epileptics for the foreseeable, and on Wednesday I need to pop myself back in to have my staples popped out, and to see an oncologist about the scarier process of where the treatment goes from here. And that could mean a lot of pain and exhaustion, depending on what they decide. But I'm through this bit, and I think that's probably the worst.

I'll be winding this blog down a bit from here on in. I've posted every day for the last ten days, and I think that was fine while I had stuff to say and poor-taste jokes to crack, and I hope it's given people a grin or maybe even helped someone somewhere; but there comes a point where it all gets a bit self-indulgent, so I'm going to rein it in from now and update only when I have something to report.

If you'd like to know when that is, you can follow the blog by using the feature off to the right, pick it up as an RSS feed, or just follow me on Twitter.

Thanks for reading, and I'll keep you posted.