We went to see Dr P yesterday and the news was not as bad as we had expected. The magic PSA number is 6.8, not much of an increase on the previous one of 6.2, and certainly nowhere near doubling. So the rate of increase has obviously slowed. As well as the usual blood test, on the Monday of this week I had an all-body CT scan and a head and neck scan. (I generally have this combo every three months, so am well used to the rigmarole.) This showed one new spot, but also that an old one (on the L4 vertebra) had almost completely dissolved. So, in other words, a steady state. Dr P’s wrap-up was that the disease is stable and low volume. Chemo will not be required unless and until things go south; I am just going to continue on the existing regimen of a Zolodex implant every three months, and four enzalutamides a day. We were obviously relieved, and celebrated with a drink before dinner, which was Chinese takeaway — night off for the cook!

We have been watching Succession on Binge, which we have on a free three month trial. Good, but not as outstanding as Mare of Easttown, via the same source. I have embarked on a mini project I have thinking about for quite a while, digitising my German index cards to put onto my online vocabulary lists on dict.cc. I had hoped to use our new printer scanner for this, but while this scans the cards perfectly well, even after quite a few goes I can’t get it to save the scanned files in any editable format. (I am too cheap to pay for full-fat Adobe Acrobat, which would probably do this.) I have, however, found a workaround, involving scanning a batch of cards with Google Lens on my phone, then copying that text to the laptop. I then paste the text into a Google Sheet, massage it a bit, then upload it to dict.cc as a tab delimited file. Nerdy paradise!