Hmm

Ever coughed so hard you broke a rib? I think I did last Saturday.
I believe I'd already cracked it the week before during a severe coughing fit and I'd been in a fair bit of discomfort since.
Saturday morning I was laying on my side when I coughed particularly hard. As I did something went "pop" in my right side and the pain was excruciating! I was unable to move from the couch all day. Any sort of movement and I was in agony.
However after only a couple of days the pain is now quite bearable and so I'm not sure I actually broke a rib.. maybe I just tore some cartilage. Would be most unusual for the pain to subside so quickly.

Last weekend my brother Mark and I went up to Waikanae to do some pest extermination for a woman who owns a farm in PekaPeka that is over-run with rabbits and Pukeko.
We obtained a permit from "Fish and Game" to shoot the Pukeko out of season as they were destroying the farmer's grain feed and causing a general nuisance. In one night they had pecked open the bags of over a thousand dollars worth of feed leaving it wet and unable to be stored.

The paddocks were over-run with the birds and I figured we would have no problem bringing the numbers down. However no matter how many shots I fired I just couldn't hit a single one.
After a couple of hours of traipsing through boggy paddocks and having frightened off all of the birds into the neighbours paddocks we gave up and went home feeling somewhat embarrassed at our poor shooting skills.

Today I set my rifle up in a jig and checked the sites over a distance of 50 meters. I fired a shot at a board that was 900mm high and 600mm wide and the bullet missed it completely! Somehow in the 12 months since I last sited in my rifle it must have been knocked out of alignment.
I tightened the scope, fired another round at the board and then adjusted the cross-hairs to align with the bullet hole. A rapid succession of shots all into the same spot confirmed that it's now correctly sited and I won't be firing two feet over their heads next time!

I went for walk to the top of the hill today. I wanted to test out my lungs now that my cough is gone.

It's a real grunt to the top but I managed to better my last time up and made it to the top gate in 33 minutes, returning in a total of 59 minutes. I'm fairly sure most people would struggle to to keep up, so I'm pretty happy about my over-all fitness considering what my body's been through in the last five years.

Oh and the view from the track is fantastic making the walk well worth the effort.

It's still another couple of weeks before my next CT scan and then two weeks after that before I find out if I have relapsed. In the meantime I live on tender-hooks.

I've still no major signs or B-symptoms. Fingers crossed the nodes have shrunk and I can start planning for the future again.