Saturday and I wake up tired having crawled into bed just before 2am. I discovered just past midnight last night that my Patient View account had been locked so I could not see my blood results. I cast about the internet to find out what is going on. I find that the Patient View platform has been jettisoned for something called Patient Knows Best, am allegedly nhs platform. I spend an age registering and getting into my account to see if I can find my blood results. The platform is unfamiliar but the format seems less easy than the old app. Eventually I find my notifications and there are my most recent blood results. They are in list form and have to be mined out. In the morning I adapt the hard copy print outs from the old platform and transfer them over. The highlights are that my PSA has risen again, meaning its has more than doubled in 85 days. This is not good news. I also find that some of my blood results are not there. Platelet count, white cell count and haemoglobin are all missing. I think this is a result of only one blood vial being taken. In my head its an admin error. So I go to bed at 1:45am dispirited by the results.

I wake up in the morning late to a warm coffee followed by a hot coffee. A jigsaw company delivers to me a gift I intended for someone else. They put the intended recipients name on it but my address. An aggravation that I will need to sort out. I get up for a late bacon bagel and then start to research PSA levels and prognosis. I discover that there is a thing called PSA kinetics and velocities. I read that there are models for calculating PSA kinetics and the relationship between the velocity of PSA doubling and survival time. I find that that there are at least 22 ways of calculating the PSA velocity and that some apply to some phases of prostate cancer and to its progression. The more I read the more complex it becomes and the more “woolly ” the whole concept of PSA kinetics and its use gets, until the bottom line comes out as a dependency on individual cases. The more I read the less answers there are. It makes the review, that will include scan results, on Tuesday all the more important. I start to draft the questions I need to ask.

The poetry stanza I was due to attend goes by the board. I can’t focus on listening to a group of people of intellectualising a bunch of poems while I have the results in my head along with all the other stuff I have read over the last 18 hours. In an effort to get out my partner and I go to the garden centre to buy meat and veg. We had intended to eat but when we saw the queue and remembered how slow the service is we shopped and left for home.

Once home I watch a rugby match. Once it is over I get ready to train. I was not going to but the blood result just convince me that I have little I can do other than stay physically as fit as I can. All the reading I do on cancer tells me that it always comes back to eating a good diet and exercising, not drinking, not smoking and sleeping well. As I don’t drink or smoke, eat well and sleep well it leaves me with exercise. So I get into my kit and get myself into the garage. I set the rower up for an hours session and get started. An hour later I am done, its still only 5 degrees in the garage.

I have been using my new Fitbit and the HUNT study index to monitor my training and how fit I am. According to my latest read out from the fitness algorithm my physical fitness age is 60. My blood oxygen is consistently between 95% and 100%, my average daily heart rate is 62 so I am in reasonable shape. Could I do more? Maybe. I move into the evening eating tea and then drafting the blog against the background of TV. I while away time to midnight just to check whether the missing blood results turn up.