Tuesday the 5th of September, in all the excitement of my partners mothers 95th birthday party and the new grandson staying over the weekend I had forgotten that four years ago on Sunday was my first day of Chemotherapy. With a Gleeson score of 9+ and a predicted 8 months on the survival graphs, the first Chemotherapy was going to add an additional 18 months. Here I am four years later with a falling PSA, the best standard blood results I’ve ever had since I started and a new hurdle of high cholesterol. In that time I’ve been on holidays, seen friends, out lived my sister and been around to see my third grandchild come into the world. Both my daughters are working and either being mothers or continuing to study, while my son continues to forge a life in Sweden with his family. My partner continues to amaze me. Although I have not yet managed to get my poetry published I do still write some along with letters to friends. I survived COVID. All in all that’s not bad going. I am sure I have missed a few things, but there is a limit to self proclamation that is tolerable. My family, loves and garden sustain me, in that I have increasingly found that simple things are most sustaining and that what foundations I laid inside myself have borne me up over the last four years. Its not easy but now there is a real battle going on and once again I have to find the discipline and will power to get back to training, to drop my weight and combat the worst of the current chemo’s side effects. The next five years might need a revised strategy, but I am working on it.
Today was again a sunny one. As I got out of bed I could hear my partner in the office busy at work. I contemplated breakfast in terms of lowering my cholesterol and went for muesli, a good choice I thought. Of course I started to research cholesterol and sources of Omega 3. What I found was a lot of bollocks written as infoads, where there was a survey of the best products that inevitably had the sponsors product rated as the best, which is just a neat way of slagging off the competition. When I got through all the crap adn found some solid peer reviewed research it turns out that there is no firm evidence to suggest that Omega 3 supplements are of any proven benefits and that eating oily fish a couple of times a week is good enough. So farewell Roland and hello Dolphin boy as I go in pursuit of oily fish, kippers, herrings, sardines and mackerel beware. Strawberries are supposed to be good as well so suddenly a breakfast of strawberries and small flute of champagne is looking good. By the time I had researched it was time to hang the washing out, have a shower and put on my dapper clothes to go and do some. business in town.
On my return there was time for lunch, tuna roll and and apple (both cholesterol busters). I put more washing in and retreated to the Shed. There I wrote letters. I’ve discarded my artist ink for ordinary pen ink. In this weather the artist ink cloys and will not play well at all with my dipping pens. My letter complete I walk over to the post box to send it and return to peg out the latest lot of washing and begin to draft the blog. I do not get very far as the garden guy turns up so there are drinks to be made and conversations to be had. I can feel myself running out of spoons as I continue to draft the blog until tea is ready. The family dines on the patio as the evening cools. I later discover that I have missed a call from a friend, which is disappointing. I bring in my washing and settle down again to finish drafting the blog. I am more or less out of spoons now and entering the zombie phase of the evening, which means struggling to read or TV. So I guess it will be TV and my night meds before going to bed and hoping for a cool night, nothing worse than hot flushes on a hot night.
