It’s Tuesday and before we go any further my partner has just commented on my outfit. Its been a long day so here I am in furry boot slippers, kimono and Peaky Blinders cap. Its been one of those days, like a curates egg, good in parts. Breakfast and morning meds went okay as did the clearing up and general fannying about in the morning. One of those mornings that gets lost and where there is a sense of being busy but not quite sure why. I reach solid ground abut lunchtime when I settle down to read more of Calypso. The main character is a gay author and the book centres around him and his family. Its difficult to tell if I am reading something autobiographical or a piece of entire fiction. I feel tempted to research the author and see if he wears the sort of clothes he has his main character wear, such as a triple hat and long culottes that swish as he moves. Has he really got sisters who go shopping with him in Japan and buy what sounds like appalling clothes, and did his sister commit suicide. Is it all just fiction and the is author having a giraffe. Is there some bespectacled giant of a man who is making all this up to amuse his wife and children. So I hope you can see why I am tempted to Google him. My partner and I take the car to the garage to check the tyres and fill it with petrol for tomorrow’s run to Felixstowe. That goes well and we return home to do more fannying about and reading before we go into town for lunch.
In town it is raining so we zip up and hood up as we walk to the Merchant of Venice. A strange Shakespeare based eatery that has a Lambretta inside and swing seats at the window tables. On the walls are murals of the Merchant of Venice and Shakespeare. They play over loud Italian music and we have to ask then to close the open back glass wall as its blowing a gale and bloody cold. We order drinks and pasta and chat. My lasagne was interesting as I had to hunt for the pasta in it and the garlic bread arrived as dainty triangles laid carefully on a bed of salad. It is clear that there is not a single Italian person on the staff. It appears to be an Indian Italian restaurant/coffee house. It is definitely some form of fusion. We wash our meal down with coffee and hot chocolate and then walk down to the hospital in the rain to collect my next three cycles of chemo.
There are times when you know that a service is bad. The scribbled note on the desk that “waiting time roughly 50 minutes” is a bit of a give away, that and the dispensing counter has Pidgeon holes labelled “Confidential counselling”, which is three feet away from the reception counter where everyone can here every word that is being said. At one point when we are asked to go into the waiting room because the area is confidential I almost laughed. No sooner were we in than my name was called. Everybody in a half mile radius now know that I have three cycles of chemotherapy, what my address is and date of birth, I felt like saying to the dispensing guy ” and confidentially my cock is a foot long”. My partner and I leave and march back to the car in the not so nearby hotel car park in the heavy rain, arriving fairly soaked.
The drive home was uneventful but I had just got indoors and was unloading my soggy coat when a friend called. |we chatted for a while until she had to break off to complete a chore, I took advantage of the break to do my vitals before she rang back and we were able to complete our conversation. Its been a long struggle with long COVID but she has fought her way back to begin going back to work at the end of the month, it a real achievement, especially when her employers want to keep going through there competency processes. It is at this point that I get out of my wet clothes and don my odd assortment of comfort and at hand clothes and retreat to the sofa with a Tunnocks tea cake and a glass of water, but not before I get a small suitcase out of the loft. Obviously my first task is to fill my drugs wallets for the next to weeks with my newly acquired drugs. I have this off pat now and I soon have the satisfying rattle of two full wallets and a stock pile of chemo drugs to see me through to December. I can now at least plan my life for the next three months around my 28 day injection as usual. Now that’s a strange sentence, but there you go, a 28 day cycle with hot flushes is my normal with the occasional set of bloods thrown in. Job done and drugs stored I settle down to draft the blog before the England v Scotland friendly football match. I’m expecting at least one red card.
