Sunday and once again I wake up in the spare room as I continue to quarantine myself with my crap cold. I’m down to my last Lemsip. I do wake up about 9am and like an automata get myself on the scales for my Sunday weigh in. I am 97.3 kilos, exactly the same as last week, which is pleasing as I have not been able to train this as a result of my York trip and this bloody cold. On the cold front, I detect improvement, my nose is not quite as runny, I seem to have stopped sneezing and the Lemsip appears to be bringing relief. My partner brings me coffee and toast and like a trooper brings me more Lemsip from the shop. I take my morning meds washed down with Lemsip and settle down to see how I feel in the next couple of hours.

I spend my morning changing the Tesco order in anticipation of taking my partner to the hospital tomorrow for a quick appointment in the afternoon. It would be Sod’s law for Tesco to turn up while we were out so a Tuesday slot seem a sagacious choice. I spend time checking to see if I can find Christmas and birthday ideas on the internet but to no avail. I still feel rough but I am beginning to feel guilty about locking myself away and steadfastly staying in bed. I take this as a good sign and wonder about just how compromised my immune system is given my cancer and the chemo and try to gauge what is a reasonable recover time for me. My partner is going to see her brother this afternoon so I might risk a bowl of soup and a watch of a rugby match on the TV in the lounge. I have a growing to do list, including writing letters to several people but at the moment they would be just infection risks so I hold off at the moment. I have my next oncology review in four days and I am thinking about what I want to say and share adn whether they will just look at the arithmetic and sign me up for another three month stretch on Chemo. My guess is that this is what they will do and then call me in for a face to face annual review in March sometime unless the bloods monitoring goes awry or I get further symptoms. I guess that is all they can offer at the moment as from their perspective I’m doing as well as can be expected. My basic issue is energy. The chemo side effects are mostly fatigue, and as people point out to me I am 75 so should expect to slow down a bit, but that is not how it plays out in my head. I wonder sometimes if there are drugs that would give me a lift, a quick snort of cocaine perhaps or some “uppers” but I have never been into that as I never liked the idea of being out of control, certainly now with a body full of meds it would seem a foolish adventure. So I will settle for a dish of soup and an afternoon rugby match and then I will reassess how I am.

I do have one question; why do lips dry and crack when you have a cold. I am regularly using Vaseline “lip therapy” at the moment. It one of those addition irritations that goes with the cold. Just one of those little mysteries I guess.

My plan for soup and rugby goes okay so I stay in the lounge in my sofa spot and see the evening through on TV. A friend unexpectedly calls me whilst traveling through Leicester on her way to Leamington. I think she said she was visiting a dog breeder, but I may have misunderstood. It is a short call but a nice surprise. By 10:30 I am done, spoonless and take my self off to the spare room again to finish drafting the blog, taking my meds and washing them down with a final Lemsip of the day. My body chooses now to have a hot flush, so I sit it out before I try to settle down and sleep. I am tired but I am getting hints that I am starting to recover from my cold, it just feels like its going to take a while to recover from this one.