Monday, its a jab Monday, so I get up slowly, having done my cyber checks and taken my vitals. In my cyber messages was this:

I think I get caught up in thinking that I am the person in my head, the young energetic person with youth on my side, ambitious and with limitless energy rather than the actual seventy five year old with stage four metastatic prostate cancer person that I am. Its important that I do not define myself by my disease however to remain moving I have to balance the management of it and what ever else I wish to do. Every day I get now is a real gift and an opportunity. The opportunities now are more cerebral than before but since my journey started I’ve managed holidays and trips, joined my local poetry stanza and published my first book of poetry. Along the way there has been some dips like managing my sisters death and the other challenges that family life brings so all in all the past four years has been an interesting learning curve. It has been a time of much reading in order to keep my brain fed with the result that I have read much more than I would have done and almost without exception the books have been new and outstanding, to which I owe much to friends who either point me in the right direction or gift me “must read” books. At the moment the balance is a bit more of a juggle but with smaller steps I should e able to keep moving forward.

So as I sit this morning looking at the sunshine I start to draft todays blog early. Before I go to the GP surgery later today I will hopefully type up a couple of new poems and maybe write a letter. After that I will see what small steps I can find to take.

I lunch on bacon sandwiches before walking down to the GP surgery. It is a real effort and i arrive feeling crap. Once called in I hand over the jab and soon the nurse is sticking the needle into me. I am ushered out and I start the semi shuffle back home but I become so enraged with my self that I force myself to go to the Co-op to get a paper, they have none, and a bag of chocolate buttons. As I walk home I become more angry with myself and mutter the odd motivational “for fuck sake Roland get a grip”. Judging by the look a fellow pedestrian gave me I obviously said this a bit louder than I intended.

Arriving home I cannot believe that I am so out of condition and salts. I settle on the sofa to cool down when I get a message from my eldest daughter to check my accounts. I do, and find that the solicitor is winding up my sisters estate which means the rest of my inheritance has landed in my bank account. I do not really care if its a fiver or five hundred but it signals the end of more than a year of death admin and that is a relief.

I start to type up a couple of poems that I wrote recently and add them to my “all I have file”, whilst thinking about putting another collection together to try out a British based publisher. I update the blog before returning to the poetry project and my Ruth Ozeki book.

I am feeling rough when I go to the toilet and find I have blood in my urine again. I am so pissed off that the little walk I’ve taken has induced this. All I can do is rest, drink water, put my feet up and rest. It means I cannot help lift in the Tesco order when it arrives later in the evening, and feel like a chocolate fireguard. I’m seething inside at feeling so fucking useless, all I can do is grit my teeth, and try to be rational and take it tiny steps at a time. By the time Only Connect (the impossible quiz show) is on my mid day injection is getting sore and I down some more paracetamol. Tonight is a night I go to bed early and curl up and hope I sleep as long as possible or as uninterrupted as little as possible. So I down my night meds and retreat from it all. What a day.