Thursday, I wake the sounds of my partner cleaning and tidying, she has a friend coming to take out for lunch. My partner brings me a hot water and I set about my getting up rituals, messages, med admin and the like before taking my vitals. I manage to get an earlier appointment for my 28 day jab next Wednesday, the day of my emergency urology appointment so that things are manageable. I move my Thursday dental appointment to the end of May so that I get a couple of day respite before our weekend away. My vitals are the usual good. My partner and friend go off into the world and I get up, just as the window cleaners arrive.
Once up I make a simple breakfast, sort the post out, catch up with my blood pressure monitoring chart and read the meters. The quarterly poetry review arrived in the post so I sit for a while scanning it but I am outfaced by the volume of work that confronts me. I read this years winner of the national poetry prize. Its okay but I do not feel it. Once again I am overwhelmed by the poetry industry and the way it runs on competitions and the all encompassing life style commitment it demands. It creates careers for all sorts of folk, poets, short story writers, reviewers, critics, publishers, editors, and commentators. It has idols, champions, inspirational people, role models and “giants”. There is a whole culture of what is good and what is bad and arbiters of what that looks like. Its a club that fascinates me but do not want to join. My soul aim of putting my stuff out there is that my family and friends get to know more about me than they do, or I think they do. Like I say I am overwhelmed. I do however realise that my small book would be classified as a “pamphlet”. All I can say to that is “phuck em.”I manage it all by knowing I am a narcissistic vanity poet and keep bunging the Americans dollars to publish my stuff.
With admin and some chores done I start todays blog. I had not realised it but this is the second of Cycle 11 of my chemo. How easily the time slips by. Yet all the time my vitals seem to be good. Anniversaries slide by, its five years since my kidneys packed up in Jamaica and this coming Easter Monday is five years to the day that I was flown out of Jamaica back to England and then my prostate cancer diagnosis. I am alive, I am vertical and fighting the best I can, but I know what a toll this has taken on my family. I spend some time reading a new book which has been sent to me from a friend in Scotland with the note to say is just a story. Its a Steven King novel called The Eyes of the Dragon and is a fantasy novel that seems to romp along, it appears to be something light that I can read happily over the Easter period.
In the same Amazon delivery was a mystery package, small and intriguing. I open it up and laugh. Over the last couple of days I have been joking with friends about seeing unicorns as a result of taking co-codamol and the fact that Unicorn poo is Skittles. I laugh because my present is a small but perfectly pooing unicorn. Just the right thing at the right moment.
I return to reading and answering the odd WhatsApp message until my partner and her fried return from the day out. My partners friend surprises me with the gift of a spade, as she says there is not a lot of use for a spade in an apartment. I reciprocate with a copy of my poetry collection. After chat and a drink my partners friend leaves and we settle back into an evening of pasta, Designated Survivor and reading. There will be night meds and bed as I slide into Easter. My aim is to rest and be ready for what faces me in the post Easter week.
