I woke up in an empty house this morning, it’s raining outside and I thought “Brian won’t come today”, then I remember, “Brian’s dead”. Brian isn’t coming ever again. It’s a thought that repeated itself during the day. I suspect there might be other days like this, but then that isn’t surprising. I’ve not told the garden yet, but I suspect it knows already.

So I get up and get my work ready for the meeting this afternoon. Once I am clear about my route and what I am going to do I go for breakfast in the village cafe, do the crosswords and then return home to the car. Being slightly tyre paranoid I drive to the garage and check my tyres, spot on. I put more air in anyway and my tyre paranoia disappears. I drive to Sutton Coalfield YMCA for my meeting, which goes well. Back home I reboot the boiler and settle down to write the blog. We have a house guest tonight so I little tidying is done and of course the standard toilet roll audit in the toilets. After that she will have to take us as we are.

It’s a week since the end of chemo and I am not sure how I am at the moment. I weighed myself this morning and came in at 98.6 kilos. 17 days ago, in the first week of my last cycle I was 100 kilos, so I suppose my efforts since the New Year might be paying dividends, along with a lack of steroids and the dwindling effects of the yew tree bark poison. My body feels as if it has less aches and pains, which means it is important to keep going to the gym and doing the work. I need to to do more core and upper body work as well as burning off the calories. My hands have cramped up less often over the last couple of days, which I cannot explain reasonably. The biggest inconvenience is my thickened finger nails. It is clear that cycles one and two created the initial thickening of the nails. Interestingly the thickening progresses in thickness from little finger across to the thumb. I have a small ridge for each of the other four cycles so the ends of my nail are the problem. This couple with the residual numbness in my finger tips from the chemo means that my fine manipulation skills are not good. I find small button such as those on a shirt are difficult so prefer T shirts for the moment. I likewise prefer clothes with zips, which seems to be more manageable.

Obviously the weight gain around my gut is the most psychologically distressing. Although I have bought trousers with a two inch increase on my normal waist size I am still conscious of my expanded being and self conscious about the bulging nature of my body. It is from this baseline that I shall be measuring myself over the coming weeks.

The tricky bit is keeping track of my psychological state. Trying to avoid becoming self obsessed and overly narcissistic is quite difficult when carrying around something inside yourself that is trying to kill you. Actually that’s not true. Cancer has no idea that it is killing me, it is just doing what biochemistry and physiology does. There is no sentience in there knowing what it is doing. There is no “being” with an appreciation of life and death or intentionality, just stuff growing in a maladaptive and non synergistic way. Whereas I am sentient with a sense of life and death and therefore I am doing everything I can to make my physiological and biochemical environment as hostile and death inducing to all those errant, malfunctioning, bastard cells as I can. Go Rocket!