Wednesday and its a oncology review Wednesday, so I get up and immediately check to see if my blood results have come through. They are not posted. I make breakfast and take my meds. I settle down to watch the football highlights I missed yesterday expecting to be called by the oncology team for my review. To my surprise the call comes around 11 o’clock and not the 2:30pm I was expecting. A woman introduces herself as one of the doctors on the team and then tells me that we cannot do the review because the bloods I gave have been rejected. Apparently the information on the form and the vials did not match. As the review cannot be done without the blood results, she tells me that they will reschedule me for next week and will send me conformation. I immediately ring the GP surgery and have a conversation with them about a new set of bloods to be taken. It takes time to get through to the person on the phone that there is some urgency in my request and not just a whim. After some consultations I finally get an appointment for Friday morning.

Having made my blood arrangements I settled down to watch Lionel Messi score his hat trick in Argentina’s opening game at the world cup. The doctor from oncology rings me again and tells me the consultant (he who made a pact with the devil), has told her to schedule me for a fortnight, not one week, as he feels it will make no difference. She also prompts me that the consultant is advising me to stop. I responded by saying that the consultant and I have had these conversations before and note that the oncology review will be on Wednesday July the first. All I can d now is to see if my body recovers in the next two weeks. Hopefully I might get more energy and less fatigue and the neuropathy decrease in my hands and feet.

I am not sure if I feel relief or not but I do know that my 28 day injection is due Monday, so life is not free from all cancer interventions. With my cancer arrangements done I return to working on the manuscript of the next poetry collection. It is a fiddly task but I eventually get to the end of it. By the time this is done its time to watch some tennis and to begin to draft the blog for the day. I am in the middle of this when my partner returns from visiting her mother in the care home and the garden guy turns up.

This evening is of course football dominated with a early six o’clock match and then the main event of the day, England’s opening game against Croatia. So I shall be settled down at nine o’clock to see if the England side can actually produce a reasonable performance. Tomorrow is officially the last day of Cycle 8 of the chemo rechallenge, it maybe the last all together, it is also the day I get my nails done. I suspect that I will come a way with some suitable world cup nail art.