DVT DAYS 125, 126, 127, 128 & 129

So where have I been since Saturday the the 11th of July I hear you ask, or rather I hope you ask. Recently I think I have been experinceing post birthday inertia,weight gain and a sense of meaninglessness due to the continued COVID lock down. I have also been busy with Enabling Environment work trying to write all the content required before the editor of the work moves on to pastures new and will inevitabley forget about it having followed Gibbs Rule 11, When the job is done, walk away. There have been some fiesty TEAM meetings that have left me wondering what I am doing and how much COVID confinement is getting to me, I realise how much I miss the gym, not just for the equipment but also the change of scenery and coffee made by someone else. I can after all clamber up onto my own exercse bike in the shed and sweat an hour away so it is the other elements that make the gym appealing. Being confined cuts into any sense of efficacy over the outside environment. Its all very well growing things in the garden but it does not compensate for a sense of contribution to the world. I miss not having face to face contact with the people who I care about outside of the family who are confined with me. I spent the whole day yesteday writing letters and cards trying to maintain some sort of communication with people and to keep the “juices” flowing in terms of social interaction and connectedness. As yet I have not slipped into solpisism, I know the real world existst beyond me, its not being or feeeling that I am part of it that is the irritation.

This isolation is not good for my health. Physically I feel my fitness drain away and mentally is anybodies guess. I have begun to be ultra sensitive to any change in my body functions and when it does not match what I think is normal for me I get anxious that the change or defiecit is due to advancing cancer. I have no way of knowing. It is not made easier when my latest blood results come back without the crucial PSA result they are suppossed to have in them. I suppose this means calls to the cancer nurse and the unit to chase it up, however strictly speaking I should only have a blood test just prior to my next oncologist appointment in August,I doubt they will be that fussed. On the other hand as yet I still have no new oncolgy appointment. Another call to make.

Life just seems to be full of irritations at the moment, that I know is my stuff, but nevertheless they are still irritating. The lack of an oncology appointment is one of course, followed by my phone contract coming to an end, slugs eating my dhalias, my “My BT” phone app refusing to download onto my phone because it thinks it already has! The list is long and equally petty. I do fight back with radical action like sewing on the missing button from my shorts and rethreading the waist cord on another pair, I even dissected a heating pad and returned it to working order. Where necassary I employed revolutionary methods to fix things, like getting the plumber to fit a new overflow tank ballcock and valve, my that was an exciting day. Even now I wait in anticipation of tomorrows visit by “Jeff” in his mask and gloves to survey the possibility of re-piping our central heating system from micro bore to full bore piping. My whole being can hardly handle the excitement, although this will abate when he quotes us a price to do the work.

The garden continues to provide distraction in a beautiful way. We visited our local garden centre the other day and returned with trays of bedding plants and spent a productive afternoon upgrading some of the flower beds. In the midst if this I found a seed time nest of great beauty.

In fairness I think we are doing our bit to give nature a hand but the weather appears not to want to join in. This dull grey leaden sky nonsense that drizzles on regular occassions is not what I call summer sunshine and puts a real damper on things both literally and psycholgically. I felt so cold the other day I was tempted to put the heating on but resisted the temptation and went for more layers. I applaud myself for this as both green and courageous given that at any moment I may suffer a “hot sweat” which sees me disrobing at a rate of knots. Just one of the delights of my cancer treatment, which seems to happen more often in the night thus breaking my nights up into two or three hour chunks. I used to go to bed and die till the morning, but now it is short bursts of non sweaty to sweaty sleep. Perhaps it is this sleep disruption that is finaly getting to me through the accumulated fatigue.

In all this there are moments of true jolliness, like when my lastest addition to my ice hockey shirt collection arrived. My most recent addition is a russian red army team ice hockey shirt, it came to me all the way from the Ukraine. I am very pleased with it.

I am truly excited at the moment as at this very moment I am resting my feet on my new under desk foot rest whilst the laptop sits neatly on my lap as it should. This probaly sounds purile but believe me the joy of being comfortable as I work is well founded. To add to my daily sense of jolliness is that in a couple hours our new garden help is due to arrive and mow the lawns and do some rudimentary tidying up of the garden. Not only do I get the more onerous jobs done but I get to see another human being in the confines of our house and garden. I am tempted to get a garden camera, one of those motion activated ones to see what and who else wanders into our garden. If I get the right equipment I might even be able to plug it into my TV and create my own “Spring Watch”, Chris Packham and Michaela Strachan eat your hearts out.

I have just come from an “open forum” run on ZOOM, my favourite platform. One of the participants noted that as a collective we appear to have run out of creativity as COVID has progressed. Initially everyone was challenged by the problems and necessity truly became the mother of invention. There was an out pouring of creative ideas to over come the restrictions as we all struggled with coming to terms with our changed life styles. Now it seems we are habituated to the situations rather like new remand prisoners getting used to prison life in the first few days of captivity, we have slipped into our COVID routines and no longer face immediate problems. Now the challenges are more subtle, it is our attutides, tolerances and resilience that are being tested. It is the more psychological aspects of “quarentine” that are increasingly coming to bare down on us that are the real issues to deal with and these require more than a quick fix, new routine or flash of creativity. These require thought, when our abillity to think reasonabley or rationally may be impaired and as a consequence our judgement less good. Perhaps this too contributes to my recent lassitude and lack of blogging behavior, perhaps I too am beggining to experience creativity fatigue as I sink into a sensne of being “comfortabley numb” to the COVID threat and/or the world. All of this will disappear tomorrow when my youngest daughter visits us tomorrow and stays a few days. There comes a time when family comes first.