CYCLE 6 DAY 20

Sunday lay in and more Civil Partnership day planning, that’s how my day started. Breakfast and drugs came much later. There was then a bout of furious hovering, dusting, cleaning and polishing to get the house ready for everyone to return to the real world of work and the usual grind of the usual trying to stay one step ahead of the next crisis, nasty surprise or mishap. It always feels so much better having a crisis if the house is clean and tidy. Tidy house, tidy mind. So with all this good domesticity behind us its almost time for the gym, when my eldest daughter is delivered home by her friend in Norwich. He needed to return straight away so it was literally a flying visit. My eldest produced a surprise, and unread Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, “Good Omens”. I of course started to read it straight away. It immediately made me laugh and it instantly became my bedtime book. Tonight will be an early night with Good Omens.

A quick visit to Sainsbury to gather missing supplies and then it was on to the gym. The gym was a pig, I huffed and puffed for my 714 calories and at one point I thought I might not make the hour  but with fifteen minutes to go I got my 10,000 steps Fitbit reward and so I carried on to the end. I was tempted to leap on the scales and see if my new, now 4 day diet was working. This of course is madness and I reigned myself in. The rule is I weigh myself once a week, at the same time, on the same day, naked, on the same scales. Once and only once. If there is a genuine weight change it needs a week to show with any degree of statistical significance. My body gave me a gentle nudge that it was still fighting the poison of chemo by disrupting my gut temporarily, but I weathered that and was okay again by the time we clambered back into the car to head for home.

Home for dinner, the end of a football match and Dr Who and then it was blog time. Tonight I will retire early and read Good Omens till I drift off to sleep. I am beginning to get anxious about ending chemo and moving into the “crossed fingers” stage. I know that I will miss regular feedback about my PSA level and the other blood results. It is the feedback from the environment that tells me whether what I am doing is being effective or not. Without this feedback the risk of stress is increased and there is a possibility that I lose a sense of efficacy, which in turn taps into how I make meaning of life. This neatly ties the psychophysiological work done on “executive stress” and the work of Ron E Baumeister to be found in Meanings of Life. I’ve not got time to wax lyrical about the construction of personal internal universes and their relationship to reality and life management, let alone how this might be tied to psychophysiological characteristics of the nervous system as modelled by the Russian school of psychophysiology, namely Neblytsyn; I’ve got Good Omens to read.

Tomorrow is a 28 day injection day at the GPs at 8:30, so lots to look forward to. It pigeon egg in the stomach time again. I have to say not having testosterone not only makes me fat, but it is giving me the most incredible smooth skin. Silky in fact.