Today is that strange wait and see day, will I fall asleep, vomit, eat voraciously, have my hair fall out, my mouth become sore, get a stomach upset and a plummeting white cell count?

I’ve reffered to Samuel Beckett before but today it seems that I am the head in the jar like in his book the Unnamable. I’ve not only put myself under scrutiny but it feels like the rest of the world has freedom to watch me for the signs of side efects. My internal conversations centers around whether I am functioning normally, my internal radar is up and running and that part of me that I call the Dark and Tricky rises up and whispers the darkest fears in my ear. I suspect we all have our own versions of the Dark and Tricky that focuses our anxieties and invades our frontal lobes wrecking our reasonable rationality and executive functioning.

However there is a life to be gotten on with and this one needed to be at the dentist for 9:10 before my immune system starts to loose white cells and make me vulnerable to infection. As dentists tend to prod, poke, drill and invade the mouth there is a tendancy to create opportunities for infection. My dentist is brillant and understood perfectly what the situation required and set to work plugging my missing filling with a tempory fix to take me through the coming cycles of chemo. Job done, we chatted supersoft toothbrushes and flavour free mouth washes and agreed for me to return just before christmas. A nice end of chemo present to myself, a christmas crown

I return home to check my mail and do admin work for some of the work that I am still doing. I needed to cancel a meeting this week because I have no idea how I am going to be post chemo. This is what gets me, the way the disease makes life unpredictable and therefore less secure. Not knowing how I am going to be and not being able to take the risk at times feels an unsafe place to be. It also means that income is at risk in terms of lost fees if work cannot be rearranged, so there is a layer of finacial unpredictability. An example is in todays mail, my appointment for a CT scan has arrived and falls on the day I am due to meet people in a service I support. I’m thinking this is another meeting that I will need to postpone but then I realise that the scan is scheduled for 7 o’clock in the evening. I am encouraged momentarily as I think that this might mean that a sense of urgency may have returned to my treatment plan. Then my Dark and Tricky rose up and whispered that it might mean I did not have much time. I guess there are going to be moments like this along the way. At least the CT scan will act as a benchmark against which the effect of the chemo can be measured over time.

Now it was time for fun. That meant watching WordPress tutorial videos to try to learn how to bring images to the page and use other tricks to freshen up this blog. Success, I’ve managed to insert a photo of my sharps box into yesterdays blog , CHEMO 1. But for those that missed it, here it is again.

Having mastered this it was time to do my homework on how to inject myself in readiness for tomorrow. Of course YouTube was a blessing with plenty of video tutorials on the art of stabbing yourself with a needle in the fatty bits of your body. I have to say that it did not reduce my anxiety about doing it for the first time tomorrow. Currently my injections are living next to the bacon in my fridge.

So tomorrow I will follow instructions and try to over come my natural aversion to push needles into myself, but tired of the anticipatory anxiety I retreat to the garden centre, where I buy plants and spend my afternoon renewing part of a front garden flower bed. As a nod to my conditon I wear gloves for the first time. I like to plant with my bare hands, it feels kinder somehow. By the time the family return home the border is complete.

Tea time provide the opportunity for my partner to practice shoving an “in your ear” thermometer in my ear. So we have now both mastered the technique. The good news is that I am still way below the 38 degrees that triggers the call to the oncology ward. Having had the skill building session I find myself alone as my family spend time with friends, either eating or watching a show and doubtless talking about what its like coping with living with me and my drug habbit, after all I am the one with my hyperdermics next to the bacon. So today has been a watchful day, which is wearing and which I combat by keeping busy. In essence a good day, definitly not a bad one, so I reckon I win today. After all I still have my hair, I’ve not vomitted, my mouth is okay, I’ve been active, learned new stuff. The white cells will just have to sort themselves out.