CYCLE 2 DAY 4
Today was a stay at home day due to all the people that were due to turn up and do things, like the water board and Sainsburys. The fact that it threw it down with rain all day did nothing to motivate me to go out either. But because people were suppossed to be coming I got up early and vowed to get my self stabbing over with early. No point waiting around for a quiet moment or to sit thinking about it. So it was up and into my self stabbing routine. Stab stick out of the fridge, toast and coffee and then on with the deed. No matter how I explain it to myself the whole experience is just alien to me, and I like that. I never want this to become “normal”.
Once I have sorted out the early morning ritual, only three more to go, I set about my tasks for the day while I wait for the water board to come and excavate my street stopcock out so that the my plumber can put a new internal stopcock in on monday. I am quietly confident all will go well, after all I have a job number! Of course the morning passes and no one shows up, so I ring the water company, who politely tell me that they have it booked in for Monday. They apolpogise and assure me that they will turn up on Monday. I make arrangements with my plumber, neither of us are confident, but we will go with the flow, no pun intended.
Whilst waiting I draw up work invoices, make calls and rearrange visits that my previous chemo cycle forced me to cancel. In the midst of this Sainsburys delivers and I do three cycles of washing and tumble drying. All this time it rains and I decide I’m not sitting through a rugby match tonight. The Tigers will have to do without me tonight.
I get a WhatsApp which makes me immediately view my day differently. Its Macmillan Coffee Morning! I am a good cause. People all over the country are downing coffee and cake for me. One huge sugar rush and an instant peril for all those people with a touch of diabeties.
In effect across the country vast numbers of people were indulging in a:
I’m sure that this is all very good and charitable but I’ve never been in a group that others raise money for because I am an endangered type of mammal. The cancer mammal must be saved and we will do it by eating cake. It’s so British. I am sure everyone who is doing it: the eating,the baking, the coffee drinking, are doing so out of a desire to do good, to be kind, to show support for us cancer sufferers and possibley to give back something having been there themselves but I cannot shake the feeling that I don’t like being an object of others good intentions. This may say far more about me than them, I fact I’m sure it does, but I’m not clear what exactly. It feels like the industrialised medicine that I experience in the treatment of my cancer is also using industrialised and commercial selling and PR techniques to create funding. I notice how many Cancer adverts there are on TV today asking me to leave something in my will to the cancer research foundation. Is it just me that feels I’m being got at, to be made to feel grateful, to be drawn into some sort of fight, having my vulnerability exploited? Maybe its just PR to raise awareness. My awareness is sky high actually, I do not need an advert or a coffee morning to know I am fighting for my life.
In self defence I cook curry so that my partner has food to return to after a day in which she dealt with the double whammy of visiting the doctors and the dentist before going to work for the afternoon. Not a good day, so worthy of my special curry.
The evening brings a lovely surprise as my daughter returns home from climbing with one of my nephews and his girlfriend. Its really good to chat and catch up. We have set up a family day in November and share the date with them. Because of my illness during nearly all of 2019 we have missed family birthdays and anniverseries so we are going to host a family get together before the christmas season over takes us. Somehow this feels the right things to do, a kind of re-tribalising of the family.
I’m tired tonight, glad I have had an at home day but a I feel a bit of cabin fever and a niggle that I could have gone to the gym, but I cannot do everything. Tomorrow is a day of rugby and chores probably. I leave you with cake as my contribution to the days sugar rush and a rainbow of course, which seems to be my favourite image at the moment.
