CYCLE 6 DAYS 13 & 14
Sunday 29th December 2019
Yesterday was a day of laziness and the gym. I woke up feeling quite poisoned and not having slept until the light of morning. A recurring theme is emerging regarding my sleep. This sleeping better at dawn and into the light is becoming quite marked.
The one good thing about the day is that I get to the gym. I grind out my hour on the cross trainer and burn 770 calories. Again I have to walk the gym floor to achieve my 10,000 steps reward from my Fitbit before I flop onto a mat to stretch out. I get the strange “tell your flab” machine to do a read out on me. My weight I knew about but prior to being ill I had a physiological age of 53, of which I was rightly proud, since being ill and chemo it has jumped to 69. This is very disappointing and means I have a lot of work to do once the chemo ends on the 7th to get my fitness back. I feel like I need to rebuild myself and that means I will need to do something different in my training. It’s going to be something more like rehab than training.
Once home we ate all things in the fridge that we bought as nice to haves at Christmas but were in danger of running over there sell bye dates. The result was an indoor picnic, which was a pleasant change from standard hot meal format. In the middle of this a university friend of my eldest daughter arrived out of the blue and whisked her away to the cinema. When they arrived back my eldest said she was off to Norwich with her friend so she could go to a New Years Eve party with him. Ah the impetuosity of youth. So off she went with a bag of books and glad rags wearing sparkly Doc Martins to spend a couple of days continuing to write her doctoral midterm assessment and to party. I finally retreated to bed late hoping to sleep.
Monday 30th December 2019
9:30am is becoming early for me but there I was sitting up in bed drinking coffee, trying to make the effort to get my arse out of bed and get moving. So up I get and start to tidy stuff up while my partner makes me the life enriching bacon sandwiches. We are both determined not to sit around too much, so we clear the decks and get ready to go out for a walk.
After a bit of faffing about we drive off to Bradgate Park, don our boots and walk through the park. We walk past the deer sanctuary and onto the cafe. There is a long queue and slow service and I am impatient so we turn around and start back. My partner takes advantage of the facilities and while she does I look inside the information hut, where I find a vending machine for venison. Nothing else just packets of dead deer, the well managed dead of the herd that live in the deer sanctuary. I guess if it helps keep my council tax down its a good thing.
The walk makes us aware that we lack one or two of the essential park walkers must haves, namely 1: A child, 2: a scooter, 3 a dog, and 4: a sports type buggy. What was noticeable was that a large number of adults were carrying any combination of the four essentials and in some cases all of them. By the time we made it back to the car I was tired and did not want to see another scooter for a long time.
Home and all the chores we had walked away from greeted us on our return. So as a priority we walked down to the post box to send the official invitations to our civil partnership ceremony for the 24th. On the way back I picked up my next lot of drugs from the chemist. Always in the back ground there is a kind of sub routine running that keeps an eye on my drug supply. It checks that I have my next 28 day injection in stock and enough pills to keep my drug pouch topped up for the next month. Once back the remaining chores beckon, so more washing goes in and I start to catch up with the blog.
I’m finding the start of a new year a double edged sword this year. I think I am too old to think that things can change overnight, at least not for the better; I will be pleased to have survived 2019 but know that 2020 will carry periods of fear and anxiety. For the first three or four months I shall be in a phase of waiting and seeing what happens, after that its anyone’s guess. At some point I want sunshine, beyond that I am not sure. There are some projects that need to be focussed on, like the civil partnership day, the completion of the poem typing up and of course the “fatboy” project. Beyond this it is grey, but then I spent my entire therapist career wading around in the “grey areas” of mine and everyone else’s attempts to make meaning of their lives, so nothing new there then. So 2020 should be a doddle, all I have to do is stay focussed, keep fighting and enjoy the grey stuff.
