Friday and I am awake at 7 o’clock with a headache and feeling crap. For a change I am first up making hot drinks which I take back to bed and down a couple of paracetamol. I feel crap, did I mention that? My partner takes pity on me and brings me toast and jam as I wait for the paracetamol to kick in. It does begin to work and I get up and dress as I have to be at the GP surgery for 9:05 to have my bloods done. While I dress I check my temperature and find it is 36.2, so its normal. I pull on my thick beanie and jacket and stuff its pockets with masks before heading off to the doctors.

Arriving at the surgery I don a mask and book in. I sit at the back of the reception area, a throw back from school days when you stood more chance of seeing the blackboard cleaner winging its way towards you from an infuriated teacher, those were the days. I am called in quite quickly and in a trice I have my jacket off, hand the bloods form to the nurse and start to slap my forearm to raise a vein, what used to be called “Feltham applause” a term derived from the prevalence of drug taking at Feltham Borstal back in the day. It’s one of those prison black humour things that has stayed with me after all those years of prison work. Having applauded my vein, I clench my fist a few times by which time the nurse has found the vein and is in with the needle. “Relax your hand now” she says and in a trice she has two vial of my blood out of me and a fluffy cloud of cotton wool on the entry hole. She tapes the cloud and then labels the vials. We say good bye and I am off. The whole thing takes as long as its taken you to read this. Pretty impressive I think, a good example of patient and nurse working in harmony to get the job done.

I walk home via the village co-op to buy a paper. By now my nose is running and I know I am not going to have a fun day. Once home I check the heating is on and make another coffee to take my morning meds with and to see me through doing the crosswords in the paper. My nose runs like a tap and I ache, this is going to be a cold. I have a sense of real unfairness. I have made the effort to see friends in York to help take care of myself, I have battled to manage my cancer and now I get a cold. At some point I will have to make a decision as to whether or not I take an Actifed to dry my nose up. Its a tricky decision as I am never quite sure how it interacts with the chemo and other stuff I take and whether it just prolongs the cold by a couple of days. Having done the crosswords and the meds I start to draft the blog and to top it all I get a hot flush. Yep I am still getting the hot flushes due to the hormone suppression treatment. Mostly they are random, either day or night and all I can do is sit them out and hope they pass quickly. By now its already 11:30 and part of me is frustrated that I am sitting here, good for very little apart from a little light admin. I do not feel like I am pulling my weight and I am conscious that pre jab Roland put a load of washing in which is now waiting to be hung out to dry. I’ve no energy. This is one of those hidden tricky days where I am good for nothing and already hoping tomorrow is going to be better.

In a tortoise flurry of activity I check the post and there is nothing from the solicitors only Christmas mail litter to recycle sofa. While on my feet I hang my washing and then settle back on the sofa sneezing and dabbing at my runny nose. Its time to chase the solicitors again. This is the mundanity of cancer, the slow grind of trying to maintain a normal routine of every day life against a disease that slowly and quietly chips away at every aspect of ones being. Some I can fight back on, I’m good at the headology drugs but the physical stuff is an area where I am dependant on the drugs the medics have me pumping in and my only indicators are in the arithmetic my blood results and my vitals give me. Today my vitals are okay and after the witching hour tonight the blood result fairies will deliver the next batch of arithmetic. As I have said before, how I am is in the logic of the arithmetic. So I brace myself and gather up what spoons I have to see me through the rest of the day.

I sleep most of the afternoon with a stinking cold. I go through the evening sniffing but get to midnight when my blood results come through. My PSA has dropped by a measly 0.1, but it has dropped. My potassium has sneaked up above the normal and my eGFR has dropped to 56, 4 points off the normal of 60. I go to bed to in the spare room to nurse myself through the night.