Thursday and today is the second day of Cycle 12 of my current “chemo”. It starts early with the builder badgers ringing the door bell to announce their arrival and requesting the cars to be moved off the drive. So I am up and car driver ready in no time at all despite feeling a bit post co-codamol groggy. The cars get moved to safety and then various builder badgers start to appear with loads of tools and a chipper. There is early morning coffees and then they begin, interrupted only by a clarification chat with the head badger about where the new gate pillars are going in and the edge line on the neighbours side.
With the badgers all working and digging furiously I make my breakfast and take my morning meds. I get an early start to loading material for the blog including the summary of the consultants letter I received yesterday. It sums up my situation very neatly.
It is difficult not to get into defining myself in terms of my medical diagnosis and conditions and to remember that I am still living a life as best as I can. Perhaps this is why people with this diagnosis or other life limiting conditions do things like throw themselves out of aeroplanes or pogo stick up a mountains. It would appear I have chosen a more cerebral route. I remember years ago thinking about Mary Wesley who published her first novel at the age of 71 and was considered a “late bloomer” who went on to sell millions of books in the last twenty years of her life. She was someone who gave me hope as I got older that I would one day publish a book of my own. Here I am at 75 having published my first two collections of poetry, so thank you Mary Wesley for the inspiration. It is one of the things that I remember when I feel that I’ve become my disease, I am more than cancer and bladder stone, I am a poet, blogger, correspondent, YouTuber, gardener, partner, father, grandfather and curious human (carbon based species unit, CBSU). Those are not bad things to be, not necessarily in that order of course!
My first real task of the day is to do battle with the local council who mangled my garden bin with their emptying machine yesterday, like St George (it was his day yesterday so its apt) I go to slay the dragon.
It turns out that this is a pretty meek dragon. I fill in an online request from for a new bin adn send it off. Next step was to send another online form to say I expect it to be free and within the hour someone sends me back a reply saying the replacement will be free and with me in five days. From there I go onto the net and check some of the sites that the Americans claim my book is on and where the request for an audio book was generated from. Sure enough there are at least another four sites where if you type in my name my book comes up. Apart from Amazon it appears to be available from Waterstones, Kobo, and Barnes and Noble. This is all very gratifying but I wonder who is getting the royalties, so I email the Americans and ask the question. Its not the money so much but the principal of the thing really. I shall await the outcome with interest. I then lunch with my partner.
My afternoon is a combination of sorting out my antispam software account on the website and discussing with the “Spadger” (sparky Badger) what part of the system the outside power system is on. He wants to turn off all the computers just in case he trips the system but as my partner is on a two business meeting its a no go. We decide Friday afternoon will do. From there its taking my eldest daughter to the physio at the sports centre in the village so she can take advice on her newly torn tendon in her ankle for which she has been referred to an ankle specialist and then on to my brother law to get him to sign my driving licence renewal photographs.
With my chores done I return home in time for tea and an early evening of Shogun as my partner does her singing lesson. We come together again in mutual watching before I take my night meds and and head for bed as early as I can for tomorrow I will need to be up early to move the cars off the drive again to let our builder badgers on site to continue to do the the project. I am hoping to avoid the need for co-codamol tonight and still get a good nights sleep.
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