Wednesday and I am back into my old waking routine of drinking hot water, taking my vitals and checking my socials and messages. With all that done I get up and dress in my training gear, my partner already on the way to see her mother with her brother. Breakfast is a bagel affair and then I take a few minutes to do the days cross words. I clear things away and then I head for the garage and the rowing machine. I’m still sore from Mondays injection and Tuesday row so I am sensible and set myself up for a thirty minute row. It turns out to be an even tougher session than yesterdays forty five minutes. I do not make what I think is a standard distance for the time. It is what it is and I guess my body is telling me that I need recovery time.

I record the session in my journal and then clear away the kitchen before reviewing some of the things I have written recently. I stumble across a short poem that I recently wrote and had forgotten about.

430
When I’d rather be asleep
Than awake, I know its trouble.
When all the niggly bits
outweigh the rest,
then its desperate.
When nothing is a crisis
but everything needs tending
in an endless round of care
that’s when I hanker 
after sleep.
It’s the insidious side 
of cancer warfare,
chipped at slowly
like Chinese torture,
every drop washing away energy,
a man under erosion.
I crave a kindness or two
just to know that
someone sees it
before I pull the covers
over my head.

					439 20-03-2025

My mind turns to Easter and I begin to hunt around for ideas and also do some pre ordering. By the time I am through with this my partner has returned and so we have lunch together before Tesco arrive to deliver what was a hastily put together order. With the refuelling done I take my partner for a short drive to the local garage where I check my tyres and then go onto the garden centre for a ginger beer and a shortbread. This is how it goes some days in retirement.

Back home my partner plants the sweet peas we bought at the garden centre while sort out my diary and check the date and time of my post operative assessment by the surgeon. It spurs me to do my nails and to do another set of hand physio exercises. The hand physio is my one appointment tomorrow so I am keen for it to go well. I suspect I shall just have to keep going as I am for another couple of months. I realise I have no cash to pay her so its a trip for me to he local Co-Op to use the cash machine before the evening meal and the slide into the evening.

For some reason the cash machine tells me my card is not acceptable, it used to be so I assume the machines on one. So I trudge home and eat tea and settle down to an evening of films. I down my night meds, don my finger splint and magic latex dressing and go to bed