Tuesday and today starts with my usual routine of taking my vitals and checking messages and socials. It always takes longer than I think it should but then I often get waylaid by the news feeds. Nothing of note to day in either my wellbeing or the world, which is a good day in that there are no personal crisis to be dealt with and my health bounces along holding cancer at bay. This is a day to celebrate the mundane. I putter about for a bit and then take my partner into town for lunch, parking once again in the most convenient but most frequented by the drug addict and down and out population by Leicester. In fairness we have discovered that much of this can be avoid by using the “hotel ” side of the carpark rather than the Addict Dance academy. We dine quietly next to a couple one of which has an horrendous cough and announces that she and her partner have been ill for ages. They have come all the way from forty miles away to enjoy the restaurant and a ball and presumably to spread their nasty little germs around. Thankfully the coughing abates and relative quiet ensues. Having fed its time to pursue the cancerous part of the day, a slow and measured walk down to the hospital pharmacy to pick up the next three cycles of my current chemo.
As I stand about to hand my appointment letter to the pharmacy receptionist my phone rings but I am not able to answer it, I am peeved as it is from a friend who I haven’t talked to for a while. After the briefest of waits my name is called and I collect my drugs, never have I been served so quickly, but I take it as proof that the new build pharmacy is paying off. Mission accomplished my partner and I return to the car and drive home.
Before going in I decide to walk to the post office to get a paper, my partner dumps my drugs in the porch and we amble off. Our next door neighbor is out sweeping his drive and we stop to chat. It is a moment I cannot let go pass without without once and for all find out what him and his partners names are. We have lived next door for year and often chatted but had clearly got to the stage where asking seemed rude. However I take the plunge and say something suitable and Englishly apologetic and say I still do not know their names after all this time. He is very good about it and immediately says “I am R and she is L” . What a relief. we continue to chat and it appears we both agree that there is a hole in our dividing hedge in the back garden and think we ought to either plant it or put a couple of fence panels in. This is a real win win situation, so after more chat my partner and I finally get off to the post office on our newspaper mission.
Returning home its eyes down to the cross words and the coming evening. My partner will suffer my watching the big football match of the night and then eventually we will both go to bed, me going through my new night ritual, which now includes applying the magic latex to my hand scars before donning my nocturnal finger splint.
Wednesday and I wake from a strange and restless night. I check my vitals which are surprisingly good, my blood pressure is tickety boo and my SATS joyously at 99. MY partner brings me hot water and goes off to see her mother with her brother with whom she is going to have lunch. I get up quite quickly for me and down my morning meds, noting that tomorrow is the day I get a large dose of vitamin D. I drive into town and collect my new face furniture, one pair of distance glasses and a pair of reading spectacles. In truth the distant glasses make very little difference to my vision but the reading glasses definitely do. I can probably get away with just wearing my reading glasses when I need them in front of screens and print, I will see how it goes. On leaving the opticians I stop for panini and a coffee in Costa to check out my new face furniture. It all seems to be okay.
Of course I wore the Ferrari’s to Costa and discovered that I could still miss-see things as my scribbled note on a serviette suggests.
I drive towards home and but head for the gym which has a beauticians attached to it, it’s where my partner goes. I sheepishly go in and say I would like my nails done and I am asked to to wait till the beautician has finished her current client. When done she calls me over and looks at her diary and says “when?” I think I mumble something like “soon”, I swear I can hear my inner pixies rolling around with laughter. The beautician says “Now” and I say very quickly “yes” before I change my mind and my inner pixies wet themselves.
The beautician sets about my nails and pretty soon I am popping my hands into the secret hand oven that bakes my several layers of builder gel. By the end of the process I have immaculate shiny nails and my hands are very happy and almost forget about their operation scars. The pixies have managed to stop laughing out loud but they are still giggling.
So having been nailed up I drive home and take my eldest daughter to the pub for a late lunch and as it turns out a discussion on the types of memory and it importance or not to the interviewing of traumatised, (or not), trafficked (or not) people by the police. Turns out its a tricky area. We are joined by my partner who swears that it has been snowing where she has been a few miles down the road. We all return home as the temperature plummets. I try to catch up with drafting the blog before attending an online poetry collection launch by the chair of the Poetry Stanza I belong to. IT means rigging up the computer in the office and I am not sure if it will work so I might yet have to resort to my laptop.
I attend my first online poetry collection launch for a collection by someone I know. Its a strange and moving experience that lasts an hour and then I am back to watching football. Out of the blue someone from the past rings me seeking information about a mutual acquaintance. We talk for a while and I give him some possible contacts who might know where the person being sort might be. I then return to football and ultimately my night meds and bed. Today is the last day of cycle 22 of my current chemo, its 639 days since I started it and I have another three cycles in hand before my next oncology review in May. I am desperately hoping that I can get into a rhythm over those months and feel well and normal for a while.
