Monday and its a vampire day, at noon today I shall be having bloods taken in readiness for Wednesday’s oncology review and Friday’s cycle 2 start. So after another night in the spare bed to avoid my partner and I keeping each other awake with our cold symptoms, I get up and shower and dress in my “popping to the GP” clothes. A quick breakfast of toast and I am ready to put away my washing and tidy up my end of the recliner. By the time its time to go the GP I am just about organised. The walk to the GP surgery is a slow one, I am very low on spoons (energy) and so I take my time. Once there I book in and wait. In a very short time I am called in and my favourite blood taker gets to work. No pain and its over in a trice.

On the meander home I drop into the village co-op and buy a paper and a couple of pizzas, which I fancy for lunch. I also drop into the village chemist and buy the items on my “first aid kit refill” list. The house first aid kit has already been topped up with a first aid kit refill pack but I always add in a couple of basic additions. Brolene eye drops, Savlon, Canesten, Dioralyte and paracetamol tablets all get added to the kit so if we go away we have everything, and when the bathroom cabinet is bare we know that there are back ups in the first aid kit. Having done the overhaul this January we are now good for at least the next year. It also means the household could provide a field hospital with bandages given how many we have accrued. Once home I settle down to do the crosswords in the paper and my partner cooks me one of the pizzas for lunch.

I spend some time trying to decide which poem I will take to next Saturdays Poetry Stanza meeting. It is a zoom meeting this month so I will have to circulate my choice early in the week, hence my looking at the issue today. I am torn because I do not want to share something that is too “Me “cancery””, I have become sensitive to the fact that death, decay and disease “suck the life out of the living” as my friend eloquently put it. I do not want to be one of the life suckers, but at the same time I do not want to deny what is going on. It is uncomfortable. I find I have a poem that says this:

486
“fed up with death,
decay and dying.
It sucks the life 
out of the living,” 
said my friend,
and now I lay here
full of poison
and wonder how much
life I suck out of
my family and friends. 
The watching and not knowing
what to do for the best,
those feelings of uselessness
in the face of another’s pain,
swamping the everyday.
It’s the way kindness
gets blocked as each
tries to find a way
to cope with the storm. 
I try to calm myself
And let it pass,
but it:
No,
I suck.
Its not a good feeling. 
					485 30-12-2025

I continue my read through and in the end think I will go for something that describes how I cannot help myself plunging into myself when I write.

477
I long to write expansive poems like Darwish and Martinson that illuminate, that take the fibres of life and weave them into others being, To find themes that skewer the heart to the expression of life. I want to pull the strings that lead others down a path to hidden gardens and waves of engulfment that leave them feeling the hugeness of the sky, the speed of light and the briefness of life,
But I stumble,
trip over myself
and find dirt
in my mouth,
dark in my eyes
and a gyroscope,
running fast,
in my head,
leaving me 
facing death
and its cold 
finality.
			477  27-11-2025

I shall see how things go before I finally decide. Whilst I am doing this sorting I occasionally absent mindedly stroke my beard and note that more hair has fallen out between my fingers. It is the chemo at work.

The afternoon goes on and I listen to relaxing music as I draft the blog or read more of Fredrick Petersons poetry. A strange man, an American neurologist who at one point headed up a committee that was given the job of finalising the method of electrocution via the electric chair for the state he was in. Apart from his medical career he wrote poetry and collected Chinese art. His first published collection of poetry was Poems and Swedish Translations in 1883, which is the collection that I am reading. Its a strange mixture of original poems and his translations of his Swedish, Finnish and Norwegian contemporaries, which appear to be in no particular order.

So I read and draft the blog until the sun goes down, when I begin to run out of energy and start to think about what I might watch on TV. Last night saw the end of Sarah, the Woman in the Shadows and the latest episode of the Night Manager. At the moment Patience on channel four is the front runner as I suspect I will not get to see the Liverpool v Barnsley cup match. It would appear that an early night might actually happen, which will be good as I have a dentist appointment tomorrow. Strangely all the dentist can do is look at my teeth to see if there is anything obvious that cannot wait, there can be no jabbing pointy pins into my gums, it is an eyes only job as chemo makes my mouth super sensitive and anything that needs doing will need to be okayed by the oncologists.

Of course all that is really on my mind is whether the chemo, even at this early stage has affected my PSA score or not. That is something I will not know until the blood results get posted at midnight tonight. I am hoping I am holding my own on that front.