The day has been a very domestic one being taken by surprise by the early Sainsbury’s delivery guy. So my day started in my dressing gown chatting to the delivery guy about the weather as we unpacked the crates. I then set about clearing up, paying bills, organising the office and buying fruit and meat for the weekend. Like all days I start off with relatively good energy levels but as the day wears on I begin to find it difficult to keep going at the same pace. By the time I am at the gym waiting for my partner I am flagging and as a result we decide to train on Saturday morning instead. We return home and settle for then evening, me to write a brief blog and then either watch TV or read.

This veering off course is not good; my physical fitness is a significant part of my fight with cancer. The fitter I am the better I can cope with the physical demand of the treatment and also the psychological juggling that needs to be done to stay ahead of the disease. It is a constant battle on both fronts.

I manage part of it by getting “Rocket” to do the physical bit for me while my head gets on and does the research, the planning, and keeping a strategy going for the long term. In this way I can best balance my energy against the need to deal with the real world whilst fight my private internal battle. I used to use an image of a desert to understand the strange things being ill did to time and the resultant feelings of being ill but I changed to the image of an island. This seemed to represent me amidst the real world and reminder me to swim occasionally. The island image no longer feels right any more, however I’ve no clear idea what image does feel right at the moment. This feeling of uncertainty and lack of clarity of image maybe the best indication of the ambiguity and uncertainty about my condition that I feel at the moment. I guess something will come to me, I just need to trust my mind to incubate and to sort through the conflicting thoughts and feelings. “Trust the process” is something I used to say to my staff team in the therapeutic communities I had responsibility for; I guess its time for me to take my own advice.