A day when the workers have gone to work and I have a brief lay in before getting up and clearing the house up a bit. Breakfast is grapefruit and coffee as I look at my e- mails and organise the day. Washing in the machine and the dishwasher on I laze for a bit before getting ready to meet my friend for lunch.

It’s a short drive to the pub we have agreed to meet at and we find that we arrive at the same time. Settling into our reserved table we set to chatting. It’s a real pleasure to have the space and time to have a conversation that can roam across whatever comes to mind. We take our time and compare experiences of things like book clubs. Before we realise it several hours have passed by and I need to head to the gym while my friend has to make her way to her yoga class. So I drive to the gym and read the papers while waiting for my partner to arrive. Once my partner arrived we went up to the gym floor. It was packed with New Year get fitters who were accompanied by the rustle of new spandex. The tightness index of spandex is clearly going up. Second skin is not an adequate description. All I could get on was a bike, so I peddled for an hour and 564 calories and 10,000 steps.

Home and a porch full of packages, two for me, which when I open are thoughtful, kind and stimulating from a good friend in York. She has been unable to resist her Occupational Therapy training and sent me a solution to my numb finger’s difficulty with buttons. I am really pleased and will practice in the days to come as I have some work commitments that are probably not T shirt suitable.  The other present a book to add to my growing pile of future reading. Dinner consisted of cold meats and grapefruit after which I sat in front of the TV typing the blog.

It’s one of those days which is just normal. It reflects one of the comments by my friend at lunch time, that I look so normal. Apart from my oddly thickened nails I obviously appear normal to the outside world. This being “normal” to everyone and the outside world is a strange factor that I am still not sure of. I am not sure what effect this is having on me and how I am interacting with the outside world. I suspect that my altered perception of myself has changed the way I interact with the world if part of me thinks that the world can see that I am cancerous. I wonder if some people with cancer go on their “experience binges” as a way of saying “look at me being normal doing all these things that others do”.

Below are two poems that I found while researching Probation LDUs this morning. In the Worcester LDU web page I found these in the women’s services page. I liked them and thought they reflected some of my experiences of the industrialised oncology services. My view of the verse referring to God is of course that God is mute because he does not exist, but it obviously works for the poet.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you start giving me advice,
you have not done what I asked.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you begin to tell me why
I shouldn’t feel that way,
you are trampling on my feelings.

When I ask you to listen to me
and you feel you have to do something
to solve my problem,
you have failed me,
strange as that may seem.

Listen! All I ask is that you listen.
Don’t talk or do – just hear me.

Advice is cheap; 20 cents will get
you both Dear Abby and Billy Graham
in the same newspaper.
And I can do for myself; I am not helpless.
Maybe discouraged and faltering,
but not helpless.

When you do something for me that I can
and need to do for myself,
you contribute to my fear and
inadequacy.

But when you accept as a simple fact
that I feel what I feel,
no matter how irrational,
then I can stop trying to convince
you and get about this business
of understanding what’s behind
this irrational feeling.

And when that’s clear, the answers are
obvious and I don’t need advice.
Irrational feelings make sense when
we understand what’s behind them.

Perhaps that’s why prayer works, sometimes,
for some people – because God is mute,
and he doesn’t give advice or try
to fix things.
God just listens and lets you work
it out for yourself.

So please listen, and just hear me.
And if you want to talk, wait a minute
for your turn – and I will listen to you.

Author Unknown

Listening Poem

You are not listening to me when…

You do not care about me

You say you understand before you know me well enough

You have an answer for my problem before I’ve finished telling you what my problem is

You cut me off before I’ve finished speaking

You find me boring and don’t tell me

You feel critical of my grammar, vocabulary or accent

You are dying to tell me something

You tell me about your experience making mine seem unimportant

You are communicating with someone else in the room

You refuse my thanks by saying you haven’t really done anything

You ARE listening to me when…

You come quietly into my world and allow me to be me

You really try to understand me even when I am not making much sense

You grasp my point of view even when it goes against your own sincere convictions

You realise the time I have taken from you has left you a bit tired and a bit drained.

You allow me the dignity of making my own decisions, even though you think they may be wrong

You don’t take my problem from me, but allow me to deal with it in my own way

You hold back you desire to give me good advice when you sense I am not ready for it

You give me enough room to discover for myself what is going on

You accept my gift of gratitude by saying how good it makes you feel to know that you’ve been

helpful.