Thursday and I wake up early as this is going to be a busy day. So I make warm drinks for my partner and I earlier than usual. My partner gets up for a shower and is quickly followed by me. There is time for toast and morning meds and then I am off to see the hand physio. The amount of bendiness is measured and the scar tissue examined. The decision is that I should concentrate on massaging the scar with Nivea crème and using the night splint with the latex dressing. We agree that I should return at the end of July when six months of splint wearing comes to an end.

I arrive home and wait for my partner to return from her physio appointment and when she does we drive the cars to our local garage. My partner’s car get left at the garage for its newly acquired “crunchie” sound to be investigated. We return home in time for my partners friend to collect her for lunch. I sit on the patio, have soup and then I spend the afternoon trying to put together the contents of a fourth collection of The Cancer Years, for which I have no title for yet. At one point I take a break and draft another poem.

444
The drooping broom
trying to sweep
the lawn edge,
this and a profusion
of green 
is what I feel
this May day.
A sunny time 
that belongs in summer
as the temperature rises.
There is much to do 
but I do no stir,
sitting quietly
like the garden before me.
“behold the lilies
of the field 
for they neither
reap nor sow”.
I am not sure 
I can live 
Like that.
So I find myself
pen in hand
jotting while birds
sing and Spring
takes a sprint start.

All these flowers,
trees and plants
do everything that
is beyond me.
When did I stop
paying attention,
let myself not listen,
let myself not see?
It’s time to put the pen;
Down!

                                     444           01-04-2025

Having written I return to preparing the collection. Mid-afternoon and the garage rings to tell me that my partners car is done. Thankfully it is only disc pads that needed replacing. My partner and I go and collect he car and return home. The resources to begin to make a family tree for my partners family have arrived so I start the process of trying to build a tree from the notes that my partner gave me a few days ago. It is a preliminary phase of sticky notes placed on a pre printed ten generational template. After an evening meal I start to try and build adn initial tree. By 8 o’clock its time for me to watch football. Its what I do until full time when I start to draft the blog, taking my night meds and strapping on the night splint before bed. Over the evening I have been thinking about ideas for more poems based on the dedication that I am thinking about for the fourth Cancer Years collection; “This collection is dedicated to men and their loved ones who quietly gets on with their life while fighting prostate cancer. We can’t all be VIPs but we are all, in our own ways, brave.” I think there very many men and their loved ones who are quietly being brave everyday without publicity, without doing things that they would not normally do and just want to live an ordinary life for as long as they can.