DVT DAY 39

Its been a full-on day that went from breakfast to meeting in a blink of an eye. The morning meeting went on for a while as we sorted out who was going to do what and when. So, I and my colleagues all left with tasks for the coming weeks. A further meeting between three of us to do the fine detail took me towards lunchtime and the next meeting. In fact, it was an open forum for service managers. By the time we had done a brief review of the session and I had written up my notes I was well into the afternoon so I retreated to the garden shed to review some work done by a colleague. Before I knew it I was clearing the kitchen and cooking dinner. A concoction of vegetable rice and chicken in a sweet and sharp sauce. No time for relaxation as my partner needs the Skype to work for her singing lesson. Of course, it did not work, I’ve just about had it with Microsoft. Too late to sort it so it had to happen over WhatsApp. Another few hours will go to sorting that one out.

I retreat to the back bedroom to write the blog and indulge in a coffee and seven jelly beans. Tomorrow we have an early Sainsbury’s delivery and I have a meeting at 9 o’clock with a researcher who is investigating what people who retire do and why they keep on doing things. After that I’ve got a pile of work to do.

I am beginning to miss not going out, the village café bacon rolls, the mildly snotty village shop assistant and the pleasure of popping a letter into the post box. I am missing my friends, it’s beginning to feel desert like again, long shadows, sandy distances and mirages.

DVT DAY 38

Today is sunny and I am up and breakfasted earlier than usual. I give the poorly laptop one more try, but it hangs every time in the set up process. This reinforces my sense that the basic organs of the machine are not well, either that or the version of Windows 10 is corrupt. I retreat to the shed and set it up before returning to the house to self-inject and go through my self check routine. I decide to video myself with a view to putting it on the blog. I usually hide his away but it defeats the object of writing an honest blog warts and all if I do this, so for those interested the video is below.

The getting the video into the blog was a major undertaking as the video was too big to just transfer into it. So, I am now the proud owner of my own YouTube channel. I had to establish a channel and then up load the video to get a URL to use in the blog. It was an interesting experience getting the channel up and running. At the moment the video is only available to those with the URL, but I think that because I have embedded the URL in the blog you should be able to see the video here.

Having spent the rest of the morning in the shed writing a letter I was ready for lunch, a delicious bacon sandwich. I joined the therapeutic community reflection space hosted by a colleague for the Royal College of Psychiatrists Therapeutic Community quality network. Those who came to the space were all prison therapeutic community workers trying to deal with the COVID19 situation. It was a useful time and one that looks like it will continue for a while. I left the space expecting to go to another meeting but found that it had been rescheduled for tomorrow. I then spent time trying to access the work done by a colleague in readiness for the now 9am meeting tomorrow to find that I could not down load it due to the royal college of psychiatrist IT security blocking it. A real aggravation but one I did not have the patience to deal with.

I return to the garden and prick out more seedlings, so my temporary greenhouse is now pretty full and I need to think about managing the space and the timing of the next round of sowing. At this rate I will have a harvest all of my own for months in the autumn.

Time for dinner and a phone call before I settle down to write the blog, and that’s when the fun started and I had to find out how to get a YouTube channel. So, I come full circle. My evening then is blog and DEVs. Tomorrow I’m all meetings.

DVT DAY 37

So Easter is done and its back to office spaces around the house and the shed. My partner returns to her morning walk and I return to the dying laptop. Overnight it has reset and started to talk to me in set up mode, but it is a tease, we get as far as putting a name to the account and a password and it freezes. No option but to start again. So all morning it was resetting and all afternoon installing windows. We have got to the account screen and it has been saying “This will take a moment” for about the last forty minutes. I am steadfastly leaving to its own devices but I think this is terminal organ failure. If this does not work then I will give it a try with a recovery disc that is on the way, but if that fails the machine gets junked.

So today I have been in and out of the shed as I’ve tended to the dying laptop. In this time I have been able to write my daily letter, and to fill in my new web password journal. My old one had everything under R for Roland, which worked for one or two entries but has recently become too crowded to be useful, so the new one is strictly in alphabetical order, more or less. Being of a cautious persuasion I only enter partial passwords and identities that are enough for me to recognise.

My garden chore for the day is to prick out and pot up some Cosmos seedlings. The greenhouse is nearly full so I am looking for spaces all over the garden to site the new plants. It is a nice problem to have but the weather forecast says there is going to be a frost tonight and possibly for a few nights so it’s too early to be putting tender young plants into good old mother earth just yet.

So, its been a jigsaw of a day that tends to be typical of my “Shielded” state. I am getting walk and exercise fever. I’ve got things to do that will keep me occupied but I am missing the gym and the ability to walk outside for a reason able time. Tonight I shall wrestle with the laptop and see if I can finally over come the difficulties bit tomorrow I move on and get on with my other work. During today an e-mail popped up telling me that the Ombudsman has finally got the information that they need to investigate our complaint that arose out of my being air ambulanced out of Jamaica just over a year ago. It seems that I am destined to relive the Jamaican experience for a while yet. I think tonight I could do with a good old fashioned mindlessly thoughtless film.

DVT DAY 36

I write the blog at 23:36 having been embroiled with the resurrection of a laptop. It is a Toshiba Satellite “skullcandy” L70-C-C13 to be precise. It was my daughters originally but it more or less died. It was so slow that it was useless. Despite my best efforts to unbung it, it remained dead slow, even after I tried new RAM and an SSD it remained tortoise like. So in desperation I have been trying to reset it to its factory settings, it is only now that I might succeed. I type this watching and waiting for a blank screen to reignite into life, I am not hopeful. So I write the blog in a cyber whirl of anticipation.

As for the rest of the day, there was a moment of relative joy as while waiting for the moribund laptop to work agonisingly slowly through something I idly checked the status of Sainsburys delivery slots. To my amazement I found they had some. So with great glee I booked a slot and then revisited my waiting basket to fill it with all the things that we had run out of since I first tried to get a delivery slot. So it is going to be Eldorado Friday in this household between 8 and 9am, with a Tesco slot the following Friday that’s Aprils food sorted.

One other thing happened that was both sweet and bitter. My GP rang me to how I was and to try and carry out my oncologist’s recommendation that I go to an oral medication for my DVT rather than keep on stabbing myself. We started the protocol to check that he could prescribe it for me by checking the NICE guidance on the drug proposed and to my and his disappointment he found it could only be prescribed by the relevant consultant, who in my case was the DVT specialist and not the oncologist who had recommended it to the GP. MY GP is a lovely man and was truly disappointed that I would have to wait till the 23^rd of April to discuss it with the DVT specialist. However my doctor did send the letter he had received from the oncologist to my phone, I did not know he was so tech savvy, and I to my delight I discovered I could print direct from my phone to my printer. My printer is so posh it has its own email address apparently. It’s only a matter of time before it invites me over for drinks. So as I say the interaction was bitter/sweet but it was one I am glad of and thankful for such an attentive and caring GP.

It’s been a quiet day on WhatsApp except for my friend who is celebrating her daughters third birthday today and by all accounts it has been a glittery day of activity. I wonder if I will still be in isolation in July when my birthday rolls around.

So I am still sitting here watching a laptop screen saying “This will take a few minutes please be patient”. Actually the screen just went blank that means it is either working or just gone AWOL. This could be a long night.

DVT DAY 35

Day three of the festival and today is all about the garden and finding spaces for the future planting of the seedlings. But first to answer the question of how my night under canvas went. Well to be honest not too good. I had forgotten how constricting a sleeping bag is. I like to “star fish” when I sleep and this is not possible in a bag, especially one that is zipped up to keep the warmth in the bag. So, I was not as comfortable as I could be. It was nice to listen to the distant hoot of owls that I tend not to hear when indoors. By two o’clock in the morning I was feeling cramped and restless and need of a toilet. I held out as long as possible but, in the end, I gave in and went off in search of a toilet. As I wriggled out of the tent, I found the ground wet and cold. So, I snuggled down in the spare bedroom for the rest of the night.

In the morning I still felt quite achy but I got up and opened up the shed and the greenhouse. After breakfast with my partner I set about weeding pots and looking for spaces in the garden to plant all the seedlings that are coming up in the greenhouse. I fix a new trellis to the patio wall and tie the climbing rose to it and tidy up vine that is now growing again. Once done I return to tiding the pots and beds, all the time looking for new spaces to grow vegetables in.

I take a nap in the tent and get woken up by my partner bringing me a light lunch. With renewed energy I start to renovate some baskets for climbing beans and peas. I notice that the pond has tadpole activity in it and that there is a resident frog. It turns out that there are three frog’s resident and more tadpoles than I realised. This is beyond my hopes for the pond when we first put it in during autumn last year. It appears we have been successful in creating a suitable ecosystem.

By late afternoon I am tired and resort to doing my nails, hand and foot, not a simple task since chemo. My thickened and cycle ridged nails are difficult to make comfortable and it is a task that I undertake as a sort of biological DIY task. Once done I inspect them and find that they are beginning to look more normal, like all things biological its going to take time to get back to a semblance of normality.  

Dinner time and therefore its time to close up the shed, zip up the tent and close up the greenhouse. All done its time to eat and write the blog. As the weather begins to change the garden will have to look after itself for a couple of days while I go back to trying to refurbish and old laptop. Its guts have been laying around on the table for days now while I went “Festival” so now I need to apply myself and return the table to the rest of the family.

DVT DAY 34

Festival day two. Tent still up and tonight is my night out under canvas (plasticated cloth type thing). I did my usual drugs on time after a poor nights sleep and another night my Fitbit thought I was dead. So full of my daily compliment I retreat to the shed and set up with the intention of doing nothing but kick back to good sounds and do a bit of gardening in a self-sufficient mind set sort of way. After a breakfast bacon roll and coffee on the patio with my partner I settle down to read the post. A letter from a friend who is isolated and not able to get to see her family has arrived and I save the pleasure for a cup of coffee on the swing seat in the sunshine. It is such a great pleasure to get a letter, I do not understand why people do not write more. Actually I think I do but today is a festival day and not a philosophy one.

I potter in the garden for a bit and scribble an odd line or two strangely inspired by Splodgenessabounds’s Two Pints of Larger and a Packet of Crisps Please. Where that came from I’ve no idea, but that’s the way it goes sometimes.

https://youtu.be/tf3aJx7D7YA

I weed garden pots and settle down after lunch to watch the BBC recording of Kate Tempest’s BBC recording of Let Them Eat Chaos. Its 53 minutes long and left me breathless and wondering how someone can develop such a distinctive and powerful poetic voice, a strange mixture of hip hop and alliterative iambic pentameter.

After a bit of a refection I got down to some more weeding of the garden with a view to make room for the dozens of seedlings that I have potted up in the temporary greenhouse.

Dinner and Indiana Jones followed by clearing the kitchen and then the blog. The exciting thing is that I am sleeping in the tent tonight, so at sometime soon I shall wander of up the garden with a pillow.

DVT DAY 33

Its festival time! Pitch the tent in the garden, get guitar out, throw sleeping bag in, add the scented candle and put the lantern in the tent. Put the play list together of the great dead, Hendrix, Jopin and the rest. Actually, listen to Kate Tempest and wonder at her poetic voice. Take time out to prick out tomato plants and other vegetable plants then write the letter for the day.

Dinner and close up the campsite to watch Vera and write the blog. This is how prosta8kancerman spends Good Friday. No time, no routine, a drift through the day following inclination to inclination. I can feel writing and reading coming on, tomorrow perhaps.

DVT DAY 32

Today has been a busy day full of things to stretch my brain. There were nice surprises like the letter from a friend which was a delight to read and savour as I worked in the garden shed. I was up early and kick started myself with a shower and bacon sandwich breakfast before retreating to the shed to write note cards to people. There are a group of people who I am not sure are still living at the address I have for them, or indeed still alive. I have sent them cards with my details on so they can reply if they wish. In the meantime, I shall be continuing to write to my regulars.

Of course at ten o’clock I took time out to self inject but today was the first day of the new 15000 units injections. I’ve a month of these to go and then I’m not sure what happens, either more 1500s or a reduced dose.

The good news is that my partners mother who had a fall last night is okay, bruised but okay. She is getting additional pain relief from her GP so hopefully with rest she will back to doing back flips pretty soon.

I spent my morning writing cards and reading my letter which prompted me to send emergency poetry to my friend. By lunchtime I was ready to do a practice run for the afternoons reflective group. The technology that we are using is tricky to use to facilitate the space we want to put together but we got the practicalities more or less right. So, when the actual forum took place, I was able to work my way through it. The practicalities of the session were a challenge but the content was what I expected and the progression through the session was as I thought it might go. It was hard work but the content was well worth the effort. The team reviewed the session and we planned to continue the next set of sessions. I retreated to the garden shed and wrote up my session notes. That’s not something I’ve done for a while so it was interesting when it got to the personal reflection section.

So having got to the end the work day I went in search of my partner who I find having a nap due to a headache, I joined her and had a nap myself for an hour. When I woke up I found it was time to clear the kitchen and to start dinner. While my gastronomic concoction was bubbling away in the oven I went to pack the shed up for the night, close up the greenhouse and bring my washing in off the line. Time also to have a call with a friend and catch up on plans.

Dinner and then Two Popes. A film that turned out to be rather touching. So now its blog time and transition into the Easter four-day weekend. My plan is to put the tent up in the garden and go “FESTIVAL”.

DVT DAY 31

Wow what a day suddenly life is full of things to do and to sort out. Once I am through breakfast and into my shed I get to work on the first letter of the day. By serendipity the person I am writing to rings me and we are able to chat about the issues around the current situation and the challenges of finding food and keeping family occupied. I return to my letter writing till I am interrupted by the news that we have just received another Boris box. Before we can reject it, the deliverer has disappeared but this time there is a note in the box telling me how to change my status from needing food. I do it immediately and we make the decision to donate what we do not use to a food bank. I return to my letter writing and preparation for a zoom group later in the day. The postman brings the invoice for my civil partnership celebration, which I pay immediately by bank transfer. The Civil Partnership is almost completed, all that remains is the delivery of our album of the day. I also notice the butterfly’s that have appeared and the flowers that have opened up under the influence of the sunshine.

At lunchtime I settle down in front of my laptop to sign into a reflection group. After a slight technical hitch, I joined the group. For an hour we talk about how the current situation is affecting he work of the therapeutic communities. The range of experience is fascination and the insights it brings are really useful. At the end of the hour we review the times usefulness. Everyone has found it useful so it will be happening again in a similar format. After the group three of us discuss the future groups and the format for the one I am to lead tomorrow. Having done my contribution for the day I change into my garden clothes with the intention of doing a bit of gentle weeding, however I get in to the tool shed and end up taking everything out and tidying it up.

Only when I’ve completely cleared the shed out do I get to the front garden for an initial weeding. Once I run out of steam I clear away and sit on the garden swing seat and recover. Once I feel recovered, I go inside and cook dinner. Tonight, it was pasta with a mushroom sauce with broccoli and wilted spinach. We are just settling down to coffee and a well-earned rest and we get a phone call from my partners mother’s neighbour to say she has had a fall and an ambulance has been called. My partner and daughter drive off as does my partners brother. We had only a short time to assess the best things to do. My partner knows that if her mother goes to A&E she and her brother will not be able to go with her or visit her. This is not going to be an easy time and I now sit and wait feeling anxious and not a little impotent to contribute meaningfully. We shall see how the night plays out. Its fingers crossed time again.

DVT DAY 30

Today has been a planning day in regards of work and at the death of the day much has gone pear shaped. Apart from 200 litres of compost, a phone call with a friend and a zoom conversation with another friend and a letter written the day has been bitter sweet. The sun shone, the seeds are germinating in the greenhouse and we got another Tesco slot in two weeks’ time. A nice chap from the COVID task team rang me to check I was okay and whether I needed anything. As it happens, we are okay so he left me with a phone number. Nice to know that someone out there knows about me. Tomorrow is the last 1800-unit injection, after that I start on the 1500-unit injections for30 days. So that’s 30 down and 150 to go.