DVT DAY 29

Today was a shed and garden day. The highlight will be the arrival of the Tesco delivery between 8 and 9 0’clock tonight. The fridge is looking empty and we need our order to see us through the week.

My day started with a sandwich and coffee before I go to the shed and set up my garden office. Settling in I start the first letter of the day and sit writing with the occasional moments revere looking out over the garden. I more and more think that having access to the garden is what will get me through, coupled of course with the care and love of those close to me. I can only write for so long so I take time out to plant some broad beans and peas in some of the garden troughs. While I am on a roll I try to sort out the solar fountain in the pond that has stopped working. I place the pump and outlet in a bucket but nothing I did brought the pump back to life. I decided it was officially knackered and search the internet for a replacement. I found a floating disc version that I am willing to give a try. So, its waiting on Mr Amazon to deliver from now on.

After a brief lunch I return to writing letters. I finish my second letter of the day just as my daughter prepares to go for her exercise walk. She acts as my Hogwarts Owl taking my letters to the post box for me. Without this I would be cut off from this form of communication, one which means so much to me.

I prepare dinner, chicken curry, and we sit to eat and catch up with the corona virus. The usual grim news and the usual desperate attempt to get entertainment out of it. So having moved the car we wait for the Tesco van to deliver us from an empty fridge.

So having stocked the fridge we settle down to watch people race across the world and eat spatchcock guinea pig. Life has its strange moments.

The good news is that after almost a month of self injections my calf appears to be reducing in size and feels less stretched and awkward. Two more days of 1800 unit injections and then I start on a reduced dose of 1500 unit injections. How long for I do not know, what I have got will take me through the next month.

DVT (deep vein thrombosis) DAY 28

I get up and find it is sunny and head for the garden. I grab a coffee and open the temporary greenhouse. Breakfast if muesli eaten while I gently oscillate on the garden swing. My partner and I chat about how things are going and our survival plan for the coming weeks. At the moment we are managing and now we can get food delivered we should be alright I the short t medium term. The longer term will depend on the length of the virus peak and how it whether there are resurgences in specific areas or generally. We just need to stay aware and pan accordingly. I do some more internet shopping and finally buy a weights bench on e-bay, so in a couple of weeks I shall be able to train properly and protect my body over time. I was pleased to find what I wanted as it appears the whole world is buying training benches and many suppliers have sold out. So all over the country people must be setting up their own gyms in the garage or whatever space they can clear in their home to be able to keep fit. Late in the day I get an e-mail from e-bay to say they have withdrawn the seller form their service but I am not to do anything and to wait for my goods. Sounds to me like I have little chance of getting my goods and I will have to claim my money back. I shall just have to wait and see.

I retreat to the garden shed to write my daily letter. I am half way through the letter when I get a message from my son that he can take a zoom call. We finally connect and we get to talk for a long time. I get to see my grandchildren for the first time in a long time, which is delightful. My son describes what it is like in Sweden at the moment. They are just coming out of a long winter and the Swedes are wanting to be out and about. Everything is still open and there is free movement only the ex-pats from England are taking it seriously and staying at home. It would seem Sweden is in for a difficult time fairly soon. We eventually managed to get everyone in the households on the Zoom screen, which was a good experience and something we will do again soon.

Back to the shed to finish my letter and to close up the greenhouse. We prepare tea and eat it while watching TV before having an evening of more television. Tonight, there are chores to do, clear the kitchen, bring in the washing off the line and write the blog before I can get to bed and the excitement of tomorrows food delivery. Of course, there are drugs to be taken, there are always the drugs.  

DVT DAY 27

Well that was a day. Life has its bad and relatively good moments. The most important thing is that we got news that someone close to the family died this morning. He is the brother of my youngest daughters boyfriend. It is terrible to lose anyone but to lose a brother only slightly older than yourself is a dreadful thing. Being in the situation that we are we have few options to be supportive, we just have to trust them to look after each other and bed themselves. The isolation in this sense is all the more difficult to deal with and feels like true isolation. Of course, we send flowers and a card but somehow it never feels enough, and isn’t.

I sort out my morning injection, have breakfast and then head for the garden shed to write my daily letter. I get half way through a letter and I check my e-mails and to my surprise both Sainsburys and Tesco are offering my a priority delivery slot now that the government has shared their “Shielded” list with them. I immediately get on the web and try to get a Sainsburys slot as that is where we usually go. Could I get a slot, could I buggery, no matter how I tried? Sainsburys had filled the coming week and not released the following two weeks. So I try my luck at Tesco. Not a problem at all. Straight in, I fill my basket, get a slot for Monday and we are a family that can eat and order food for the foreseeable future. So given the ease of Tesco’s I should not think that we will return to Sainsburys any time soon.

In the midst of this I get a letter from the DVT clinic telling when my appointment is going to be and telling me that it will be a virtual consultation. So on a Thursday later in April I will get a call from a consultant who will divine my wellbeing or lack of it over the phone. I will try and be helpful by measuring my calves beforehand and by that time my weight training may have kicked in.

With that small victory under my belt I return to my letter writing. I find I can write letters only for a limited period before they start to sound like idle gossip on a front door step between two people who are being polite but cannot stand each other really. It degenerates into mundane mumbling about the weather, the cost of soap powder and the state of Mrs X hair since she went blonde. So I stop and route out my weight lifting bars from the dark depths of the garage. The collars are rusted and need WD40 to free them. I strip them down and wire wool the rust off the bars and then wash and dry the collars before storing them in the garden shed to keep them dry. The weight are plastic coated and need just a wash and will not rust. All I need now is a new weights bench so I start to surf the net. I find the perfect bench but it cannot be delivered until July!!! I try several outlets and they are either out of stock or cannot deliver now. It is very frustrating but I shall surf deeper and be successful in the end. This is all in preparation for mem to start training again once I reach the 28 day mark of my DVT. I am supposedly able to start to train again after four weeks of self-stabbing. I need to strengthen my upper body and try to build core strength to combat the longer-term damage to my spine inflicted by the cancer. Ultimately if my back goes, I might become upper body dependent, so seriously starting now is a good idea and I have 10 weeks of house arrest to do it in, so with luck I can make a good start.

Time to rest for a while, close the temporary greenhouse and retreat to the house for tea. So the evening begins and I continue my hunt for a weights bench before settling down to watch Joker. Joachim Phoenix is just brilliant in this dark and cleverly layered film. So its blog time and a time to reflect on the day.

DVT DAY 26

Another day, another morning of Zoom meetings and trying to work out how to be useful from the couch or the garden shed. After a couple of hours it seems we might be able to do something but pulling it together is going to be a challenge.

The strain of conducting business over the scree- based platforms is hard on the eyes. It seems odd as in face to face meetings it is the ears that that become tired, not the eyes. By the end of a day of screen meetings and cyber social interaction there is a strange sense of being drained in a new way. I think I need to ration how much screen interaction I do each day. Taking the time out to write letters or thoughts helps as does doing the garden. Each day a small task in the garden helps breakup the day and makes me do something physical. Today I planted potatoes and took some cuttings from my favourite pants. It is still early in the year so the garden will take more time as the weather gets warmer.

I am concerned that I am not training so I have started to research exercise regimes and thinking about a programme for the next ten weeks. I realise that I miss the gym.

I still have not cracked the problems with the laptop that I am upgrading so I still have my silver savvy jigsaw to do.

Tonight I worked out when my twelve weeks of isolation ends, bizarrely it falls on my parents joint birthday, June the 14^th. It seems a long way away. For now it needs to be one day at a time and to find the pleasure and beauty of life on the here and now.

DVT DAY 25

I am writing this at the end of what seems a long day. Having wrestled with a recalcitrant hard drive that refuses to play I am left frustrated and in need of some research time. However, I had the joy of a real letter dropping through the letter box. A letter written on beautiful paper and in a marvellous matching envelope was a joy to take to the shed to read. There really is nothing like a real letter to stop and savour. Every time I get a letter, I am prompted to renew my correspondence efforts and today was no exception. So today I have fulfilled my intention to write a letter a day. I also got a letter from an old colleague who has been reading my blog and could empathise over my aversion to injecting myself. Its good to know that someone else finds the process as aversive as I do. So on the basis of getting letters today was a very good day. It was also a friend birthday who is also isolated and not amused by having to spend her birthday at home. A bright shiny home as she has cleaned everything that moves. I guess this is true for many others as well.

The rest of my time has been spent talking to colleagues about constructing and offering reflective spaces to service mangers in the criminal justice system. Out of that has come an evening of work drafting notes and thinking about an approach to the project. In essence it is quite exciting to be thinking about something new and hopefully useful. There are also the practical matters of keeping the basics of the business end of the activity going, so tonight I also spent time drawing up my invoices for March. Very soon the tax man is going to be asking me for a self-assessment. Death and taxes guaranteed. So tomorrow I have a round of phone calls to make before I get into my first meeting of the day. So sleep is my priority right now as I can feel myself flagging.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 24

ON DAY 2 OF “AS GOOD AS IT GETS PHASE” I PUBLISHED ADVICE ON CORONA VIRUS THAT WAS PURPORTED TO HAVE BEEN ISSUED TO HOSPITAL STAFF. IT TURNS OUT THAT THIS WAS A FAKE NEWS ARTICLE. I HAVE NOW TAKEN THIS OUT OF THE POST AND CAN ONLY APOLOGISE TO EVERYONE WHO READ IT. CLEARLY THE LESSON IN THIS IS TO BE VERY CLEAR ABOUT THE SOURCE OF ANY ADVICE ON THIS ISSUE.

THANK YOU TO MIKE FOR MAKING ME AWARE OF THIS.

More to follow later.

April Fools day and this time last year I was landing in the air ambulance at Birmingham and being transferred to an ambulance bound for Leicester Royal Infirmary. I had seen a spectacular display of the aura borealis as we flew towards Iceland on the last hop back from Jamaica. I was just thankful that I was back in dear old Blighty and amongst familiar sights and sounds. My joy was fairly ephemeral as I found myself being put into isolation for three days just to be sure that  I had not come back with something nasty from Jamaica apart from a pair of dodgy kidneys and a probable bladder problem. As it turned out my kidneys made a very good recovery and are firing on as many cylinders as you would expect for a man my age, the down side was the star of my diagnosis of metastatic prostate cancer and the recent DVT. Still I cannot complain as my current isolation is far more palatable than my previous experience of a year ago. In fact, I feel like I had a practice run. I also agree with George Alagiah the journalist who has been fighting cancer for six years when he said that those of us with cancer have an edge in that we are stronger having faced the ambiguous nature of cancer and faced the questions of mortality that it raises. Its not quite “been there, got the T shirt” but it does build a resilience that is useful in putting other things like Corona virus in perspective.

So today started slowly with a muesli breakfast and a coffee in the quiet of the house as my partner had gone for her walk. I donned my now standard lounge pants and ice hockey shirt and got myself ready to go to the garden shed. It is has become like going off to work each morning and with it come the routines of setting up my office. I settle down and write my first letter of the day, however part the way through my partner appears and tells me that I have just received a food box from the government.

Apparently because I am of the Shielded community, I get free food. Who knew? Well the box was full of goodies as you can see from the picture above. It poses a moral dilemma as I am not sure we need it but the man on a mission who delivered was not about to hang around for a chat. It is something we will think about seriously and resolve as quickly as we can. It is made less clear due to my daughter being furloughed and her boyfriend being put on short time so there is a question mark as to whether they can stay where they are or whether they will need to move in. Its highly unlikely that they will have to move but if they did we would need to cater for them. The box of goodies was interesting. My favourite item was the can of prunes in thick syrup. I think this is a deliberate ploy to keep my bowels open. Boris bowel bombs! So kind of him when he has so much on his mind. So back to the shed to finish my letters until lunch to find that the computer parts to upgrade and old laptop have arrived. It turns out that this is going to take longer than I thought as I need to clone the new SSD before I can install it in the laptop. I spend all afternoon wrangling the lap top and hit a dead end.

So I do what I always do I resort to cooking and wipe up a Thai red chicken curry. Actually, I use one of the pre picked ingredients meals that we had delivered yesterday. To my surprise it turns out to be tasty and easy to cook. A friend calls and I have the pleasure of chatting to someone outside the family and hearing how others are dealing with being isolated. She has children to occupy as well as continuing to work from home, no mean feat. It makes my situation feel much less pressured and quite luxurious. So it will be an evening of research as I sort out cleaning an SSD drive and booting up a brand new drive without cloning the dysfunctional old one. I will see how long I can remain enthusiastic before tiredness over takes me. The good thing is that I have not had time to think about where I was this time last year. Keeping busy in the here and now has kept me from drifting into unwanted revelry about less happy times.

DVT DAY 23

So this time last year I was being flown out of Jamaica with a bladder catheter and a set of blood drain valves in my neck.

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I woke with this thought and new it was a day that I needed to keep busy. My partner had already been for her walk  and returned with some odds and ends so I made my breakfast and retreated to the garden shed. My first thought was to write my letter for the day and to do the crosswords in the paper that my partner had brought in. It came to self-stab time and I got myself ready to do it. The problem is I am very sore from yesterdays 28 day injection and it makes it difficult to bend. More to the point it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a suitable place to inject myself. I resemble a pin cushion and I am considering researching whether I can use other sites on my body. Today I find a spot and self stab. I am now much kinder to myself and ease the needle into my flesh slowly and as gently as I can. Gone is the old darts approach which aimed to get the needle in as quickly as possible. I always rest a moment after having done the deed and got the bent needle in to the sharps bin. I now take my temperature every morning to give me a moment to gather myself after the injection. Fortunately to date I have always come up green and normal.

I return to the shed and finish my letter and begin to plan the rest of the day. I decide to build the new raised vegetable bed so gathered up my tools, changed in to my work kit and got to building the frame. All went well and the new bed was ready quickly. What takes the time is the varnishing or staining of the wood. It took a fair time to get this done and when it was there was time to tidy up the garden while it dried.

So having put out the bins for tomorrow the raised bed was ready to be lined and filed with compost. By the end of the afternoon I was knackered, every time I moved or bent over my stomach pulled and I felt the soreness of my belly. I started to clear away during which my eldest daughter arrived and offered to be my Hogwarts owl and take my letters to the post box. She returned quite quickly full of smiles as she had found a prized DVD and to my surprise a pack of 9 toilet rolls. It seems our strategy of little and regular with the addition of new online suppliers is keeping us ticking over. We have resisted bulk buying or panic buying. So far so good and it means I have not been out of the house apart from a visit to the GP surgery. It would appear that we are fortunate to be living in a village that is being sensible and our three general stores are being able to cope with demand. The emergence of toilet rolls again seems to validate this.

I finish in the garden and pack away my kit and settle in for the evening, which will include a bath to try and soothe my soreness. For me it will be doing the blog and trying not to dwell on where I was last year. It feels like a cruel April fool’s joke as tomorrow is the anniversary of landing back in England and being put into an isolation room for three days. Sound familiar?

The rest of the journey is history and the subject and reason for this blog. As the Jamaican nurses used to say, ” See you on the other side”.

DVT DAY 22

Its Monday and I am tired and sore from this mornings injection so this is a very brief summary of what I did:

1`I went to the GP to get my 28 day injection and found it was not the usual nurse. It was not a good experience and has left me sore.

2. I went to the shed and joined a meeting to discuss some future work for Enabling Environments, and then wrote a letter.

3. The Wolf, my Jimny O2 car had a flatr battery so I hooked it up to leave to charge overnight.

4. I planted some ornamental vegetable seeds that I found in the back of a cupboard. They were an old birthday present.

5. I joined a Knowledge Hub where all the Enabling Environment materials and forum are going to be sited.

6. I watched “London has Fallen” before going to bed still feeling sore.

DVT DAY 21

So today I wake up to find the clocks have sprung forward and my body is expecting drugs a bit later so there is time for breakfast. Nice to have a relaxing meal during which to chat and plan the day.

I set to and start to take an old laptop apart with a view to upgrading it so my partner has a laptop of her own to use. All goes well as I am now confident of what I am doing and I am nodding terms with hard drives, RAM and mother boards. I have the thing in bits as the rest of the household busies itself around me, doing marking and organising the house. I source the upgrade kit I need and select the addition random access memory I am going to put in. It is in the basket and we get to the pay page and then I cannot find my credit cards, everything else apart from my card holder. So “hunt the card holder” started. It’s gone on for hours. I know exactly when I last used it, and what I did since in minute detail. I also know that I have not been out being one of the shielded in isolation so where ever it is, it is in the house somewhere. In desperation to get the computer parts I borrow my partners card and finish the order. Order made I continue to play hunt the card holder. This game goes on until dinner and then I continue the hunt.

Today I have failed to write my daily letter or do anything else other than turn the house upside down. When I do surface, I discover that the family have formed a new large WhatsApp group and I think they have entered the world of ZOOM and other platforms, so I have to play catchup to see where everyone is.

I take time out to blog a bit in the hope that my unconscious will keep working on finding my card holder. I am hoping that we have not been selected to host a family of Borrowers. One ray of sunshine is the possibility that we have solved our toilet roll shortage as it looms large in the household. With luck we should be toilet roll sufficient by the end of the week. One has to find solace where one can finds it.

Tomorrow it is an early start as I go to the GP surgery for my 28 day injection. This is the day I get to be driven to the surgery and left like a dog in the car until I am allowed in to have my injection after, which I shall be ushered out to the car and whisked home. At least I get to see something other than my house and the garden.

DVT DAY 20

I woke in a strange bed, the back bedroom bed, familiar but not the usual and then I remembered my partner had taken herself off with a tickly throat last night. So here I am in the back bedroom bed looking at the trees in the garden and thinking how well I have slept. The mattress is so much firmer and supportive than the new one on the big bed. Ultimately it means getting another super king size mattress but that will have to wait till I am free of my leper status; I am never going to buy another mattress without laying on it first. Not that we did not lay on the other one but somehow it just was not the same when it arrived. So it good old fashioned springs in pockets for me in future.

I get up, put bedding in the washing machine, cook an egg roll and retreat to the shed, but not before catching up with the daily Covid-19 situation. As expected the numbers are going up here. I have a plan, keep my distance and spend a lot of time in the shed.

I set up and settle down to write my letters for the day. Some are easy to write others less so. I am writing to people who are in my address book but they may well have thought me dead and scrubbed me out of their address books long ago. Of course I might be writing to dead people. I take odd moments out check e-mail or WhatsApp messages. A colleague always finds amusing things to circulate but today I found he had sent a lovely video about life being like a train journey, I was expecting there to be a joke at the end but in fact it was a message of appreciation that I was one of the people that was on his train. A lovely thought. A friend sent me a picture and a new word. I leave you to spot it in the blog at some point. I end up writing three letters which my daughter will post when she goes for her daily walk. I spend quite a lot of time trying to get my laptop to hook up to the internet reliably but the signal from our router fades in and out and is not stable. I then spend time trying to find a signal booster that will do the job and can be delivered fairly soon, if I cannot make this work in the shed I will need to relocate into the house when I need to work online. I am reluctant to do this but it may be the only realistic solution. Time will tell once Mr Amazon has worked his magic and got the tech stuff to me. Life is never easy but then who wants it to be, only the snizzlenuggets of this world want easy.

Eventually I can write no more so I fill the bird and squirrel feeders. I once joked with a friend that if there is a day of reckoning I will at least be able to say “I fed the birds” and hope that it tips the scales in my favour. Although if I were an ancient Egyptian I doubt Thoth the god who weighs the hearts of the dead  to see if they may progress, would be impressed by a few bags of seed. Although Horus the falcon headed god might put a good word in for me. It looks like rain as the sky turns stormy and there is that quiet which precedes one.

I empty the tumble dryer and close the shed up for the day and retreat to the house where I start the blog and watch as two men deliver bags of vegetables and fruit  to our porch. My partner has sourced a delivering farm shop locally and is impressed with the quality of the goods. On slight hiccup is the volume of some of the vegetables. We now have enough carrots to enter into bartering. So that’s it until the evening’s entertainment, which for me might be a bath and a bash at some yoga maybe.

Hopefully I might find something on Netflix to watch or an opera. I may also read as it will stimulate the letter writing content. My “go to stuff” at the moment is Kate Tempest. I found one of her books in my brief case and sat and read some of her poems in the shed over three digestive biscuits. She is truly a poet.