This is a day of conscious idleness. This is a rest day. This is a day of watching sport, doing light house work and packing for the holiday to come next Tuesday. As soon as my bath bombs arrive from Amazon I shall indulge in a warm bath while my eldest daughter and partner have gone to town to shop and run errands. Its days like this are made for doing ones nails, updating the food log and general indulgent faffing around. This is exactly what I am doing. The most exacting thing I’ve done is stick a new sticker on the garden recycling bin. I did after all have to go outside to do that so I need to rest. It is what I shall do for the rest of the day. It means switching off the brain, having no clever, or otherwise, thoughts and making no attempt at any intellectual effort whatsoever. If my old reptilian brain cannot handle it, it will not get paid attention to or done. This is me dropping the mic. Of course the cancer won’t be so neither will Rocket.

It’s Friday! I can lie in and indulge myself all the way to 8 o’clock. No further than 8 o’clock as I went to bed so early last night due to being so tired; so as much as I would like to lay around I constitutionaly cannot. So it’s an early luxury bath for me. That was a good idea until I find that I have no bath bombs left and there are no bath bubbles or solution available. I find a bottle of strawberry body wash which I tip into the running bath with abandon. While waiting for the bath to fill I make breakfast and coffee and find the helpful little notes left by my partner instructing me on what is required. So I’m going out today then to shop for food. Now I wish I had panic bought in response to the corona virus, but I did not so it’s a shopping trip for me. I eat breakfast in the bath, answer e-mails and WhatsApp messages and generally get myself organised for the day. Having reached the wrinkly and cold stage I got out and got ready to go foraging at Sainsburys. I notice that my calf has eased considerably. It seems that warmth is the key to easing my calf. As the day went on I also notice that my calf stiffens up as the day goes on and I use it more. Perhaps I need to warm it more. Calf hugging is in order. I think leg warmers and my mind flys to my ice hockey leggings! Wizard idea.

 A quick tidy round and a load put in the washing machine and I am off to the supermarket. I draw out some holiday money and then shop. So far there are no signs of panic in this supermarket, the shelves are full. I whip round and fill my basket except for bath bombs that I ordered those on Amazon to arrive tomorrow. Back home I wrap a present for a friend and trot over to the post office and send it on its way. It’s early but with being on holiday next week it needs to go now. I walk down to the village café and indulge in an egg and bacon baguette while I do the crosswords. I was quick today and had time to reply to e mails that had come in. Once home I cleared the decks, turned the cars round in the drive and garage and got the suitcases out. During this I discovered the bannisters were sticky so I spent time washing the stair bannisters down. Life is so full of fun.

I hung the washing out and headed for my garden shed to write the blog and spend a bit of time in the open air and to view my garden. I like my shed and cannot wait for the better weather when I can retreat to my space in the garden. It is where I like to read and write the most. Ever since I read about the birds responding to oxygen in the mornings I like to think of them around me getting their full complement of whatever oxygen my garden is making. I also wonder if this is why so many writers had garden rooms to write in and a lot of artists had studios built in their gardens. Perhaps the creative juices flow more freely with fresh oxygen and that artists and writers feel this unconsciously, intuit it, and naturally gravitate to where they feel the effects of the “new oxygen”. I wonder. My problem is now to devise a series of experiments to see if the effect is measurable and verifiable. Unlike the Japanese man who fed nocturnal oxygen to his canaries I think my project might have more design variables to contend with. I wonder if there is a research grant going for this sort of thing, although if someone offered me the money I wonder if I could face the effort of it.

So I am now slowing down in the shed and wondering if the multivitamins with added iron will help me. As I read the Radical Remission book there is a constant tension between the scientist in me who has an aversion to superstition, suggestibility and desperate salvation seeking and the difficult balancing act of keeping an open mind without being gullible and needy. I think I am finding an increasing urge to trust what I find works for me and to perhaps consider a wider range of life adjustments to best address having and trying to rid myself of cancer. I am not sure that the latter is possible and that’s the nub of the problem, but if what I read is true then there are people who do experience radical remission. I am a realist I think, with my figures, or the ones I started out with, the prognosis is not good but then there are the cases that were sent home to die some twenty years ago and here they are still going strong and appearing to be healthy. I just have to find my own formulation that works. As I said to a friend today about the Japanese man and his oxygenated canaries; without cancer I would never have found this inquisitive man. There are delights along the way.

I was up early again today to get the train to London, it was still dark. I drove to the station and collected my tickets and clambered aboard the London train. I read on the train as the light came up which was serendipitous. As the sun was rising I was reading about a Japanese man who is a Radical Remissionist. He was diagnosed with cancer but as is the Japanese way neither his doctor nor his wife told him, however he underwent treatment in hospital for months and was extremely ill. At a critical point he developed a really acute sense of smell and could not stand the smells of the hospital so he managed to get up onto the roof and curl up and rest whilst breathing air that smelt as air should, fresh. The nurses who found him thought he was trying to commit suicide as did his doctor who became furious with him and said if he wanted to do that he could go home. So he went home and began to try and recover. He started with breathing and meditation and again found his way onto the roof where he would sit and watch the sun come up in the mornings. When doing this he began to ask questions about the birds that sang each morning.  He noticed that they began to sing at the same time each morning at exactly 42 minutes before the sun rose. Being a scientist this man was curious as to why this should be. So he measured the occurrence to confirm it and began to put together a theory. He kept canaries in a cage so he experimented on them, He got his brother to buy him a canister of oxygen from the chemist and waited till night when the canaries  were asleep and then gave them a burst of oxygen and surprise surprise they sang for a while and then went back to sleep. He found he could repeat this through the night with them and each time they would sing. What is more is that they continued to wake up and sing 42 minutes before the dawn. His theory is that the when the trees begin to breathe out oxygen under the stimulation of light it stimulates the birds to sing. Whether this is a health benefit to them or not is not clear but I thought that was an amazing thing to discover as the sun came up during a train journey. Each day I will now think of birds getting high on new oxygen each morning. The happy part for him was that he survived and is still around today many years after he was sent home for palliative and hospice care. In effect he was told to sod off and die and he sodded off and lived.

As you can imagine the journey flew by and I arrived excited to see my favourite Tracy Emin. A quick journey on the tube to Aldgate and then a short walk and I am at the Royal College of Psychiatrists. I head for the café and get breakfast, which I, of course, recorded in my new food journal.

A colleague arrived to chat and we were soon whisked away to our meeting. It was a long meeting and of no interest to anyone but the Enabling Environment chums in the room.

Back on the train on the way home I read more about radical remission and some of the elements that appear to be a part of the process.

I am home and feed and so tired that I am retreating to bed at a time that a recalcitrant child would be sent for their own good. I will post tomorrow.

I wake to a busy house, partner already hooked to work through the laptop having discussions about something beyond my understanding, my eldest daughter busily disappearing through the front door to work. I have my now standard breakfast of muesli and orange juice and get ready for the day. I leave my partner busily sorting out work over the phone and set off to do what I need for the day. My intention was to hunt for the power inlet I need to repair my laptop but decide to go and see the Damian Hurst’s at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  My first stop is for coffee at the cafe where I take the opportunity to write the blog for yesterday and begin todays. I have thinking to do as well as some practical things such as sourcing a new power input socket for my laptop. This could be tricky. The practicality of fitting a new one is dependent on whether the power inlet is part of the fixed board so I probably need to open it up before I can know which part to order. The You Tube video I watched glibly said that the maker had ordered a replacement part but I am finding it difficult to source the part. There is the possibility that the board is cracked, so I need to get into it and have a look which means making sure I copy the hard drive.

Anyway I view the Damian Hursts. There is a new giant cockerel at the entrance that is in what looks like a Spanish style. I am pretty sure the BBC art correspondent was in the café with a retinue of people, I supposed he was there doing a piece for the TV.  I find when I am at YSP I have conversations with myself about how I am; I suppose it is a thinking space that allows me to think about the unthinkable. Today I found myself facing the way my sense of time has changed. I leave about 4 o’clock and drive back down the M1 but one the way back I felt light headed and need to stop to eat and wait for myself to feel better. A panicky moment but I drove back slowly and carefully till I got home. I eat tea and feel better, in time for our next door neighbour to pop round with the Amazon parcels that had been delivered to them. This evening it will be a relaxing bath and an early night in preparation for tomorrows trip to London for and Enabling Environment meeting.

It’s up early today and a quick breakfast before driving to Oxford. It’s a mere 80 miles and my satnav says it’s going to be an hour and forty seven minutes, so of course I leave at 06:15, which in theory means I will get there at 08:02, a full hour early. Given that I will have to find a parking spot in a street close to the service I am visiting this seems a reasonable tome to arrive. I finally get to the service at about 09:45 due to an accident on the M40 and appalling traffic in Oxford. That and the fact that by the time I arrived in the parkable streets of Oxford all the spaces were taken. I finally found a space in a rather dodgy road position but by the time I had found it I just thought “fuck it this will have to do”. I walked, actually I more limped due to my stiff calf muscle and swollen foot, to the service hoping that I would find my way back to the car at the end of the day. Although since discovering that my phone has Google maps on it this anxiety has been decreased in my life. I arrive and meet the team and we settle into the routine of the assessment visit. We introduce ourselves to the members of the service we are accrediting and get on with the business of reviewing their evidence and asking them all sorts of questions about their experience and work practices. I obviously cannot share any of this. What is so lovely for me is that feeling sitting in a room, in a circle of people who are committed to exploring who they are and how they can reform their personal universes to live more fulfilling lives. There really is nothing quite like it. It is not a random process or a matter of luck, there are rules and there are structures that enable this to happen. It is a risky but safe place to be. In essence people are trying to make meaning of their lives to date, how they became who they are and how they can live a life that is more …. This is the difficult bit. What we all want for ourselves in our lives is not the same and finding out what we want and how we achieve it is a hard task. In essence the participants in this are accounting for their lives to date and using the shared experience of the lives of others to cooperatively explore their individual personal universes, or how their world makes sense in relation to their experiences. This exploration inevitably is embedded in the personal relationships in the community, in a real time here and now context. For anyone who has not done this it is difficult to imagine the impact that this can have. It takes great courage and moral fortitude to undertake this journey and to expose and explore all those things that shame us, make us scared, and all the hidden Dark and Tricky parts of us that colour the way we make meaning of the universe and our relationship to it. I spent many years sitting in these circles with high risk prisoners exploring the universes of those that killed, raped and in general were at war with the rest of humanity. The bravery of some of these men was outstanding and exquisite, which I doubt will ever be a popular view of people labelled criminals or even worse, animals.

 In a conversation with an old colleague we compared our experiences of recently having contact with the medical profession due to life threatening illnesses. Our experience of the industrialised nature of medicine and the constraints met with doctors who dislike questions were similar. It led us to discuss the nature of the therapeutic community and the fact that people (carbon based organic mammals) have processes that require time (18 months at least in a TC) to explore, account for and change the self. Despite reductionist demands to distil the essentials of a treatment and to just deliver those components that are deemed the “active ingredients”, people just go taking the time they need. That’s human mammals for you. Once you accept that the process becomes accessible and a thing of beauty, not an aggravation, frustration or scientific imperative to reduce.

The day went well with the community feeding us well and being very open and welcoming. Occasionally the review team would huddle together and discuss their experience of the community and scribble notes and frame questions for the next session. Nice people. I always want to spend more time with the teams but alas we are always working busily to get the work done and do the community justice.

At the end of the day we give some feed back to the community and promise to have our report with them in a month. Then we, the team, scatter in our different directions. I head for my car and only at the end point have to try three different streets before I find my car. I tap in my home destination to the satnav and head for home. Getting out of Oxford was a fucking nightmare. Tiny streets, one way systems, huge congestion and a plethora of road works; when I do get onto a dual carriage way there is another hold up. It takes a long time to get home where I meet my partner who has just returned from the gym. I devour soup and crackers and watch a football match before retiring to bed very tired and glad to horizontal. I am hoping all my impressions of the day will consolidate and some of the questions I’ve asked myself about today’s experience will think themselves through while I slumber. I take my night drugs and try to sleep.

Well today it should be a stab day at the GP but due to a cranky unconscious, or prankster pixies, I contrived not to make the appointment. So, having missed the gym yesterday, I plunged into an early morning bath and dashed down the road to the GP surgery to admit to my omission and begged an appointment. The receptionist took to me kindly and booked me in for the afternoon. I returned home and spent the morning rereading the evidence for the therapeutic community review I am doing in Oxford tomorrow. I also tinkered with the idea of driving down tonight and booking into a hotel. After casting around the oxford area and finding the most expensive hotels were the ones near the service I am visiting I decided to make the effort in the morning and drive down. I had odd moments of feeding that I recorded in my new food journal.

This is the first day of changing my diet to cut out refined sugar and some carbohydrates and to increase my water and fruit juice intake. I might even restart making fruit smoothies, which explains why there is now cartons of orange juice and coconut water in the fridge.

So my morning went by quickly and before I knew it, it was time to go to the GP for the stabbing. I arrived with 3 minutes to spare and was soon called in. The drug is thick and there is a lot of it so it takes little while to push into my gut fat. This nurse did it very painlessly and relatively quickly. I guess the soreness will get to me over the next couple of days, it usually does. I booked the next jab session and wandered off to the village cafe to have a bacon baguette and coffee. While there I booked Thursdays train tickets and planned other bits and pieces I needed to think about.

Home and I pick up the post, which includes the Leicester Tigers bid to get me to renew my session ticket. They are trying to woo me with a same price as this season, I am not surprised the way they are playing. On Saturday the ground was almost half empty despite the clubs claim that there was 18, 000 there. They just count all session ticket holders and add on the tickets sold, the number that turn up is very different. I suspect my partner and I will think carefully about what we will do.

My partner returns home early from work and we talk about my new diet reductions before she goes off to cook tea. Tonight I shall get ready for my drive to Oxford tomorrow morning, so its early to bed for me tonight.

I realise I’ve only got 7 days before we go to Spain and at least three of those days are spoken for in terms of work. All of a sudden I realise that I am not as organised as I could be but I’m guessing it will all be fine, after all how many clothes can it take to survive a single week? I think all the other bases are covered.

A sunny morning, hurray. Breakfast and yesterdays newspaper in which I find the above article about a fellow prostate cancer person. I note with interest that this mans team were able to tell him what his life expectancy was likely to be. Having seen the television programme about this man and caught a glimpse of his bone scan, it was pretty solid black and yet he gets a guess at ten to eighteen years. I have three spots on my lower spine and a PSA of 0.4, so how long do I get. As the man in the article says he is likely to die with cancer and not from cancer, something I was told early on in my journey into prostate cancer club land.

I have frequently said that my sense of time has become like those waxy Dali clocks but a friend posted an image of a dandelion clock in response to another friends loss. It struck a chord with me as time being subject to random winds that remove parts of the clock, the self.

In my position the best is to hope for windless days and at best a gentle breeeze. Maybe this is why I dislike the recent cold and windy weather so much.

The rest of my day has seen me finally finding a taxi firm to take us to the airport in ten days time and tidying up the office before going to the gym. I get to the gym and full of enthusiasm get into the changeing rooms to find that I have a towel and no kit. I resort to coffee and a snickers as I wait for my partner to finish training. I watch foorball and then we return home. I start to organise my coming week and discover that I have not confirmed my 28 day injection for tomorrow! This coupled with my recent habit of forgeting my daily medication is an interesting development. Perhaps I am unconsciouly pretending to be well and avoiding the reality of my situation, although as I indicated above I am not sure what the reality of my situation is. I do know that when I weighed myself for my once a week weigh in I was pleasantly surprised given the jelly bean intake this week. I came in under 100 kilos which surprised me but has given me impetus to make a pre holiday effort to reduce my weight a bit more. Actually its my waist line I need to attack to get the bulk of my wardrobe to fit again.

Home and I settle to write the blog and think about my week ahead. Its a busy one with a therapeutic community review, a meeting in London and preparation for the holiday the following week. I might get to see a friend but I will see how things go. So dinner in front of TV and a quiet evening is the order of the end of my day.

• 

• 

All the above are true on this Saturday. It started wet and felt crap, what is more is that it looked like it was going to go on all day and then there was:

Of course that meant doing something and as it is Saturday it was always going to be the rugby down at the Leicester Tigers.

So wrapped up in at least four layers of winter warm clothes and double socks we drove into town to watch them. A sparse crowd and a dull match but the Tigers managed to beat Worcester 14 -8. It was bloody cold, so cold that not even half time chocolate bars could hold it at bay. So once the game was over it was a fast walk to the car and warm car drive home. Once there there the priority was to get the fire on, the tea made and to settle into a warm room for the evening. The blog to write and then hopefully a mindless film and football before a warm bed for the night.

It’s raining again! I’m sick of it, let’s face it is not Global Warming its Global Wetting. I’ve already suggested to friends in letters that it is likely that half of humanity will fall foul of athletes foot having spent prolonged periods in gum boots and waterproof walking shoes with double layers of socks. The smell will be pungent to say the least and vets will be in demand to treat hoof rot for the more advanced cases.

So given the rain I decided to go nowhere today and to have a lounge pants and T-shirt day. Minimal cleaning up today and a time to write letters and put the dry washing away. Apart from that I graze and listen to Radio 2 until I cannot bear bloody Jeremy Supercilious Patronising Vine anymore and escape to radio 3s composer of the week and midday concert. How nice to be free of the vacuous verbal and find thoughtful music.  

I write letters and contemplate the front garden being drowned by father nature and wait for a time when the rain eases off. I pick my moment and make a dash for the village co-op and post letters. Once home I settle down to more radio and the tiding up of toenails and underwear draw. I am sure other people do these things too but there is something about paying attention to them on a wet and dark day that brings added value to them. They are often tasks done in haste and not paid attention to whereas on days like this there is time to take time doing them and really appreciate them.

Well before I realise my partner is home and gearing up to go to the chippy to get us an easy Friday evening meal. The eldest daughter has dashed in and dashed out at some point in the afternoon so go to visit a friend in Norwich. So tonight it will be rugby or a film or Vera, who knows, all I am concerned with is being warm. So there it is, I’ve have unrepentantly slugged the day away and it feels okay.

It’s been a day of doing and of looking after. Once up I focussed on doing the final preparations for the holiday including trying to book a taxi to the airport. I thought I had success but when I got the email asking me to confirm they had jacked the price up by £50, so I shall be looking for another taxi firm. I awarded myself a gold star for achievement when I fathomed out how to pay a cheque into our account using my phone. Quite easy really; but a useful skill to have.

I’d already decided to go to the gym quite early to have breakfast and them to train, so off I went to the gym but stopped at Sainsbury’s to pick up Euros for the holiday. Amazing that you can just walk in and get fistfuls of foreign cash. Then onto the gym where I settled down to do the crosswords and eat eggs Benedict. So a relaxing morning before I donned my kit and did an hour’s exercise  wearing my wrist weights. Success, I shifted 849 calories and got my 10,000 steps reward. I flopped in the lounge and downed a post exercise drink and a bowl of Thai chicken soup.

 By the time I felt up for the drive back time was getting on. I had a long chat on the phone with a friend who is recovering from a bout of what sounds like flu. Once home I walked briskly to the village chemist to collect my drugs and a loaf, as I had seen a weather forecast that suggested it was going to hail and sleet on Friday morning. I’m not going out in that and plan to review evidence for the service review I am doing next week.

 So finally in for the night I clear the kitchen, unpack Daisy the dishwasher and put my weekly wash on. Its blog time till my partner gets home and we prepare for her singing teacher to arrive. My eldest daughter has yet to get back from the university but the good news is that at her mid doctorial exam went well and she is being allowed to carry on to the full doctorate. She appears to have gained an academic admirer who is going to join her supervision team on the basis of the quality of her presentation and discussion yesterday. Go the eldest! Proud parent moment. Tonight I will check to see if my latest Jasper Fforde Kindle book has down loaded. This is part of my holiday preparation. Once I’ve done this it will be football and post singing lesson Death in Paradise.

It is another mundane day with a hint of cancer, e.g drug collection for my Monday 28 day injection and my holiday drugs. To add to this is my impression that my right calf and ankle is swelling a bit, it certainly appears to be bigger than my left calf and ankle. It might be that I’ve pulled, strained or twisted my ankle a bit. I shall ice it and see what happens. So tomorrow, if I go to the gym, will be an upper body workout. Friday is a leg rest day.