DVT DAY 44

Up to an early breakfast and an early trudge up the garden to the shed. I open up the greenhouse and have a chat with the seedlings. I spend a bit of time writing a letter and preparing a work hour record sheet before setting about pricking out more seedlings. I get engrossed in the process and work away till lunchtime, with the odd visit to the house to get a Wi Fi signal that is reliable. I weed out the patio pots, weed out the front garden pots and then I’m ready for lunch, scrambled eggs and salmon. My garden is giving gifts everyday and keeps me sane, more or less.

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I have a meeting at two o’clock I dive into the shower to freshen up before I go video! The meeting opens up and I observe the it, taking notes and noticing the processes that look similar to the other groups that I am part of. By four o’clock the meeting has ended, the debrief done and the notes made. After couple of hours of listening I needed to do something physical so I found some hard wood tiles to mount the swing seat on and put one of the raised garden beds on. That done it was time to strike the tent and end the festival camping in the garden. By the time I had struck, rolled, and pushed the tent into its cover it was time to eat dinner.

I return to the house and find my daughter has returned from her exercise walk via the chemist. On this walk she delivered my new perscription to the chemist who actually had the stuff in stock. This is a big deal as it means no more daily injectuions. Two pills a day and I am off the needle, my day just got great! Heaven knows what the side effects are potentially but I’m beyond caring that much, I am just happy not to be self stabbing everyday.

I tentatively try getting onto my website from my notebook and to my great surprise I get in. I have no idea how it has corrected it’s self so I beaver away to write todays blog. As for tonight I have no idea. I’ve blown Killing Eve as I have already watched the most recent episode. If this goes on I shall have to get back to reading.

DVT DAY 43

Getting up after a poor night’s sleep I sort out breakfast and have the joy of doing the crosswords in the paper my partner has brought back from her morning pre work walk. This is a rarer joy recently and I take my time over it. However all things come to an end and I headed out to the shed to set up my office as I had a days work of writing Enabling Environment stuff to do. I made a start and broke off at ten o’clock to self-stab. I am evermore grateful to the DVT doctor for moving me onto a tablet medication, the prescription just has to arrive and we can sort that out. Release is in my grasp I just need to be patient.

I return to the shed and get my head down to write a document and to design some planning tools. At some point I return to the house so that I can get on the internet to send materials off. When I am in the midst of doing this my Amazon order arrives. It is a bicycle pump and I cannot resist seeing if it works. It does and my eldest daughter is now able to set about learning her new circus skill.

Lunch time comes around and we all find ourselves in the kitchen watching soup warm up, when out of the blue another Amazon package arrives for my partner, I am intrigued. It turns out to be wide brimmed floppy hat with a Velcro see through brim! It a kind of cough and sneeze guard of large proportions, I of course had to try it on. I may well wear it when I finally emerge from isolation riding a unicycle!

I return to the shed and write more stuff, and more stuff, and yet more stuff. Every so often I return to the house to send to a colleague. By five o’clock I am done and decide to look at what I need to claim from the RCP for the work I’ve done this month. I discover it is all in bits and pieces and not easy to put together in solid days or half days so I am on the hunt for a time sheet that I can use. In a brief moment of WiFi I discover that there are Apps that will do this. My task tonight is to find and down load an app and get myself up to date. That and completing the blog that it appears I can only access from one of my laptops. If that goes down I am knackered. So fingers crossed I return to the house to complete my day, which will include the next episode Killing Eve on i-player.

DVT DAY 42

Another day up early as the plumber was due to return and finish his handy work on the boiler condenser outlet. So, early coffee and a bit of Andrew Marr to catch up with the corona virus up dates. Already people are writing reports, criticising and arguing about getting back to normal and yet the death rate is still romping along at the same rate and the care homes continue to be unreported. There was a spectacular professor of virology interviewed. She was the model of clarity, knowledge, intelligence and was so articulate about her subject that there was no mistaking where we were and what needed doing. The plumber arrived at this time, waved through the window and got on about his work while Andrew Marr got far from clear answers to his questions from Gove. No surprise there then. The lovely professor was crystal clear about the need to invest now in plant to manufacture any future vaccine on an industrial scale. When asked if the government was up for this Gove waffled and basically said no and muttered shit about international cooperation. The answer was really “we’ve done a bit, but no”. The plumber waved again and got me to check something, which I did and all was good. He took his envelope of money and waved. So we are a home with a functional boiler again, which obviously means we will all want to shower or bathe at the same time. I went off and got ready to self-inject feeling pleased that there is an end to this in sight. I get it over and done with.

I head for the garden after a bacon sandwich and start sorting out the rubbish that is going in the Hippo skipette. I move a load of bags and load them into the Hippo skipette nestled into the front hedge. Job done I contact Hippobag and sort out collection. In the coming days the bag will magically disappear. I was about to rest when my eldest daughter appeared in the garden with her unicycle, an old Christmas present, which after a brief moment of activity has resided in the garage. She has decided to learn how to ride it as a way of combatting isolation. I note that the tyre is flat and suggest that we reflate it before she tries to ride it. On looking I find we have no pump so I go to the Mr Amazon shop and find one that in theory can be with us tomorrow. Once the unicycle is functional I just know I am going to be on it. I too want to learn how to ride it. What a great way to emerge from being shielded, riding out into the village on a unicycle!

Back in the garden I move the Buddha head to live under the magnolia tree, which seems more appropriate than be hidden behind the temporary greenhouse.

I rest in the summer house and read some of the letters in a volume of notable letters that I have. A ham sandwich and a few letters later I end up in the greenhouse potting up yet more seedlings as the early evening draw.  It gets chilly so I come inside to write the blog knowing that Killing Eve is back on TV tonight. So unreal but such fun.

DVT DAY 41

So today was exciting, a Saturday lay in. The laying there feeling smug that I had fixed the laptop was good, after that it went downhill. I decided that I would at last have the bath I had been promising myself for a couple of days after a hot cup of coffee. I checked the boiler and found it was “out”. I turned the knob to reset, which usually solves the problem but this time there was a bubbly noise, the green light flashed on then off. I tried again, and then I tried again. The only conclusion was that the boiler was knackered. I made the coffee and a cup of tea for my partner still blissfully unaware and text out plumber. The plumber replied instantly and asked if it could wait till tomorrow, I was thinking about this when he text again and said he would be with us in half an hour. He is my hero. I of course said yes and he replied to ask if we had any latex gloves and to leave them at the porch. So we get decent, and look for latex gloves, which I find several pairs of stashed under the sink under a mountain of plastic bags. At the same time my partner came up with a pack of masks! Apparently she had acquired them early on when I was being fairly cavalier about the virus ad she thought it best not to declare the masks until necessary. In the rush to get the boiler area ready to be worked in I broke my inspection lamp and was mending it when the plumber arrived.

We hailed each other over the door step at a good social distance and set the ground rules after which he came in gloved up and closed himself in the office where our boiler lives. For about half an hour he tinkered and foraged through the boiler’s innards and then suddenly said, “all done”. We went back to the doorstep pose and chatted. Apparently the condenser outlet had become blocked causing a back up of water that fell back into the boiler and stopped it from working. Viola! Chop a bit of the condenser outside and the problem is cured. Boiler happy again, Roland very happy again, and plumber happy, because he gets paid cash and can get back to his decorating with his wife up a ladder. He is coming back tomorrow morning just to cap off and seal the pipe properly so we negotiated how to hand over the money. Frankly I would have paid him double, like I say he is my hero.

I returned to trying to rectify the SSD drive I had screwed up but in the end over a bacon and egg sandwich I had to admit defeat. It is something I will take up again one rainy afternoon. So I put all the screws back into the laptop case fired it and checked that it was working okay. It was so I cleared away and then did the Ta Da! Bit with my partner who asked if she could have Skype on it? By now I am feeling confident and with in a matter of minutes Skye is up and running and picking up all her Skype friends and work contacts. Sorted I think. She then asked if it would support the Photoshop software that she had as present some time ago. I delve into the IT box in the office and come up with the instillation disc and again within minutes the programme is up and ready to use. Finally I am done, I put the laptop in the new bag that I had ordered for it in a fit of confidence that I would succeed, and present it to my partner. Happy partner who now has a laptop of her own that is empty and can be filed with photographs and be used to do her isolation singing lessons on.

I am clearing away my tools when my partner appears waving the phone at me and saying into it “he is just here”, and saying to me “its the DVT clinic at the hospital”. Never words of joy when they are unexpected. I say hello and the doctor introduces herself and asks if I mind doing my telephone consultation early as it was due on the 23^rd. I assure her that if she wants to spend her Saturday talking to me she is most welcome. We chat about my last conversation with my GP and the possibility of coming off the dreaded self injections. She is happy for me to move to an oral medication in a tablet from that I can initially take twice a day, which fits into my drug taking habit very well, so we agree on this way forward. She will send a prescription to me to start with and write to my GP, copy to me, and arrange the future prescriptions. My response to the new medication can be monitored thorough my regular blood tests for the oncologist. It looks like a result all round, till I try to confirm how long I will need to take the medication. Will it be for the six months I was told at the clinic when I first went? “Ah” she says, this is never a good thing to hear from a doctor, it is akin to the sharp intake of breath by a garage mechanic when he is weighing up the damage to the car and the potential damage that can be inflicted on your wallet. She explains that because I am having regular hormone stripping injections for the rest of my life (thanks for the reminder) she wants me to have the blood thinners for the rest of my life as well! Apparently the 28 day hormone stripping injection makes me susceptible to DVTs, the fuckers never told me that when they started chemically castrating me! I am the reasonable Englishman and finish the conversation pleasantly being glad I was getting off the injections. Everything changes so this is just another ripple in the process. However I will need to rethink how I head my blog.

 I make my way to the bath room to finally have my bath. Bath bomb in, can of coke, apple and bag of cheeselets and I am ready. Phone to radio 2 and some music and I am at last in the bath I’ve been craving. I find I can dance laying down in the bath and discover that if I chant inwardly “iambic pentameter” I can keep time with the house music being played. Revelation. So I dance horizontal for quite a time. My partner has gone for a post yoga walk and I think my daughter has gone for her walk to. After several top ups I finally get out and wash my hair before doing the doing the full drying and scenting thing. Deodorant and smellies! There is nothing like climbing into clean lounge pants and fresh ice hockey top to make a chap feel beezer!

So I come down to an empty house where I head for the office and the main PC to writ the blog. However I am intrigued by the landline phone that is flashing a bright red “F” at me. I press play and I get a voice telling me that the memory is full. I press all the buttons in various combinations but it will not delete. I google it where I am advised to unplug it and then reconnect, if that doesn’t work the friendly BT people think I might need to buy a new phone, well they would wouldn’t they . I surf deeper and find a sensible voice of reason, which advises that if I scroll though the menus I am likely to find a “recording” item which will give me a delete option. I follow this advice and find that indeed over the last few months we have actually recorded several incoming calls. I delete them all wondering how we managed to record them in the first place. Bingo it works. At last I settle to write the blog, until a friend sends me a beautiful video of a ballet company working at home. I love it and it reminds me that if I had my time again I would seriously consider dance as a career even though know the realities of that.

Then another friend sent me a TED talk that just transfixed me.

So after these lovely and provoking interludes I continue to write the blog. This is Saturday night, no football, so I hope for a good film and an early night, after all the plumber is coming first thing.

DVT DAY 40

Up early today as there is the excitement of a Sainsbury’s delivery to be had. Very prompt, dead on the dot of 8 o’clock the Sainsbury’s van rolled up. Of course I scuttled out of the way till he had gone. I re-emerged to a sea of blue plastic bags and mystery shapes strewn across the kitchen floor. I set about packing it away, which turned out to be quite a task. The fridge, the freezer, the kitchen cupboards, the downstairs storage cupboard is full and now we have a cardboard box of overflow cans and goodies tucked away in the garage vestibule. We now need to eat like pigs to get through it all before the next deliver is due next Friday. It is ironic that I am trying to lose weight and keep a food diary of everything I eat. I notice that the odd biscuit has become a ritual and the amount is creeping up. At moments of feeling sorry for myself just recently I have gratuitously indulged in at least 7 jelly beans. Where sugar is “fat powder” for others it is “killer dust “for me as it feeds my cancer. Another irony as I am blessed with a sweet tooth.

I wade through the blue bags and finally get to the end of squirreling the goodies away and then realise there are no stamps, I ordered stamps, I check the bill and there they are. No stamps to be seen. I go through the bin and there they are. My “owl tokens” are indispensable to me.

Once clear of the shopping I cook myself a bacon sandwich and get ready to self-stab before being interviewed over zoom. I had completed a workbook about the process of my retirement and the work I have done since then. The research is part of an Erasmus project being done in several European countries with a view to creating a tool to be used with pre-retirement people to help them plan their retirement activity. It was an interesting interview and, let’s call her Sam, was knowledgeable about the area.  Apparently people now have Encore careers and Legacy careers, the rest seem to just fall into retirement without a plan to do anything. We chatted about the structure of the workbook until there was nothing left to say. So lunchtime approach and I retreated to the garden shed clutching two runner beans. My partner has been sent them from hr work team as part of the teams strategy to amuse themselves through the restrictions. They are now safely snuggled in pots in the greenhouse sporting their own labels and with a shelf to themselves.

A lunch of soup and teacake and I return to the shed to write letters and organise some EE work. By four o’clock it is getting cold so I pack up, deliver my days letters to the “Owl” for delivery to the post box. I discover that the Windows recovery disc I was waiting for had arrived. So I begin to try and re-run the start-up programme. After several tries it kicks in and then there was the long and prolonged process of instillation. During this time I help to cook tea and end up eating it while I press buttons and keys and then holding my breath in the hope that it is all going to work. To my relief it does and I end up with a laptop that is empty and functioning well. Rather than stopping there and thinking that I have won I am greedy to make it even better, so I down load cloning software and try to clone the old disc drive onto a swish new SSD drive. I play and try different ways into the system and suddenly the disc I was looking for pops up on the screen. I try to clone it but with no joy and so I try again and this time leave it to run without me watching it. Its mid evening and I retreat to London Kills and sit with a laptop on my legs writing the blog. The laptop will either work or not but I will not be playing any longer tonight, that will be a tomorrow job.

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.