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.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 19

Today I have spent my day on the telephone and in front of a screen on ZOOM. I have a “to do” list now and some work to look forward to. But I am tired and it is difficult to be creative and inspired when fatigued. My partner has a sore throat but does not know if it due to spending all day on the phone or it is something more sinister. However given the current virus situation I shall sleep in the spare room tonight and see how she is in the coming days. My drugs for the next month have arrived. Even though I have a considerable time to go on my 1800 unit self injections I now have the following months worth of the 1500 unit injections. The future defines itself in my medication, my blood sample forms, those tell tale blood results and of course my next oncologist appointment. I try to find a routine but fail. I have keystones like my meds, going to the shed to write letters and the garden to tend, but I hate the dependency for food and the loss of my role as provider. I am fortunate, I know but I wonder how well I will fare as the days, weeks and months progress. I guess that a lot of people feel the same way. I have thoughts about being made a leper, being “shielded” for my own good and feelings of being infantized, but I found an app today that updates the incidence of the virus and the death toll in each country. I find it sobers my feelings and chills my judgement.

https://www.covidvisualizer.com/

Balance is the key, the danger is coming to like being a hermit more than swimming in the ocean.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 18

So today I wake earlier than usual and find my partner has gone out for her morning walk. It is time to clear away a space for the plumber to service he now dodgy boiler. So, I clear the cupboard out and put in the bucket, sheet and inspection light. That’s my part done; with luck I will not even see him as I will be in the garden shed. My partner returns and finds me on the phone to the GP surgery. I am due to have my 28-day injection on Monday at the GP surgery but I am not supposed to go out. The receptionist is a bit nonplussed and goes off to talk to the doctor .The outcome is that I am to be driven to the GP surgery and parked in the car park and then my partner will  go inside to book me in and then when the nurse is ready I will be ushered in and seen to. Well that’s one issue sorted out.

Next I am trying to get through to Sainsburys again to get a delivery slot. No chance but at least there is some advice for those of us who are “Shielded” but not recognised yet by Sainsburys. I am referred to a UK gov site where I can register. I eagerly do as I am told and register quietly proud that I now know my nhs number of by heart. I get registered and fit all the criteria so now I have to wait. Apparently, the information will not be shared till next week and Sainsburys will contact me. So, I need to have patience and wait for the wheels of cyberspace to turn. I will not starve, so there is no need to panic especially as I am trying to lose weight.

Before retreating to the shed I order flowers for my daughter in law in Sweden. I contacted my son to let him know and found that he and the family were self-isolating for a fortnight due to one of them appearing to have some sort of cold. What I did not realise is that Sweden is not in lock down even though the countries around them are. My son tells me that the cafes, restaurants and general areas are all open and being thronged. Part of me is glad that the family have isolated themselves.

With some tasks done its time for me to retreat to the garden shed and to set up my home from home. I have decided to write at least one letter a day, hopefully more. I have dug out my address book and will write to everyone I have an address for and of course I shall write more to my regular correspondents. I have reams of writing paper that I have recently acquired so I am looking forward to the process. My fear is that I descend into narcistic and boring self-reflection, but I trust my friends and those that care for me to tell me. It is a pleasant experience and I had a moment of feeling like a Bronte in a garden writing those now famous letters. I have several volumes of letters either as collections or specific collections from one or two authors. The letters of Van Goth to his brother are a fascinating read. I might well re-read these as I recently visited the Van Goth interactive exhibition, which reminded me of what a fascinating character he was.

My letter for the morning is going well when I become aware that the plumber is in the house, so I leave my partner to deal with him. He had text’d me to say he was arriving in twenty minutes and that he would be keeping to the social distance protocols. A good man. When he finished, he gave me a wave and shouted “See you on the other side”, which is what the Jamaican nurses used to say to me as they waved me off in the ambulance after dialysis.  Ironic as this time last year the medics were trying to decide when to give me my pre flight dialysis. We now have a working boiler all without any human contact so we can sit tight and bathe now.

A bite for lunch and then it was on with the work clothes so that I can mow the grass. It is a lovely sunny day and the smell of the new mown grass is a delight. It makes me tired but the effort is well worth it. I think it is going to change tomorrow and we will be back to the slightly chill weather. By the end of the afternoon I am sweating like a pig and have to sit down and rest for a while. Of course, I check my mail and find that I have some Enabling Environment queries to answer so as I sit to recover, I draft a reply. My daughter goes of to do her one period of exercise for the day and takes my letter of the day to post. I crack on and pack away the things that I moved this morning. What was nice was being able to pack my new computer tool box, so that I now have all my computer tools and bits and pieces in a single tool box. Have computer box will travel, well not quite yet.

My evening will be writing the blog and listening to my partner having her virtual singing lesson. Her resourceful singing teacher is quite a character and very creative hence the skype singing lesson. Tomorrow I have early calls to make and then two ZOOM meetings to do, so Friday is going to be busy.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 17

A friend sent me this yesterday, I thought people might like to see it:

WHAT WAS HERE WAS A FALSE NEWS ITEM THAT I HAVE NOW TAKEN OUT OF THIS POST. THANK YOU TO MIKE FOR POINTING THIS OUT. IF ANYONE READ THE ADVICE PLEASE IGNORE IT AND REFER ONLY TO THE GOVENMENT ADVICE ON COVID-19.

Today I got my “stay at home letter” officially making me one of the one and half million “shielded” but confined people. See below:

So today I got up had a bath and breakfast and then headed for the shed. My partner is in the office fielding calls and organising staff and my daughter is in the back room working on her studies and suporting pupils at the local community college. We do not see each other except at brief moments to organise a meal. I spend most of my day writing letters, which I cannot post myself and rely on my daughter to post them when she goes for her exercise walk in the local vilalge park. If I have your address then you are likely to get a letter in the not too distant future. Every hour I get up and make sure that I get at least 250 steps in. Then its back to the shed and today the the midday concert on Radio 3. Anything is better than Jeremy Vine. Post lunch and I spend time sowing some vegtable and flower seed in the greenhouse and the new rasied bed on the patio. Its very satisifytign but now I just have to wait to see if they germinate. If they do I can sow a second round. So this evening I shall write the blog, short and sweet it will be tonight. Tomorrow brings the challenge of clearing the gutter hedgehogs, servicing the water butt and of course writing more letters. I also have to sort out how I get my 28 day injection at the GPs on Monday, life is full of challenges. Yesterday was full of good news about my cancer now this good as it get phase becomes the long haul to freedom.

DVT (deep vein thrombosis) DAY 16

So that was the phase that was, to parody an old satirical television programme. Now that I have the results of my scan and my latest blood tests I need to move on to whatever the next stage is. I was going to call it the “Fuck off and die stage” but this seems a bit disingenuous and not a reflection of how I now feel. My problem is that I am not sure what to call this phase. Make no mistake this is a phase which will see me having to battle and although I may hold my own for a while sooner or later cancer will have its way. Cancer is clever and will find its way back to get to me. This is a stage that is just normal cancer warfare although there are those who belong to the radical remission club who advocate loving ones cancer as part of oneself. I am not sure I can honestly embrace that view, it’s in my nature to grit my teeth and focus on the required outcome and try to move consistently in the direction required to achieve the outcome. At the moment it feels like a Spock moment: live long and prosper! Perhaps that is a better name for the phase I have now entered. I shall return to this.

So I woke to my new leper status of being one of the “shielded”. I get up to find my partner has been to the shop on her early morning exercise walk and is already fielding work calls. My daughter will not rise yet. So I breakfast and try to appraise Sainsburys of my “shielded” status but the phone line to them is down, the web page not corona virus orientated so all I can do is leave a complaint for them to contact me. As things stand where none of us are supposed to go out getting food is being tricky at least safely and within the Boris Rules. Sooner or later it’s going to have to shift. So after a frustrating and fruitless hour of calls, e-mails and surfing its time to self-stab and wait for the oncologist to call.

“He who made a pact with the devil” rings on time with a semi cheery “how are you”. From the first syllable it was apparent he wanted to be off as soon as possible. Can’t blame him really but he could hide it better. I told him about my DVT which warranted a grunt and then we were on to my blood results. Apparently they are good, which I knew and my anxiety about my higher ALT (liver function) was apparently misplaced as was my concern about my platelets. The oncologist theory about the ALT elevation was that I might have had a drink, I should be so fucking lucky it is now over a year since I have had any alcohol, perhaps I should start. The bone scan shows my spine cancer lesions are no bigger and appear not to be doing anything aggressive, although I get back ache more now, but that could be lack of exercise. The lymph system tumours in my hips have reduced from 25 mm to 15 mm, for clarification that’s smaller. In the words of the oncologist “it’s as good as it could be”. He said he would write me up for a tablet rather than an injection but I am not sure if he meant for the hormone depletion or the DVT injections, but I will find out when I get his letter. He will see me again in four months, not the three I was expecting, so I am clearly not a priority or a concern. He said he will send me a bloods form but he would have none of my requests for monthly blood test because he said he would not do anything with them. Totally missed the point or just did not want to get it, I doubt he got it, he is not the most emotionally intelligent consultant in the world. So that was it, I’m as good as it gets paraphrasing  Jack Nicholson who  famously said to a full psychiatrist’s waiting room, “Supposing this is as good as it gets?” May be that should be the name of my new phase; The Good as it Gets Phase. I might well go for it.

After the brief oncologist call it was time to retreat to the garden and to assemble the new raised bed that arrived during the oncologist call. There were supposed to be two of them so I spent time e-mailing the supplier via Amazon. The item is no longer available, made in China, so no surprise. My guess is that we got the last one and will have to wait till Christmas for the next one to arrive. Any way once I had sorted out what diagram 1 actually meant I put the thing together. My partner helped me place it on the patio and casually noted that it needed to be weather proofed and wandered off. She was of course inconveniently right. I fished a half tin of garden furniture varnish out of the garage and set to painting the thing. The task took more time than I planned as I had to start with the underside and then flip it to complete the job. Getting the liner in was tricky until I remembered I had an industrial stapler which would do the job. So it now stands proudly on the patio full of compost and waiting for me to decide what to plant in it. That is a tomorrow job.

With that done it was time to kit the temporary greenhouse out. In went the compost, pots, seed trays and the stuff we bought from the garden centre a couple of days ago prior to my leper status. I got as far as planting the asparagus in a very large pot before deciding I had had enough for the day. So I change out of my work clothes and retreat to the shed for coffee and the last sugarless biscuits.

Once in my shed I open my next package to find the reconditioned notebook that I ordered had arrived. That is something I shall fire up tonight. It is a real bargain with 1Terabit SSD drive, Window 10, 8meg of RAM and a life time Office Pro 2019 licence, and Core i5 processor all for less than £280. I’m looking forward to fitting it up and seeing what it can do. It is smaller and lighter than my current laptop, which I up graded recently so I shall sync them and use the new one to travel with. I leave you to spot the irony in that.

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So adieu for now as I enter my new stage.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 15

It arrived today, my leper text landed late afternoon. So I will emerge from my shed in late June. This time last year I was isolated in a ward in a Jamaican Hospital, it feels like history is repeating itself.

“To:ROLAND WOODWARD

Mon, 23 Mar at 17:50

NHS Coronavirus Service: We have identified that you’re someone at risk of severe illness if you catch Coronavirus. Please remain at home for a minimum of 12 weeks. Home is the safest place for you. Staying in helps you stay well and that will help the NHS too. You can open a window but do not leave your home, and stay 3 steps away from others indoors. Wash your hands more often, for at least 20 seconds.

Read more advice about staying safe at home.

https://www.gov.uk/coronavirus-extremely-vulnerable-guidance

We will send you more messages with information.

To opt out reply STOP “

Today started okay with an earlyish breakfast. My partner had been to get a paper and a loaf and had settled into the office to start a days work fielding the many questions about the current situation and organising the workforces tasks. My daughter went to work meeting to return later to hunker down in the back room to work. I went to the shed.

10:30 rolled around and I spent the next two and a half hours talking into my laptop. All work and discussion about how the team can operate from work. Lunch and a quick sandwich during which Mr Amazon arrived with my new comfy slippers and a temporary greenhouse. So my afternoon consisted of building the greenhouse with a little help from WD40 to make it all slide together. Of course life is not simple as I needed to adjust a couple of trees to fit it in, but I got there in the end. It was time to do the crosswords and eat an orange when a friend rang. It was lovely to hear from her as she is self-isolated with her family for at least another week and maybe more if we all get locked down. We chatted as she made tea for the family and compared notes on activities and the perils of food provision. It was really good to have the contact and to hear how someone else was dealing with things.

I packed up my shed and retreated to house to find everyone still in their spaces working away. I followed suit in the parlour and began the blog. I will need to do some pre oncologist preparation tonight as he is ringing me tomorrow; I want my scan results and have questions about my bloods. I also need to prepare my routine for the next three months so I can emerge as a new and fabulous creature from my lava stage. In the meantime me and Rocket have a war to wage.