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.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 14

It’s Sunda’y and a lazy start with coffee in bed. However the debris from last nights meal need to be cleared away and washed up. It was a lovely meal, made lovely by the fact that my youngest daughter was with us and two old friends joined us. It will be the last time we entertain for a long time as I fall into the high risk group and I feel that I am not being given much choice as to whether I isolate or not. Family and friends are already angry with me for my attitude and my behaviour. I know it is out of care and love but I find this situation difficult. I sense anxiety everywhere that I experience as being disproportionate and vaguely paranoid. Not a popular view but that is how it is. Normally I would hug my daughters and my friends but this weekend and last night we all remained “untouched”. It is an uneasy state to be in and I am envious of those who are able to be in their clans and go on hugging and being tactile. It just increases my sense of leper status. Something to be preserved; but placed in a colony. Like the lepers I am not the infectious one, I just have to carry the projections of everyone else’s anxieties about loss, death and fear of annihilation. I am not saying there is not a risk, but statistically there are other things that are more likely to kill me, crossing the road for example.

So today is Mother’s Day and my daughters give presents and flowers to their mother over a late breakfast while I arrange for some frog spawn to be brought round by my partner’s brother. By the time breakfast is done and we are all preparing for the day my partners brother appears with one of his daughters and a bucket of frog spawn. There is a socially distanced conversation on the door step and then a waved farewell. My youngest daughter leaves to drive home taking my stock of beer and lager with her as I will not be drinking it, any beer left will be used to cook with. We wave her good bye without the usual hugs, it’s a crap way to say farewell.

I retreat to the garden briefly to put the frog spawn in the pond. It will be interesting to see if it survives the transfer and we get any tadpoles. My partner goes off to take food her to her mother, my eldest daughter busies herself with preparation for work and I prepare to start reshaping the garden so that we can locate the raised vegetable beds and start growing some of our food. The garden is a challenge at the moment but I scrapped the old mini green house as it fell to bits when I moved it, cleared the patio ready for its raised vegetable trug, and cleared all the old pots and seed trays into a fresh space ready to be used. The garden swing seat has been uncovered so that I can collapse onto to it when I need a rest. I am appalled by my lack of fitness, I must get into an exercise routine and quickly.

My partner returns and we walk to the village shop to get a paper and some orange juice, where we witness a sturdy shop assistant deny a woman two loafs and only letting her take one. Hurrah for sense and the moral fibre of co-op staff. We walk the long way round the village to get some exercise and come across someone standing chatting in the street carrying a large pack of toilet rolls. It was very tempting to mug her but it seemed a little over the top especially as she had a child with her. So home to agree tonights meal, of course we have looked at the sell by dates on everything we have and order them in the fridge, so tonight will be mince as it is the shortest use by date; yesterday. As for tonight , who knows.

DVT DAY 13

A day to celebrtate a bit with my new blood results in. Time for a new toothbrush I think and a fond farewell to the lastest one. Important to keep the dental hygene regime going in my condition.

Now for the all important blood test results.

Go me on the PSA front, down again. The ALT level has risen sharply which is related to Liver function, I am hoping this is due to the blood thiners I am taking for the DVT. The Bili is also a measure of Liver function which is in the normal range, so hopefully supporting my thoughts about the blood thiners. Any wway I shall be able to ask the oncologist on Tuesday when he rings me, providing he is still able to. Have to say I am peeved that I will not be able to see my latest scan results. I need to find a way of getting access to them.

Another momentof joy when I realised my leg hair is growing again. Hurrah!

The rest of my day has been about sharing various messages and pictures sent to me about the current situation and planing the garden for this year. The result of this is that I have bought two raised vegtable beds, bags of compost, millions of veg and salad seeds and some emerging veg and tomatoes plants. Sunday will be about reorganising the garden and the many pots in it to make space for the vegtables and new beds.

Tonight we dine with friends. Probabley the last time for a while.

DVT DAY 12

It’s difficult to be Jolly when your waking thought is the blood sample to be taken to be followed by a self-injection, but I tried my best. After a swift breakfast and noting that my partner was already in the office fielding calls I wandered off to the GP surgery. In the face of the corona virus the waiting room had been reorganised to keep the infected out and those without seated well apart.

I was called in by the masked nurse and who examined my blood demand forms and then stuck the needle in me. All over in a blink of an eye really and then I am walking out with a fluffy cloud of cotton wall taped to my arm. I waked down to the village café, which remains open despite the age of the owners. I order a bacon baguette and a coffee not knowing that Boris was going to order all cafes and the like to close this Friday night. I have time to enjoy my roll before I walk back home to self-stab.

I’m getting quite bruised around my gut with all this self-stabbing but I guess its unavoidable. I retreat to the garden shed and start to prep for the work call that I am booked into at 10:30. The call goes well and I set about editing a draft letter for the services we work with. I spend the rest of the morning drafting letters and sending them off to the team to be edited and worked up into a publishable form. A brief lunch with my partner and then I retreat to the garden shed again. The postman delivered some RAM for the laptop so I spent a few minutes installing it. No problems, all seems to be going well. I write letters and check my e-mails for the afternoon until I go down to the post box. I notice after having put the letters in the box that the collection plate is still saying Tuesday. I wonder if the letters I posted earlier in the week have been collected and I begin to get irritated at myself for not noticing the delayed flag. I tramp back home. Back in the shed I write a bit more until my daughter returns from work and we have a discussion about her options for working. As she works part time in the local community college she has some work options but she was concerned about me if she remained in contact with the students. We talked about the options and then she went of to the gym to train. That’s something she won’t be doing again for a while.

So with work done it was time to sort out my laundered clothes but I was niggled by the post box not being emptied. I decide to go to the post office, which is also home to a local provisions shop, and ask if the post box was being emptied. I wander round the shop and pick random items that I have not seen elsewhere. By sheer chance the post office is having its pick up so I ask the postman if the box in the village is being emptied because the collection plate is saying Tuesday. He says the plate is stuck but the post box is being emptied. Do I believe him? Maybe, I will see if my letters arrive. I return home with yet more bacon.

Dinner comes from the chippy who have chicken and fish to fry, so its luxury tonight and we get to save our last in date mince for another day. Tonight will be blog time and hopefully a film. I notice that I am tired and do not feel I have the energy to do anything intellectual like read a book, its vegetable time.

DVT (Dep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 11

A day of work and aggravation. So I get up to find my partner in the office and already having talks with her  staff and fielding questions to which she had no answers. I left her to it and had breakfast before settling down at the dining table to reassembly my laptop with a new mother board. The reassembly went amazingly well and I had only one unaccounted for screw at the end of the process. I put in the final case screw and turned on the power and there was a blue screen and then a message telling me that the computer had detected a failure and was collecting data. I waited as the percentage counter clicked over and then the miracle, the machine burst into life and blessed me with Windows 10. All before 10 o’clock. I was rather pleased with myself.

Of course the fact that it was 10 o’clock meant that I had t go upstairs and self-stab (left side today). My belly flab is beginning to look like a pin cushion.

I walked down to the village co-op and bought a paper, returning to complete the crosswords over a coffee. After the short break I set about reading and editing a draft note a colleague had sent me. It took some time until my partner and I had time to have lunch. By this time my eldest daughter was up and looking for a space to work. So after juggling room heaters she settled down and I retreated to my work space in the garden shed to finish working and to have the telephone call with my colleague.

With work temporarily out of the way I can settle down to write a letter. One of the joys in my life is to write letters to friends especially surrounded by my garden. There being enough time to catch the post I head of to the village post box and then take a walk around the village collecting a paper on the way. Back to the garden shed to read the local newspaper and have a coffee. I check e mails and find I’m being requested to consult a colleague and get something done by lunchtime tomorrow. So I have more work to do and meetings to arrange to complete it. As part of this I manage to install Zoom on my laptop and indulge in an half hour training video.

Time for tea and then the realisation that my partners singing teacher is due to arrive. I retreat to another room to find that my laptop has developed a flickering screen. So it’s off with the back and a prod around. It seems to have done the trick, so I can get on and write the blog. My eyes are tired. I am generally tired and feeling fatigued by all the corona virus wash of news, counter views and opinions. I’m tired of all the cancelling things and confining myself to the four walls and the garden. It does not feel like an environment where I am getting better. Still tomorrow I give the blood that will tell me how my body is doing and whether the oncologist is going to tell me I’ve done well enough to go to the next phase or whether the medical profession think they still have a trick up their sleeve. If I were a betting man I’d lay odds on being told to go away and wait for the telephone call and an audience in a year, in others words the “Fuck off and die” phase will start. Tired.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 10

I think my body is trying to avoid being injected. It woke up at gone 10 o’clock today so that the first thing I had to do was self stab. Once that was over it was time for breakfast and a trip with my partner to the garden centre to buy meat from the butchers there. While we were at it we also got vegetables. So we are no stocked for a while. Feeling pleased with ourselves as hunter gatherers we celebrated with hot chocolate and Panini’s.

While in a wining mood we decided to go to Sainsburys to convert the euros that never got taken to Spain back into good old English pounds so that we could squander it on things like bread and eggs in these difficult times. While there we toured the aisles out of curiosity really but picked up the odd pack of dishwasher tablets and washing powder tablets. By pure chance we arrived at the toilet roll aisle just as a callow youth was unloading a pallet of toilet rolls onto the shelf. Poor lad had no chance. I doubt a single packet made it to the shelves. He is probably receiving treatment for PTSD or a recurring nightmare of being swamped by a swarm of locusts. Anyway we came away with an unexpected bonus of toilet rolls. We got our booty home as soon as possible and my partner squirreled the provisions away.

To my delight my new mother board for my laptop arrived, but before I could get to work on it I had a work Zoom conference to attend. My colleagues and I discussed what our response should be to the corona virus outbreak in relation to our Enabling Environment work. I am to draft a note for prisons to share with my colleagues as soon as possible. I had a brief chance to wish a friend happy birthday before tea and then  I rang my sister for a long chat about how we are both surviving being in the “elderly “ at risk group. I think I would sum it up as so far so good. I did not feel like facing the rigours of putting a laptop back together so my partner and I reviewed our updated civil partnership album and gave the thumbs up to the photographers.

Tomorrow everyone in the house is working from home the schools are soon to close and the county council is enforcing working from home for all those staff who can. The whole situation has a Kafka like feel to it. The world feels like the Kafka castle and my position feels like the creature in Metamorphosis as I turn from man into a giant insect left to die in a room. These are strange times, I feel a T shirt coming on.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 9

Today the net around me tightens as the over 70s with medical conditions are advised to hide away and to take their families with them. I am not chuffed and resent being written off as a risk and something to be ordered out of site with no realistic way of fulfilling my needs. So I try to ignore the mass anxieties and try to make reasonable rational decisions.

Has it happens today there are some chores to be done so it is up for breakfast and then the daily self stabbing. Once that was over there was some domestic things to be done but I was waiting for a delivery which a text had alerted me to. I was hoping that it was my computer parts but as the suggested delivery time came and went I began to doubt myself. Eventually I went into the tracking site and found that it had been delivered at 10:45 and signed for. Looking at the signature it was possible to work out that it was probably something that I had paid for as a present to my youngest daughter. She confirmed later that the item had arrived but she had not signed for it, so the signature had been forged that was on the delivery tracking system.

Once lunch was over my partner and I sat down with the new i phone and the instructions that we had written down at the phone shop. The biggest and trickiest bit was getting the SIM card out of the old phone and into the new one. Having achieved the basics we hooked up the new phone to the power and the cloud and set the controls for the heart of the sun (Yes reference), and to our surprise the whole process went smoothly. After a short time the phone pinged and said it was ready. I rang it and sure enough it responded. All that was left to do was put on the screen protector and pop it into the new case. Job done.

So while on a roll we sat down to edit the civil partnership album from the photographer. We found several areas of it that we wanted to have changed and duly notated the pages and sent them back to the photographers. We will wait to see what happens. So time for more food and an evening of blogging and some TV. I’m looking forward to bed as last night I slept well due to the fact that we remade the bed and put the bedding on the bed the right way round. Surprisingly making a small change has made a big difference to the comfort of the bed and the quality of sleep.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 8

So let’s be clear. I started this blog on the 1st September 2019 as a way of keeping a record of my experience of prostate cancer and as a way to keep my family and friends informed of how I am. I figured that it would help people keep up to date without having to ask or have difficult conversations .It also meant that I could learn how to live with cancer and to accept that normal mundane life goes on for me. The normal boring stuff is no longer normal and boring for me, it is the everyday stuff to of which life comes, or as a friend put it, it reflects the generative power of everyday life. So I guess my blog will at times appear boring and mundane but always the fight is going on inside to maintain direction and to keep making meaning from my life. I mention this as it seems that I am slowly gaining a wider audience that appears to be leaving lots of comments. Part of this is technological cyberspace accident and malfunction as many of the comments are repeats and some of the functioning of the software is beyond my understanding. I am learning how to keep up with the most recent comments on the most recent blogs.

So if you are moved to comment on the current or recent blogs then I will respond. Where new people stumble across my older blogs then they are unlikely to get a response. I am hoping in this way that the original purpose of keeping family and friends in the loop will work. As I face the possibility of being confined to my home I want to find all possible ways of staying in touch with all those I love and care about. One thing that having cancer has reinforced is that it is the people in my life that are the most important and significant element in my life. As a neighbour tells me that another neighbour has been told they must isolate by the now godlike nhs111 it seems the general anxiety has crept up close. A friend tells me that their wife has self isolated and that this means a difficult time ahead. It seems that there is an inevitable creeping towards social paralysis and social distancing where those that find their own company difficult will suffer the most unless they are able to adapt. None of this of course deals with the lack of food delivery, lack of food and toilet rolls on the shelves or the inevitable bump in the birth rate in nine months time as the fertile population of England endeavour to bonk their way through the crisis. No matter what the crisis the carbon based mammals of this planet seem never to lose the ability to copulate to save themselves.

To all those other people who have stumbled across me and my blog you are very welcome and I am content for you to share the contents of it, make comment (although I may not be able to acknowledge you) and to take from the blog anything that you feel is useful. One or two people have asked how to contact me. There is a contact part of the site right at the start, which I hope is working.

My dyslexic journey is of indeterminate length although probably foreshortened by my cancer and is going in phases from Chemotherapy, to the Fingers Crossed Phase (the three months post chemo where we wait and see what effect chemo therapy has had), then comes a meeting with my oncologist, “he who made a pact with the devil”, on the 24^th of March 2020. At that point I shall slide into another phase. If all has gone well and there is nothing the medics can or want to do I will be sent off with a three month telephone call and an annual consultation. I have dubbed this phase “Fuck off and die”. If there are things that the oncology crew want to do and can do without reducing my quality of life out of sight then I shall find a name for this phase if and when it happens. I have been criticised for naming my “fuck off and die” stage as I have, it has been suggested that it is negative and not positive and forward looking. Looking forward I am going to die, which does not mean I cannot have a rollicking life between now and then but it is the reality. I, as an existentialist, much prefer to keep death alive and well in my life as it means I pay attention to the here and now and appreciate what I have and what I am experiencing. “Pay attention” is my watch word, phrase, thingy.

Back to the mundane of life as today I wake up and know I am going to the GP for a B12 jab and blood sample taking. So in deference to the GP nurse I take a bath during which I have breakfast and check my e-mails. It is a lovely sunny day and it is a pleasure to lay in the bath with the window open listening to the birds. Once clean and wrinkly I get up and dress, to help with the bed making and some other chores. Of course at 10 o’clock I retreat to the spare room to self stab, right side today. I find a spot of flab and do the deed. Today it stung again but hey ho I’m alive and I think my calf is beginning go to go down in size. It is not long before it is time to go to the GP surgery. My partner accompanies me as she wants to check an issue on her medications. I have a brief wait before being called in. I produce my blood sample slip to be met with “I cannot do that today it’s too late, the bloods have already gone!” I point out that this is the time I was given, but to no avail. So the bloods that were supposed to check if I was having a bad reaction to the blood thinners will have to wait till Friday when I have my other bloods done. I take the B12 injection, this also stung more than usual. We leave with my partner having sorted out her medication. Still the village co op has no toilet paper or biscuits. We buy a paper and rolls for bacon rolls and walk home.

Bacon rolls go down a treat as I do the crosswords and then run off a post retirement work questionnaire. I might get to do that at some point. A friend calls and updates me on a work call that he took part in and we chat about the effect of the corona virus on us. My friend may have to cancel several trips but worst of all he will not be able to watch his beloved Rangers. In my turn I doubt I will get to see Leicester Tigers play again for a while.  My partner and I decide on a trip into town to get her a new phone. Town is almost empty as we walk to the O2 shop and engage with the salesman. It’s all straight forward apart from the tech bit on how to get the information of the old phone onto the new one. We write the instructions down and also the codes for getting an air tie discount, buy a new case and screen protector and go to find coffee. So there we are in an almost empty Costas with our coffee and buns. The Belgian iced brioche was a mistake, far too much sugar in it but I ate it anyway. I am becoming averse to anything that is sugary, apart from honey, as I see it as a poison that will make my cancer worse. Apparently those impish cancer cells feed on sugar as well as testosterone in my case. It’s a real bug bear as I have a very sweet tooth as my mouthful of nhs fillings testify. We drive home to prepare tea from the overnight marinated chicken and to write the blog. I write it earlier in the day than usual as I suspect that once tea is over there will be a period of technology wrestling to get the new phone up and running. Wish us luck as we wrestle with the new red i phone.

DVT DAY 7

This day started as usual with breakfast, e mails and a self stabbing at 10 o’clock. the appointed hour. The day starts well but somehow the day loses it shine when it comes to injection time. As I said the actual self injection is not the issue it is the not knowing how it is going to go. Some days it goes very smoothly without any discomfort, however today it was not like that. Today it was painful apart from the sting of the drug which is usual this time it was painful as if the needle entered something other than the pinched fat. I have no idea why this should be but it is just how it is. It always takes me a moment to gather myself together before continuing on with whatever it was that I was doing before the stabbing. That’s how it was today. Fortunately on this day the Sainsbury’s delivery arrived to distract me. No toilet roles of course, or hand sanitizer, limited cleaning products and a replacement  peanut butter laced with salt and sugar.

So after a relatively slow start I take a second look at the now dead laptop that is waiting for me to contrive a Lazarus moment. I have a solution but not until this coming Wednesday, so I tidy and tinker. In a moment of enthusiasm I try to download the photos from my partners i phone. In the ensuing process I managed to create a back up of the phone on the computer but have no idea where the computer has hidden it. Then I managed to down load the photos into a preloaded file. I thought all had gone well until I started to check the contents of the sub-files. I do not know if it is the nature of i phones or my system but I found the files full of photos from my files as well as the phone. For three hours I tried to untangle them, sort them and refine them. At every turn I was thwarted and found myself deleting the same photos over and over and then found photos had turned up in already cleared files. I gave up and deleted the whole file. Maybe I will give it another try, one day, perhaps, maybe…

I started to get messages from friends about corona virus. I share them below for you to make up your own minds about them. I am concerned that according to the media Boris is thinking (difficult to believe) that it is a good idea for all over 70s (that’s me) to stay at home in quarantine for four bloody months while he and his medical gurus flatten the curve. Really? Yes really. I am in theory to become house bound.  This is not viable as I have things to do, for example robbing co op delivery trucks for toilet rolls and tinned food. In these days of empty supermarket shelves a chap cannot sit around and “be at home”, some of us metastatic prostate cancer and DVT suffers have things to do before we die and sitting on our arses at home is not one of them.

This did not amuse me!

“From an entirely disinterested economic perspective, COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents”

writes @JeremyWarnerUK business writer for the @Telegraph.

My GP sent me a survey by phone. I am due to go for a blood sample tomorrow morning and the practice was checking I was not going to infect them all with anything. If I was a tad off well what would they do, come to the house to collect my blood? I think not. Madness in the guise of common sense will take us all.

https://youtu.be/BNsTndy9CZo

I also decided to stop fooling around and looked at refurbished laptops. To my surprise I found it was possible get a good HP notebook with 8 Gb of RAM, a 1 Terabyte SSD run on Windows 10 with a lifelong licence for Windows Office for less than £300. Now that’s a bargain and its warranted for a year. After all if I am to be confined I need to have something to take to bits now that IT has become the new elder person’s jigsaw.

So tonight is spent warming my leg, writing the blog and half watching TV.

DVT DAY 6

A day of failure and a cracked motherboard means no long blog today.