DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 2

So today I was supposed to be in Spain but I am not. Today I am into the second of a DVT and my first day of self-injecting. So it’s a slow start to the day with a muesli breakfast and coffee as I work up the nerve to go and self-stab at 10 o’clock. Apparently keeping to the same time of day is important, although I am already planning to ease it towards a more socially friendly time of day, earlier if possible. I cannot be playing around excusing myself from meetings or anything else to go off to stab myself in some grotty toilet in a corona virus invested world. It isn’t really infested with corona virus, after all three people have died so far in the outbreak which compared to the six hundred people that have died from flu this winter so far is not something to get worked up about. Clearly the toilet paper buying British public’s greatest fear is being isolated without enough of the commodity to survive.

Anyway I go and self-stab. These are thinner syringes and needles this time with a smaller dose of drug. So all I have to do is select the area of flab to pinch and then lance it with the needle at 90 degrees, push the plunger and then release the flab and watch the needle pop out. Sounds easy and in fairness it is, however it is the getting to the point of stabbing that holds the anxiety. I am assuming that given that I have to do this every day for the next six months I will become proficient and if I am lucky, super cool about it. So I find some old alcohol wipes, clean the stab site, pinch the required inch of flab and stick myself. Over and done with, apart from snapping the needle on the syringe cradle and popping the whole lot into the sharps bin.

My partner and I get ourselves organised and we go off to seek a tea room that we believe is near to us. We find tha t it is somewhere we have been before and is a combined tea room and antiques trading post. Rooms and containers full of “antiques” are in the courtyard of a farm and there is a converted stables full of “antiques”. We head for the café and order food and drinks and sit and discuss how we are and I explain about my dandelion clock sense of time and how people have responded to the news about my DVT and the cancelled holiday. Which by the way has been lovely and surprising, many of my friends have told me that I am loved and cared about and offered to help in all sorts of ways from driving to places or teaching me yoga. We eat and talk and eventually drive home.

I check my “patient view” app and find my latest blood test results are in and a busily set about comparing them with my last results. My results are in fact good and yet again my PSA level has remained at 0.4. There is nothing outstanding or worrying in them, no sudden jumps or deviations. I would be doing okay of it wasn’t for the DVT. There is one new test. It looks at glucose levels and it looks like that I am out of the normal range (“not bloody diabetes as well”, is my first thought) but when I read the information about the test it appears that I am in the normal range for someone who is not fasting and has had a meal. Clearly glucose is a more up and down and complex variable than the other tests I am having. So there are going to be new things to learn around this if they keep testing me for it

Glucose is a common type of sugar that is essential for the body. It comes from many types of food as well from common sugar (sucrose). Running high levels of glucose in the blood is damaging, and is called diabetes.

Glucose result	Comments
below 2.5	Dangerously low, may cause confusion and unconsciousness.
3.6-6.0	Normal glucose level when fasting (when you haven’t eaten)
6.1-6.9	A rather high level if fasting (called ‘impaired fasting glucose’), OK after a meal.
7.0+	If fasting, and more than once, diagnostic of diabetes. If 7-11 after a meal (or strictly in a glucose tolerance test, 2 hours after 75g of glucose, glucose = 7.8-11) this is labelled ‘impaired glucose tolerance’.
11+	Too high. Diagnostic of diabetes if it occurs more than once.

In the midst of this my new shoes arrive via Mr Amazon and I try them on. They fit and I am pleased so all I now have to do is get the swelling down on my right ankle and life will, in terms of footwear, be tickerty boo. The early evening is taken up with the blog while my partner thinks about substitute things to do while we are not in Spain and preparing the evening meal. This evening I shall warm my calf and try to relax while I think about the life admin around claiming for our lost holiday and completing a service report. I will also be thinking about how I reorganise my life to get yoga into it and tighten up on my food selections and restrictions.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 1

Well here we go again. Up at 06:30 for toast and jam and a coffee supplied by my partner before driving to the hospital for the 8 o’clock appointment at the DVT clinic. At least as a dyslexic DVT is less of a challenge than metastatic prostate cancer. I choose to drive and as sods law would have it we have the fastest run into the hospital that we have ever had. The entire car park is ours to choose from. So we manage to arrive before the night team have gone and the day team arrive. I hand my letter to a nurse and we sit and wait to be called. We both read. I also check my phone and Amazon account and notice some rather nice men’s Sketchers, I could not resist, so they will arrive tomorrow. Just after 8 o’clock a nurse reassures us that we will be seen soon and sure enough I get called. A very efficient and people skilled nurse takes me through the initial assessment and checks my details She looks at my calf and measures my thighs, not something that happens often, if at all.

The nurse explains that because of my cancer they are not bothering with the blood test they are going straight to a scan; they have a slot at 9:20. So having done the initial interview we wander off to find coffee. The café is still not open so we get water and paper at one of the hospital shops and return to the waiting area. My partner reads the paper and I continue to read Radical Remission. 9:20rolls around quickly and I get called to the scan room where a couple of technicians are looking at screens and the nurse bustles around doing the privacy dance with the curtains. I drop my trousers and get on the couch and the nurse covers the non-offending leg with paper towel. The lights go down and then the head tech goes into action. First it’s the bloody cold gel from top thigh to knee and then the magic begins.

It is true magic, the sort that makes my heart leap. There on the screen are my arteries and veins as clear as day. In my arteries the bright reds and yellow indicate a good blood flow but it’s a different story in my veins, just loads of white/grey stuff, no flow at all or very little. The probe is up at the top of my thigh and the technician plays hunt the end of the clot. He finds it and shows me the end both length and breadth ways. The clot extends from my ankle up wards, I try not to find this alarming and try to stay with the wonder of the technology but inside I am saying to myself “Fuck that’s a big clot” but I notice that the technician and the nurse seem to be taking this in their stride so I guess this is not unusual. Then all of a sudden it’s over, I am wiping scan gel off my leg and from under my knee pit and pulling on my jeans again. I feel like that was an easy one for them and I did not pose much of a challenge to them but I guess with a clot that big it was always going to be easy for a competent technician to find it. We are invited to wait while they sort out the findings report and get it to the specialist nurses. We sit in the waiting area, I do the crosswords and my partner goes off to find coffee, which she does quickly. There is no time for coffee as we get called in to the nurse specialist prescriber who begins to explain the outcome and the treatment in detail. I had been made aware that the drugs would be delivered by injection but I think I had pushed it to one side as I loathe the whole ritual of self-stabbing. She tells me that she will write to my GP so that the step down dose can be given after the first month. Medication (self-stabbing), would last six months due to my cancerous state. My partner calculated that this would be approximately 180 times and kindly informed me. The nurse very kindly got me started by giving me my first injection with the cheery words “its stings a bit at first but it’s not the needle it’s the drugs that do that”. She was not wrong, it did sting, more than I had bargained for. She put together my meds pack including a sharps bin and a letter for my GP having checked the blood results from my blood test earlier in the morning. Apparently my platelets were around 115 which was up on last time, so all well there then. I am hoping to see the ful results on “patient view” later when they update the system. Thankfully my partner was with me as she asked about the letter for the insurance. The letter was duly produced and printed out on headed note paper. So that was is it, I was to make an appointment for my bloods to be done at the GP in seven days’ time to check I was not having an allergic reaction to the drug and I would get a follow up letter in due course. The oncologist would monitor in the longer term and the GP would oversee the future drugs administration. So with two green bags full of drugs, sharps bin and paper work we left the department and headed for the car.

• 

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I drove into town and we went for an early lunch at the Cosy Club. Always difficult to make interesting conversation over a meal after the sort of morning we had just had. We ate our mains but the waiter had a good attempts at spilling the after meal coffee over me, luckily my lightening reflexes spurred by my memory of having hot chocolate dashed in to my crotch avoided any harm coming to me. I of course got a new and free coffee as a result. Bill paid we headed for home.

Home and the life admin started. I had already cancelled the holiday taxi for the early morning but now it was time to tackle Tui. I got through the usual maze of press button instructions till I got to a person who was sympathetic and did the cancellation effectively and sent a cancellation invoice to use with the insurance company. So holiday in the trash can it was time to go to the GP surgery. We walked down and found a lone receptionist who booked me in for the blood I need on Monday and at the prompting of my partner I also booked in for my B12 jab that I had to cancel yesterday for this very morning. So come Monday I will get them both done. A brisk walk back as it is getting colder and will rain soon.

Home and time to rest. I put my feet up, wrap my calf in a heated blanket and write the blog. One thing I am going to investigate as a result of this is yoga classes or retreats. Since seeing the programme that demonstrated the ability of both exercise and yoga to lower blood pressure, the latter by dilation of the veins, I am persuaded that it is something that I could benefit from especially now I know my cancer is a risk factor for DVT. I am hoping bendy makes me better.

Almost a year to the day I am back in medical shit. I get up to have a bath to ease my foot and calf and to make me sanitary enough to go to the emergency care centre at the local leisure centre. My partner drives me to the centre where I am seen by a chirpy para medic. He prods my leg, asks me questions, he takes my temperature and blood pressure. He does this emergency care service to keep his hand in as he mostly spends his time teaching physiology. That was comforting. Any way the crunch comes when he presses my foot and it makes a dent that does not spring back, Fuck, pitted edema! That’s not good. When I ask, lets call him Jon, whether I could get pitted edema without a Deep Vein Thrombosis he tells me its unlikely. We discus next moves. He makes a call and makes an appointment for me at the Leicester Royal Infirmary at 8 o’clock on Monday morning. He tells us that the unit will take a blood sample and test for an elevated D dimer level. They may also do an ultra sound scan of the calf. He suggests we take reading material as we will have to wait for the blood tests to come back. We know that game only too well. I ask about flying and the likelihood of being able to go on holiday to Spain on Tuesday. He notes that the DVT would not be affected by altitude but it will need medication which comes as an injection form, a dosage of three self-injections that I might be allowed to do myself. My partner’s immediate response is that the holiday is not possible, the medic is more cautious and says the medics try to be helpful if they can. It’s a balancing judgement but one to be made soon as possible as at the very least there is a taxi to cancel and a holiday company to inform within the small print. The para medic prints out my letter for the hospital appointment tomorrow and we leave with me knowing I have no temperature but a blood pressure measure that is elevated.

We drive home, I’m hungry, I expect we both are. My eldest daughter cooks us scrambled eggs for breakfast. I set myself in front of the TV and wrap my offending calf in a heating blanket in order to keep it warm enough to dilate my veins and keep my blood flowing, it also keeps my leg elevated, which is a good thing. Mr Amazon delivers some ankle supports and calf supports that I ordered yesterday. 

So I am sitting on my sofa, leg wrapped and elevated and that is how I will be as I watch the rugby this afternoon and probably for much of the day quietly seething and being unsociable. I find it impossible to be nice about this, which is not reasonable but it feels like a real kick in the bollocks having made such an effort to get myself able to even think about going on holiday. Now it is a moment by moment, step by step situation where any final decision will come at some time tomorrow in the guts of a hospital. Until then I shall “keep calf and carry on”.

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.