Saturday. I wake up feeling less than perky after my heavy spoon day yesterday. The visit to the theatre ended up being a real pleasure but was a challenge. So Saturday morning finds me slow and sloth like. I get up for breakfast with the family and enjoy the company of my grandson and his parents as a start to the day. My partner takes her grandson and parents to a local farm that has animals to see and feed. While they are out on a trip I go online and attend my poetry Stanza meeting. For once I am pleased with the response to my poem, “God Bless America”, that is a celebration of my collection of poems being published. The family returns and I finish with the Stanza.

The family comes together for my youngest daughters birthday meal. There is pink champagne, delicious food and chocolate birthday cake to enjoy. Of course there is also present giving and chat. The grandson goes to bed as good as gold and I watch the international rugby match. As the evening goes on the family drifts off to bed, I stay up and take my night chemo meds and think about the day. I rue the fact that I did not have enough energy today to go with the family to the farm trip but it seems to have gone well. I noticed today that the cherry blossom has come out on the trees, a sure sign that Spring has arrived. It makes me frustrated that I do not have energy at the moment, I try to make a contribution to keeping the home organised and a functional one for all of us. I have to judge it from day to day.

Sunday, I wake to the sound of the family down stairs and breakfast being prepared. I get myself dressed and join them at the dining table. The family eat together and my Grandson gets introduced to his big white fluffy Easter bunny and he likes it. Late breakfast over the visiting family pack up the numerous bags and gadgets needed to bring an eight month old small person on the trip. We are gradually acquiring various bits of equipment to accommodate our grandson when he visits and this time we are left with bibs and bowls. The visitors car gets loaded up and we got to see them squeeze everything in and finally buckle up and then set off.

I’ve cleared the kitchen and set Daisy Dishwasher going and then I get to the end of the sofa feeling that I am leaking energy quite quickly. It s a football quarter final day so I am able to rest whilst watching and ultimately to start drafting the blog. I am trying to have a quiet Sunday, to try and recoup some energy to start the week with. There are things to organise like the Tesco delivery, a week away in June with the family and some Easter goodies. I make tuna pasta for my partner and my tea as we settle down to an evening of TV and an early night. With Death in Paradise over, I clear the kitchen, take my chemo meds and go to bed to conclude tomorrows Tesco order and read for a while. Tomorrow has to be a start again Monday. I’m missing out on too much and I need to climb back.

Friday, a long day. Up early to prepare the house for the arrival of my youngest daughter, her partner and their young son, our youngest grandson. My partner has gone food shopping so I get up and putter intensely so that by the time she returns the decks have been cleared. I am flagging and take a short time out before our visitors arrive.

Our visitors arrive and in no time at all I am sitting with my grandson on my lap and I am feeding him a bottle. It been a while since I’ve done that and he rewards me with a hearty belch. The family eats a hearty roast lunch together and clears away and prepares to go out in the evening to see The Life of Pi at our local theatre, The Curve. We Uber it to the theatre. I settle in to my seat and have real trouble getting to grips with an auditorium with its noise and crowds, for a while I wish I had ear loops, I understand now why people use them . The first half of the performance I am preoccupied by how I am feeling quite queasy. I forego the usual interval ice cream. The second half is much better, I have settled and appreciate the puppetry and staging. The more I relax the better it gets. By the end I am fully engaged and enjoying it. We Uber home and I eat supper while drafting the blog. I am tired, vey tired, this has been a long day and taken me beyond my available spoons. I take my meds and go to bed hoping for renewal as tomorrow is my youngest daughters birthday. I am sure there is lots more to say but I am exhausted.

Thursday arrives and I am awake relatively early as today is going to be a bit of a challenge. I quickly go thorough my usual morning cyber checks and messaging before taking my vitals. Then it up for a shower. Before I do I pop onto Amazon and buy a shower cap, yep that’s right, a shower cap. Its having a shower with long hair that then needs drying that takes the energy, if I can shower more often without the hair components then I can shower more often more efficiently. Today I just put my hair up. After my shower I have a quick breakfast and take my morning meds before getting ready to be picked up by a friend to go for coffee.

My friend arrives and drives me to a nearby garden centre where we grab a sofa and settle in with drinks and a toasted tea cake. We talk about how things are for us and quite a lot about how I am responding to my cancer. This is the friend who sends me books and part way through our conversation she gives me another book. She knows I love Japanese writers so I am not surprised to find this one is by Hiro Arikawa and also about a cat, a common vehicle in Japanese literature.

My friend and I continue to chat and I give her a copy of my collection of poetry. We have a bite to eat and continue to chat until its time for me to go. Its been a lovely morning with the chance to chat to with someone who knows me and can ask the tricky questions. My friend drives me home and I rest for a while and download the poems for this Saturdays poetry stanza meeting. Mid afternoon drive my eldest daughter to the physio at the village sports club. She is becoming very proficient on her crutches. I park in a disabled bay and then accompany her up to the physiotherapy room, so while she is in with the physio I read. Things seem to go well and on the way home we stop off at the chemist to see if the new prescription for pain killers has come through. It appears tomorrow morning is the earliest that we can get them. I drive on to the post office where I send another friends birthday card and buy a paper. Once home my eldest daughter settles down and I head for my end of the sofa where I do todays crosswords. I get stumped by the word pizzazz, I know the word but as a dyslexic I stand no chance with a word with four z’s in it.

The evening arrives and there are messages to respond to but I basically eat tea, watch football while my partner has her weekly swimming lesson. I get bored with the football and start to draft the blog knowing that later on I will need to sit with my partner and prepare a “to do” list for the visit of my youngest daughter, partner and our grandson. Its going to be a challenging weekend in terms of spoon management and ensuring that everything goes as smoothly as possible. There is a theatre trip to do tomorrow evening, a trip out and a poetry stanza to attend along with family meals. I am hoping to do as much as I can so tonight’s preparation is important.

I know that the weekend will be spoon heavy so tonight I shall take my night meds early and go to bed. Before I went out today I took a couple of paracetamol, just in case and it seemed to help. I managed today without ill effects so I am hoping I can do the same tomorrow as long as I pace myself and I am kind to myself.

Wednesday, its been a long day. There is not much to say about the bits and piece that made this day up. I am left with a letter written and sent, a trip to the post office and a new poem written and sent off to the Stanza meeting.

372

God bless America,

and its Eastern Standard Time,

lagging languidly behind

my beloved Greenwich Mean Time.

God bless America,

and its Writer Clique,

with it’s hard sell,

“give us your money,

we don’t care if its shit”

attitude publishing company.

God bless America,

for it’s can-do doing things,

it’s strange accents

and taking my money.

God bless America

for its green back dollar bills

smaller than my Great British Pounds,

but in this paper we trust,

one to make them rich

and one to make me immortal.

God bless America

With its crazy Z’s

Where my beloved S’s sit.

All those cross-cultural snippets

of adaption and ignorance.

God bless America

for publishing my collection

and setting it free

on universal Amazon.

God bless America

With its chaos,

its bewildering kaleidoscope

that Rule Britania seems pleased

to mimic, ape and applaud.

God bless America

For not noticing

that I have slipped in,

got over the border wall

like a boat person

over the English Channel.

I am now in black and white

And it feels good.

God bless America.

                                                                                                                                372 13-03-2024

I thought the day could end on an intellectual high by watching Poor Things. How wrong can you get, got very bored with it and left it long before the end. Inexplicably exhausted I draft the blog, take my meds and go to bed. Tomorrow I will try again.

Tuesday and I wake, to find my partner has gone to work. My eldest daughter manages to pop her head round the door wielding her crutches and looking sleepy. I do my vitals and get up to clear the kitchen and make breakfast so that I can take my meds. While my eldest daughter sorts out life with crutches I get on with chores like feeding the squirrels and searching for the lost garden key safe. I eventually locate the missing safe and find a new location for it. There is a lot of email and message traffic to deal with today. It is poetry stanza day on Saturday so there are poems to download and organise. There are lots of messages from people who I did a writing course with some years ago. It seems that I am not alone in publishing things. By lunchtime I seem to have done a lot of admin. I make lunch for myself and my eldest daughter. I am just clearing things away when I get a call from a friend who is returning from a dental appointment. We are able to chat for a short time and compare notes about how we are. As I am not in a good enough state to go to York next week we agree to have a coffee and cake zoom call next week.

I go to the post office to pick up a paper, some sweets and Ibuprofen for my eldest daughter, who when I get home joins me in the lounge. We watch Oppenheimer, a long film but beautifully constructed and worth its Oscars. By the time my partner returns home Oppenheimer still has a bit to go. When it does finish, I check my emails and find the first draft of my second collection of poems has arrived. On checking I find there area substantial number of poems missing so I check what I sent and then email the publishers. They are quick to come back with an apology and promise to get it put right. Things are moving fast. The family eats tea and we watch the end of Under the Banner of Heaven and the end of the Arsenal match. My family go to bed and draft the blog. It feels like I have been busy but I’m not quite sure where it is all going, I still haven’t made any headway in terms of getting fitter. Tomorrow I must make a serious effort.

Monday and I sleep heavily in the morning but my partner brings me hot water and toast as I struggle to the surface. I do my vitals, which are all good and then decide to shower. The shower is refreshing but is expensive in terms of energy, but I finally emerge with clean hair and clothes, only to heat up again with the effort. A pot of herbal very berry tea cools me down as I sit on the sofa, take my morning meds and start todays blog. It feels like today is going to be an effort already but I am determined to do something even if I am not sure what it is to be yet.

During the day I up date the family tree with the information that a relative has sent to me about the Scottish branch of the family. With this done I draft a letter to the relative thanking him for the information and sharing with him some of the current family information that is going on. We are preparing to do tea when my eldest rings to say that her ankle has pained her so badly that the doctor has told her to go to the hospital to have it looked at. So the evening is a long conversation on WhatsApp as she taxi’s to the hospital and goes through the process of going from A&E and onto the injuries clinic to be given pain killers and an x-ray. So as the Tesco order gets brought in and Squirreled away and we continue to watch the series about the Mormon murder. At last my eldest has an X-ray and sits and waits for the results. I wait anxiously to know the outcome.

Eventually my partner and I boot up and drive to the hospital to collect our eldest daughter as she has chipped a bone in her ankle and is now on crutches. The journey goes smoothly and our injured one is sitting in a wheel at A&E reception. We load her into the back of the car and drive home. Food and drink follows and I catch up with the blog, take my chemo meds and go to bed. That’s quite enough excitement for one day and enough perturbation in my universe.

Sunday, mothering Sunday and I wake and make my partner a warm drink to find she has already adn is now reading. We chat for a while and then our day going with breakfast and we ring our youngest daughter for a chat and a view of our grandson. There is card and present giving before we continue the day.

The day goes by till the international rugby on TV in the afternoon. From the match onwards I drift, there is an attempt to write a poem but it does not work out. I am trying too hard. I give up and start to do research on place to go away for a break with the family. I look at YouTube videos and drone footage. I spend a lot of time doing this but eventually decide that I am looking in the wrong place. Tea is eaten and the evening continues to Death in Paradise. Its time to draft the blog, sort out tomorrows Tesco order and then I take my chemo meds and prepare for the coming night. Its been a slow day, however I need to start doing more with my days. Its time to start to move forward again, little by little I need to start to do more by changing some of my current patterns of behaviour.

Saturday and after a late night listening to Anthony Joshua win his bout in the middle east I wake up relatively early and surprisingly fresh. My partner has brought warm drinks back to bed so we sit and chat. We talk about what she can do with the week she has taken off. After some discussion we decide that something we can do together is a SPA break. It means I do not have to walk anywhere and can spend my days on a lounger reading or writing while she has has a lot of “pampering” things. Once we decide that this is doable I go on line and find a deal at our local Spa and surprisingly there is a space when we want to go. It is an extravagance but we both need to get out somehow and this seems the best and manageable way at the moment. With the break booked I of course need to have new “dazzers” that will fit my enlarged frame comfortably. I quickly find some that means I get 20% off for mothering Sunday. They are now winging their way to me. With so much achieved I get up and have breakfast with my partner and then perform my fortnightly ritual of filling the drugs wallets after which I putter around clearing the kitchen and putting the recycling out. That little burst of activity has tired me so I head for the sofa and start the blog.

My partner goes to meet a friend for lunch and I settle down for an afternoon of football and rugby. It provides me with a way of resting and something to focus on while I rest. The games come and go until my partner returns and we watch the final rugby match together. I make my tea and return to watching TV and under Under the Banner of Heaven, a strange choice for me, but it is supposed to be based on a true crime. It is however difficult to maintain concentration on it for two reasons. Firstly the continuous interruption of adverts. I am convinced there is more advertising than actual programme. Secondly the disturbing fact that as its based on a real case and its circumstances that the world contains such stupid and destructive religionists. Of course my attention wanders and I return to the blog while the tediously slow TV unwinds. Its unmitigated bigotry and offensive misogyny grinds on, but there is a thread of psychology that runs through it. It makes me realise just how similar large sections of the American population are with the other religionists of the current middle east chaos.

I give up as I tire and need sleep. I take my night meds and go to bed to read until sleep overtakes me.

Friday and wake slowly and sort out my cyber stuff until my partner bought me my morning hot water. I take my vitals, all good and then get up. Before I get up I write a to do list, first one for a while. A brief breakfast follows and I get stuck into my tasks. I do the Tesco order and move onto filing in the publishing questionnaires that the Americans have sent me. It takes me ages and before I know it I have reached lunch time but the forms are done. I have a light lunch and then get back to my chores list.

For a short time I up date my heart pressure excel spreadsheet and then get my washing in. There have been messages during this time and some organising to do but I focus on getting a copy of my book to my son in Sweden. So I fish out a suitable envelope and dash to the post office and send it on its way. By the time I get home I am about out of spoons and return to my poetry editing. I end up completing my cataloguing all my poems and then list the ones I have used in the first two collections and start to list the ones I want to use in two future collections.

Its evening and I am totally out of energy, so I eat tea and slip into a night of TV and finally drafting the blog. My last acts are to take my night meds and set the dishwasher going. I am concerned that it takes me so little effort to feel so tired. I do not know if I have fallen into sloth through fear or lost confidence that I can drag myself out of my present state. The result is that I feel guilty that am not trying hard enough to pull this round, that I am not really fighting as hard as I can. I think I am trying to look after myself and trying to recover but am I? The old argument for therapy is that when you are inside a jam jar you need some one to read the label, it feels like I need someone to read my label right now, but I have to get to them.

Thursday! Already, time seems to be going so quickly and I feel I am not getting any better, but then I won’t, not quickly. I am wakened by my partner this morning bringing me my usual hot water to start the day. Its good for my digestion and seems not to aggravate my body in any way. I check my emails and see I am to expect a phone call from a publisher this afternoon, so I check the links they have sent me. It is world book day and a friend sends me pictures of her two daughters dressed as Alice in Wonderland and Amelia Fang, a feisty ten year old vampire from the books of Laura Ellen Anderson. Amelia Fang was not around in my day so she is new to me but looks fun. Her daughters look splendid and has obviously put loads of effort into the costumes. I would like to share but that would be an intrusion. There was no world book day when I was at school and I suspect it would have passed me by if there had been one. I was well on my way along my dyslexia journey by their age and never got to read a book until I was fourteen when, after encouragement from a scout master called Doug Crook, I read Of Mice and Men by Steinbeck. I was hooked and read everything he wrote. After that I moved from author to author reading everything that they had written, a trait that is still with me and a expensive one. I meet my match in Balzac, I never got through all 52 novels and I was devastated to find they are written as a sequence, which I had cut across. I moved on to another author. Any way today is world book day so it is apt that I should be talking to a publisher.

I finally get up for a late breakfast and then luxuriate in a bath listening to the Infinite Monkey Cage. This episode was from CERN and a light hearted discussion about the the Higgs Boson. Once wallowed I prepare for my phone call by rereading the information on the links sent to me. I also check my Amazon book account and discover that at least three more people have bought The Cancer Years: So Far. With my preparation done I draft the blog and then wait to see if my phone call actually happens.

To my pleasant surprise the woman from the book company rings me on time. She is very clear and had clearly read my emails to her and had a good idea what I was looking for. She explained that the company was a printers and did not have a publishing function. They would of course hold stock and send it out if I forwarded orders. In essence I need a distribution platform. I have my Amazon platform and my YouTube channel, but this is not enough. Alternatively I would need an agent. I am not sure that this vanity poet wants to become a business and have an agent. I thanked her for her help and clarity. So it seems that I either find an English publishing house or stick with the Americans. I decide to try the Americans again and send a short and to the point email and then settle down to read for the rest of the afternoon. To my surprise the Americans ring apologising for the mix up in the communications. We make a deal which means I get my next collection published and that both collections get published globally. I make my payment, get the receipt sent through and then send them the zip file with the collection and other pages in it. It gets acknowledged quickly so it seems I am now well into my second project. I’m going to be a global poet, mostly unread but available. This is true vanity poetry.

Having done the business with the Americans I start to watch a football match and each tea before my partner goes to her weekly singing lesson. I get a surprise call from a friend who has begun to complete a full return to work after battling long COVID. There are still of course bad days but she has managed to get to a situation she could not have contemplated some months ago. We talk about how we are and how our families are. Its a real pleasure to talk to someone outside the family and to share a conversation. We end our call as she collects one of her daughters from an after school activity. I return to the football and there I stay for most of the evening until I return to the blog for the day. I take my night meds and go to bed to read. I have publishing chores to do tomorrow, so the adventure continues, I just need to sort out the every day stuff.