Sunday, and I wake up with aching ribs, the hang over from my Wednesday fall. I make warm drinks for my partner and I we spend time lazing in bed reading and chatting. I weigh myself to see if the vow of no chocolate, biscuits and cake during October has made a difference. I weigh in at 97.4 kilos, a decrease of half a kilo in the first eight days. I’m good with this and hope that the rest of the month goes well. After a bacon sandwich and morning meds breakfast my partner goes off shopping and I watch a world cup rugby match. As Argentina finally over come Japan and my partner returns I am taking bits off the hoover to dehair it prior to vacuuming through the house. The morning is a domestic one as I run the machine over all the surfaces and on occasions suck up a spider who has come inside for the winter. Having completed the chore I am out of spoons, no energy at all and I retreat to the spare room to lay down for a while until I recover enough to take my vitals, which are all okay.

I should explain that although the tittle of the blog at the moment is CHEM II DAY X that I am in fact taking continuous cycles of chemo therapy. Currently I am on cycle 4 day 27 of a 28 day cycle. I have no break between cycles so I shall be starting a new cycle, cycle 5 on Tuesday. This will be immediately followed by cycle six before my next oncologist review. At the end of cycle 5 I will have a monitoring blood test to see if my PSA level is reducing and then one more before my oncology review. This continuous cycling will go on until my PSA starts to rise again and then it will depend if there are any other options. In the meantime there is no respite from the side effects, the main one being fatigue. It is the fatigue that is most effecting me in an increasing way. When I can’t train I lose my biggest weapon to counter the fatigue, which is what my sore ribs is stopping me from doing at the moment. Its a real hurdle, all I can do is make an effort to make this coming Monday another start again Monday.

So after resting and doing my vitals I watch another rugby game and start to draft the blog. The evening will be a quiet one of reading and Strictly result show, before more meds and bed. Then I will try again. As far as I can see there are no other options.

Saturday and I return to million Tog duvet having spent the night in the spare bed to avoid keeping my partner awake all night with my runny nose and sneezing. I make us warm drinks but today there is no negotiation for bacon sandwich for breakfast as we have run out. I’m not sure how that could happen but it has so today will be a day to revert to cereals. So once up, I eat, take my meds and get my washing in. I’m not feeling chipper and my nose starts to run again so I go for the Actifed option. No idea if its compatible with everything else I take but it works on what it needs to. I do my vital and tidy stuff away. I venture into the garden to check the squirrel feeder and sadly find the small hedgehog that I tried to tend on Wednesday had not made it. He/she was laying dead by what I call Bhudia’s corner of the garden. I dug the poor thing a grave next to he family of mice that I buried several months age and gave it a marker.

I peg my washing out and then my partner and I go shopping for weekend food. Its a quick dash to the garden centre and back as I’m still not feeling chipper, Once home I settle down to hours of World Cup rugby, putting my vitals data into my Excel sheet, and drafting the blog. My partner goes to the gym and I continue to watch rugby through to the very end when I then catch up with Strictly. Its been a strange day of watching others do things while nursing my sore ribs. Shame I acquired my ribs trying to save the deceased hedgehog, I’m sure there is a lesson in there somewhere. Hey Ho! I move on and see what tomorrow brings. I do know that in the days to come I have the excitement of Banana Yoshimoto’s new novel The Premonition arriving, one of my favourite authors. She is typical of how Japanese writers seem to be able to capture the nuances of the real and maybe not quite real.

Its Friday once again but this one is a disappointment as I wake knowing the planned exchange of contract on the London house will not happen today as anticipated. It not only marks a significant step in finalising my sisters estate but it will sever me from a place that I was never happy in and could never wait to leave. It was my childhood prison, not that my family were cruel or I was mistreat but it was a place I just did not belong. It was an aspiring working class household that worked hard and did its best to give me and my sister every chance to succeed in education and life in general. It was also a family devoid of physical contact and emotional integration. I guess we all tried in our own way but where overwhelmed by things we could not control or did not recognise. We were never cold, never hungry, always clothed and as safe as it was possible to be. All this makes my desire to be shot of this house the more unlikely, but there it is. My dyslexia was neither recognised or understood by me or my family and was in stark contrast to my sister who excelled at school and lived out the parental desires for her. I struggled to understand why I could not write or read like my peers and of course I compensated in other ways.

There were other irritants like the succession of cats that I hated and brought in an army of fleas that seemed to like me more than other family members and finally my mothers parents that moved into the house to ultimately have legs amputated in the case of my grandfather who had taught me dominoes and a grandmother who declined with Alzheimer’s and was repeatedly retraumatised by being told over an over that she could not visit her husband in hospital because he was dead. I got out before she died. So this house holds no happy memories for me despite the years I spent in therapy training and its contiguous own therapy. I saw over the years people, many criminals from shit backgrounds, recover lost family connections and memories and parental love and care that enabled them to reframe their childhood, cruelly this never happened for me so I guess my perceptions were pretty accurate in the first place. I guess others of my family have a different view, my children who sent time in the house have different memories which seem to have been happy so it just highlights the fact that its the people not the place.

One of the few things that happened in the house was acquiring a beaten up old portable type write which magically unlocked my ability to write. I later worked out why whilst doing my psychology degree. It turns out my wiring (neurodiversity) meant that I could not for the life of me convert sounds into hand movements that could translate into writing. The type write changed this process for me and made things more manageable. When I got a computer “spell checker” refined my ability, what it did not do was eradicate my inability to see when I had replicated words or parts of sentences in a paragraph. By the time I had got the typwriter I had learned to read, an accidental side effect of being read to by an inspired scout master who read to the troop Steinbeck’s Cannery Row which inspired me to read Of Mice and Men, suddenly I had the knack and read everything he wrote and then moved onto other authors. Its a trait I have to this day, its an expensive one. Only Balzac has defeated me so far. My family bewail my rooms of books but they are my scaffolding, my feeding trough and the ambrosia that feeds me continually. They if anything became the childhood family I never felt I had. This “family” gave me two things. Firstly a vocabulary far beyond I ever thought possible and secondly the belief that I could do anything because somewhere someone will have written down how to do it. Now I Google everything and watch videos on YouTube of competent people doing exactly what I want to do. So if I’ve found anything out it is the reason I am so attached to my books.

So waking to a day on which I am to be disappointed I do the check of how I am, check my messages and mail and then read the first essay of David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day. Finally I haul my snotty nose and aching ribs out of bed and eat toast and drink coffee to wash down my meds. I read more and then get ready to drive my eldest daughter to the hairdresser at the gym, where I start to draft the blog. What comes out is quite Sedaris like, I think. All of this accompanied by two women talking about the dangers of kitchen rebuilds, boiler servicing and all this time one of their swim suits has been left in a sink with the tap running to get clean. Its been an hour and a quarter of running hot water, that’s what I call getting your money’s worth from your gym membership. Others might have an other interpretation.

The afternoon goes by as I feel myself loosing spoons at a rapid rate and then I slide into the evening with its rugby and Mission Impossible film. Night meds, painkiller and bed and hope that I can shake this cold (possible reaction to COVID booster) and my increasingly sore ribs (bloody hedgehog).

Thursday and I am awake early for today I go to Kwik Fit to have my leaking tyre diagnosed, so I am brushing my teeth and swallowing medications early. I’m out the door and driving off in the car as quickly as possible so that I cannot dwell on the fact that one of my tyres might be well below functional levels. I arrive at Kwik Fit and book in. I take a sit in the waiting area and settle down to read Naked while tyre trolls get on inspecting my leaky tyre. A few minutes later the tyre tech returns to tell me that I have a nail in the middle of my tyre but the good news is they can fix it for less than thirty quid. I think that’s a steal and tell them to get on with it. Several chapters and an hour later I am told my car is done. I pay and drive off i an act of faith that all is well in tyre land.

Once home I dump the car and head for the village café where I do the days crosswords and devour an egg and bacon baguette. That’s when I discover I am getting a cold or a reaction to yesterdays COVID booster. My nose runs like a tap, I’m about to head home when my partner joins me for a coffee so we chat, watch an articulated lorry wipe out plastic bollard at the village round about and I try to stem the flow from my nose. We walk home and I sink into snot control while my partner returns to work. When in this condition I just read and that’s what I do all afternoon whilst mopping myself up. I hate this stage of a cold where it feels like my internal organs are trying to escape through my nostrils. I do get through the book though. I progressively feel shit up to fish and chips arriving via my eldest daughter and then through the evening of watching football and rugby and finally drafting the blog before night meds and bed. The only impingement of he real world was the email telling me the buyers of the London house cannot get them selves together to exchange contracts till next week. Cold feet I wonder or just slow systems.

Wednesday and its a self maintenance day. I’m up and showering early with an hour and a half to go before my dentist appointment. A long clean of the teeth and morning meds and I am out of the door to walk down the road to my dentist. I book in at reception and settle down with David Sedaris’s Naked while I wait to be called in. After a while I am shepherded into the clinical room and the couch of pain. I’m here to have a filling and preparation for a crown. For the full hour I am mouth stretched open. I get injected with anaesthetic to start with before the work on the tooth to be crowned begins. There is a lot that goes on but finally its ready for a temporary cap. The dentist produces a wizard piece of scan kit. No longer is a mouthful of sticky plaster in a tray required, this new equipment scans my teeth and jaw building a complete picture of my teeth and jaw which is then sent electronically to the lab who then print my new crown on a 3D printer! How cool is that. In doing the scan the dentist spots a cavity at the top of one of my front teeth. We have a quick chat and decide to add it to todays work. My dentist moves on to the planned filling and when that is done she moves to the front tooth. Its the full hour I’ve had my mouth full of metal and tools and now I’m numbed and sore. I make the appointment to return for my 3D crown and return to reception to pay for todays work.

I walk home and rest as I Am due a COVID booster this afternoon. I make myself boiled egg and soldiers (magic food) for lunch and then spend more time reading. I am thinking about getting ready to go to the GP for my jab when my partner returns from seeing her mother. She taps on the window and beckons me to come to the door quietly. There on the doorstep is a hedgehog, not our regular hog but a small one, probably this years. Unusual to see this nocturnal chap out in broad daylight, so I am concerned about his health. I dash to the Shed to get some hedgehog food and on my way back I trip over the electricity table and take a painful tumble. I tuck and roll and its my ribs that take the brunt. I put food and water down for the small hog and drop some on the path to encourage the little hog to eat. The hog eats a bit but then wanders slowly into the pots. I create a little shelter for the hog reasoning that it might want some cover until dark comes around.

I am pushed for time so I have to leave the hog and hope he/she is alright and make my way to the GP surgery for my jab. The walk down is short and the process of actually getting my COVID is even shorter, I barely have time to get my arm uncovered and the needle is in. I walk home beginning to feel a bit knockabout. When I go for a piss I find the tumble I took earlier has made me pass blood. I take myself off to the spare room, take my vitals, down a pint of orange squash adn read for a while, stopping only to nibble crisps and to drink another pint of water. Eventually I return to my place on the sofa and begin to drat the blog. Dinner arrives and I eat with a football match playing in the background. The hedgehog seems to have moved on with the onset of darkness. With the dark comes the feeling of cold, a runny nose and the sense that tonight must be an early night and rest before I take the car to Kwik Fit tomorrow morning. For now I must look after me, I suspect my ribs are going to be bruised in the morning, needless to say I’ll find out soon enough.

Tuesday and I cannot afford to lull about in bed as today I’m off to the dental hygienist. So there is time for toast and coffee before I give my teeth the pre dentist scrub and mouth wash. I chose one of my comfortable ice hockey jerseys, pack a book into my jacket and wander down to the dentist. Luckily I had stowed my book as I had quite a long wait before I was called into the hygienist. I sit in the reclining couch of pain and chat while my notes get up dated. Then it begins, all that scraping, drilling and messing around inside my mouth. Eventually my teeth get polished and given the standard thou shalt not use your mouth wash unless told to by the dentist, thou shall use these mini inter dental brushes before going to bed and thou shalt brush at least twice a day. I hate those inter dental brushes and their colour coded sizing. Who has time last thing at night to go through every gap in their mouth with tiny bottle brushes. Life is just too short isn’t?

I return home to an email from the solicitor telling me that new forms need to be signed and their is an issue with the house sale in London. I email the solicitor to clarify what a new clause means. He comes back quickly and reassures me that we are not at risk. I set about preparing the new paper work so that when my eldest daughter returned home the papers could be resigned. My partner and I walk round the village to stretch our legs and collect some food from the village shop on the way. Lunch follows and then my eldest daughter duly arrived and signed the papers so that we could drive round to my partners brother so that he could witness the signature. With everything signed its off to the post office to send the documents off for arrival the next day.

Once home again its chore time as the bin is put out I empty the room bins and try to get things a bit straight. I can feel myself running out of spoons so I slow down and sit and do todays cross words. So the day ends and the evening slides into view with tea on the horizon and TV following close behind with mixture of crime, football and Party Gate. I draft the blog, down my night meds and go to bed knowing that tomorrow is going to be a challenge, dentist at 10:20 and COVID booster jab at 1:38pm. Its been a day of disrupted intentions, of bits and pieces but then that’s the juggle of the everyday.

Another Monday rolls round and as usual I wake to the murmurer of work going on in the form of office chat and meeting. I am snuggled in under the million tog duvet but I’m feeling pretty ropey. I get up and do toast (more magic toast) and coffee before getting myself together. By the time I do its late morning and I am heading to the Shed. Once there I settle in and write a letter and some odds and ends. Today I am having real problems trying to get what is in my head onto the page. I find these days so frustrating, the words seem to get stuck in the end of my pen or jam themselves in the key board. Its bad enough being dyslexic but when I have these days its just grade on frustrating. I must appear, or my writing must appear like a struggling first former. All I can do is sit it out and keep trying to open the doors. I popped a small picture a friend sent me into a frame and found it a space in the Shed alongside all the other pictures and stained glass.

I wait for the rain to stop and then return to the house and make myself tomato soup (another magic food). A lot of my early afternoon is spent reclining and just getting myself together and doing odd sporadic things like super gluing the Easislide feet on the coffee table. Having watched Michael Portillo wander around Canada I pull myself together and go and post my letter. I notice that there are several plants that are still blooming in the front garden so take a few snaps to capture them.

There was a time when the front garden was a forest of huge fir trees where nothing else grew in their shade, now there is a year round profusion. I have just about got myself back in and settled when Tesco deliver early, I had not had a chance to move the car off the drive so the poor man had to juggle the blue trays around it. My partner is at the dentist so its down to me do the squirreling and sorting of the delivery. I’m soon back on the sofa trying to draft the blog. My partner returns from the dentist and the evening slides into view.

I’m hoping for a quiet evening and an early night before my trip to the hygienist tomorrow. I remember that somewhere in the day I’ve booked time at my local Kwik Fit to sort out my leaking rear tyre.

Saturday now seems a long time ago, I think that is a retired time thing. What I do remember is waking up to my partner telling me the meal we had had the night before had made her sick in the middle of the night and that she was feeling rough. I made us warm drinks and buttered toast which we ate in bed whilst planning the day and the short term future. There is something magical about buttered toast when feeling rough in the morning. Its one of the magical foods like boiled eggs and soldiers and chicken soup, although my preference has always bee tomato. So we lazed for a long time while the toast worked its magic and then slowly got up and pottered around. Eventually my partner and I felt fit enough to take my car to the garage to check its tyres before I drove off to meet friends for a meal later in the afternoon. My partner was sufficiently recovered to drive to her brothers in the village to wrestle with the paperwork required to get support for their mother.

I drove to the Whinery in Burton on Trent to meet my friends. Normally there would be five or six of us but this day there was to be only three. We dined and chatted for three or so hours before going our separate ways. We are of an age where we check each others health and activity with interest. As it happens I was the indolent one of this particular trio, as one friend is still working and the other is a positive whirlwind of activity with a range of charity and community activities that is breath taking. She is truly one of those people who makes the wheels of her community go round. So there is a lot to share and wonder about and we still find things to share about ourselves that we have not heard before even though we have known and worked together for over twenty years and in some cases more than thirty years. The meal, as with friends last night was secondary to the conversation. In the course of our conversation which is often a cause of merriment I heard a phrase I had never heard before which made me laugh. One of my friends recalled telling someone that she was so pissed off with peoples trivia and aggravations that she would never “manage people as long as her arse pointed downwards”. Made me chuckle heartily. I drove home in the rain feeling uplifted and remembering to keep my arse pointing downwards.

Once home the evening was a heady mix of Strictly, rugby and Vincent before I crashed spoonless and quickly, having time only to take my night meds and get myself to bed.

Sunday I woke and wondered what damage I had done to my weight over the last couple days with multiple restaurant meals. When I indulge I usual pit on weight so as I stood naked upon the scales I was apprehensive that I had maintained my “obese bastard” over 98 kilos mark of last week. I smiled quietly to myself as I came in at 97.9 kilos a loss of 0.6 kilos for the week. It is a good omen for the coming month of October that the family has declared a non sweets, cakes or biscuit month. Following yesterdays warm drinks and toast magic I repeated the dose which seemed to go down well. Eventually I get up and while my partner goes down stairs I put my clean clothes away and release the might million tog duvet from its storage space. I get the big winter cover ready to change and call my partner for assistance. We get the winter duvet on quickly so tonight we should be as snug as we could wish for. With ample layers, the heavy tog bedding and global warming we might just get away with not needing to put the heating on till November. I check the garden camera and find that the fox has been to visit us again and that the hedgehog is alive and well. I replace the batteries and replace the camera in the garden. I need to clean the hedgehog canteen and begin to put food out again as winter approaches although I have to say our hedgehog looks quite rotund.

Lunch follows and I settle down to catch up drafting the blog and updating the Tesco order. There will be rugby to watch later. Its a slow Sunday, as Sundays should be as I head towards a week that will include visits to the dentist, the hygienist and the GP for my COVID booster. Somewhere in there needs to be a visit to Kwik Fit to have one of my tyres checked as it is losing pressure. Beyond that I hope for Shed time to catch up with my correspondence.

Friday and I find myself drafting the blog late at night before heading for bed, so this is a backwards day. Having just come in from a meal with friends I make an effort to recall the day. Back there in the morning was an early coffee and meds followed by a walk down to the village café for a full English breakfast. This turned out to be ironic as later I get request to ring my GP. When I do I am told the GP has marked me as “Borderline” due to my cholesterol score of 6.9 on my last set of blood tests. I was offered pills but said I was controlling it through diet. Which is partly true as I chose smoked haddock kedgeree for my evening meal. I omit the peaches and cream sundae that accompanied it out of guilty pleasure.

On returning from my breakfast I find the post has delivered more forms from the solicitors. I get my eldest daughter to sign them and then trop to the post office to get the documents sent for arrival Monday morning. A friend calls at the end of her first week back to work after a prolonged fight with long COVID. Its been a tough journey and still has a way to go but this is a major milestone in recovery. I get my second load of washing in and then nap, I heavily nap until I rouse myself enough to get changed to train. In the garage I strap myself in and begin a 45 minute row. I am not good so its a mediocre session, but it gets done.

Post row I get my washing in and shower, doesn’t sound much but I am knackered. I get ready to go out for the meal with friends. My partner drives us to the pub and we meet our friends and dine. We are as usual the last people in the place as for us its about the conversation as much as the food, but that’s another blog. And that brings me full circle. All that remains is to finish the drafting of the blog and actually going to bed.

Its Thursday afternoon and I thought I would for once draft the blog before I run out of spoons. Most days I write the blog, I do it at the end of the day when I am exhausted, spoonless and heading for bed. It probably accounts for why many of the days are so mundane. By the time I get to my bedtime state I struggle to remember what happened earlier in the day and anything that has caught my attention of any interest has turned in to a grey pulp in the fatigued mind. I cling onto to the prosaic rituals of the day like breakfast because these are the things that form the scaffolding of my life. Without this construction around me I might collapse. I never used to need this carapace around me as my internal skeleton coupled with a strong sense of self was sufficient for me to navigate the world, continue to build my inner universe and seek meaning to my existence. Cancer changed that and the medications that came with it. As I learnt what challenges it brought and what compensations I needed to make so I began to build my protective shell around me. My immediate environment needed to be more ordered. I needed to know where everything was so I did not waste energy trying to find things. My tolerance of things that I thought to be easy and turned out not to be so infuriated me, and still does. Like wise technology that constantly changed. I would get used to a system and some arsehole would decide my life would be easier if they changed a sequence or user interface optic. It just could not be left alone, no progress must happen or people would not have careers. Worst of all was the the increase in “noise”. The emotional and relentless voices of the outside world, mostly wanting my money by guilt tripping me, trying to scare me or enticing me with shit I do not need. I am almost at the point of not watching TV. The BBC , which is supposed to be advert free is full of doom and gloom, grim documentaries and its own style of moral high ground extortion. It all constitutes “noise”. I suppose worse of all is my own intolerance of others trivia which is expressed as “really important” and ” I’m entitled to my opinion” , regardless of how ill-informed, inaccurate and self serving it is. It borders on the edge of “If its my opinion then it must be true”. As I become more entwined with the battle against my cancer the less I can tolerate this “noise” and the more I withdraw into an internal world of feeding myself through reading and writing letters and the odd poem. By its nature cancer forces me to live in short bursts as I no longer have the spoons for prolonged effort. I am engaged in a marathon jog with frequent water and sponge breaks where there is no room for malfunctioning technology or people without kindness. Much of this explains my recent interest in philosophy and the idea of a good person. I’ve said before that I am not a naturally good or kind person, it does not come easily to me. Some people seem to be able to be instantly empathetic and kind, it is their nature, it is not mine.

Anyway I got up and had breakfast and then read for a while. I have finished my David Sedaris book and started on another titled Naked. Another autobiographical set of essays which so far is proving exceedingly engaging. In a strange way he reminds me of Alistair Cooke’s Letter from America but from the other end of the spectrum. Rough versus smooth but with the same penetrating powers of observation and comment.

I read for a while and then take a shower and wash my hair. I am after all going to the dentist. All smartened up I walk slowly to the dentist feeling that I might be wearing too many layers for my level of dentist anxiety. Once booked in I read for a while and then make my way into the room of pain. Today I am seeing a new dentist as my regular one is on maternity leave. She is clued up on me and catches up on my current medical status adn then gives me the oral once over. Apparently my gums are good and my teeth are no worse then they were last time. I clearly need my chipped filing done and I agree to let her excavate my tooth that might be capable. I am x-rayed and we chat about the plan going forward. That’s it, she makes me a new appointment and recommends I see the hygienist before our next appointment. I say farewell and return to the reception desk where I make my hygienist appointment and pay todays bill. I walk away relieved and feeling strangely better. That was a much better experience than I expected.

Back home I have lunch and then read some more of Naked. After a while my eldest daughter becomes available and we sit down together and work through all the legal paper work for my sister’s estate and the house sale. It takes ages to work through all the questions and to ensue what needs signing is signed and what needs dating is or is not according to need. Eventually it all gets down and I drive my eldest daughter to her uncles so he can witness some of the paper work to be signed. The visit does not take long and we are soon home again. The evening gallops in with tea and my partners singing lesson, while l watch rugby and an episode of Vincent. I finish the blog and take my night meds before taking myself off to bed. Tomorrow I must train.