Tuesday and I wake to my partner getting ready to go to work. She goes off to a retirement lunch and I take my vitals, that are all good. I have woken up with the same “itchy scratchy ” feeling which prompts me to scribble a rough poem.

435
There's a lot bubbling about
making me feel itchy and scratchy inside, 
my partner retires this week
and says farewell to her managers today.
Today the second anniversary of my
sisters death, 
still unpacked, unscattered in my wardrobe. 
I'm sleeping in a finger splint 
after the operation that has left me with
a Harry Potter across my palm.
All this and my cancer quietly 
gnaws away at me,
darkly threatening to over run me
at any time my resolve runs out. 
Still I count my energy in spoons
and wonder if I have enough
for each day in this changing world.
So I lay here
listening to meditation music
planning my resolution of the 
spoon to "to do" list equation,
trying to balance on tip toe
to reach up and out
to stay engaged and carry on. 
There is little room for fripperies
if my energy is to last the day, 
train I must to hold off chemo 
side effects
to be able to say 
"I stand".
To write and capture it all,
to understand,
to make meaning
and continue to build my personal universe
that sees me through
a changed world.
It would seem the sickle and 
the stars unite
to caste a deeper shadow 
to what should be light
in which I try to navigate 
my way into the night. 

                                     435   25-02-2025         

I do not often write early in the morning, so the above is probably a bit odd. Having got that out of my system I get up and get into my training gear and take my morning meds. With my earbuds in and music in my ears I go to the garage and the rowing machine. I make the decision to do a forty five minute session and see how my hand holds up. I get going and at the end of the session it feels like my hand has done well. The figures are reasonable, so I am cheered.

Having recorded the session I removed the plaster from my hand and headed off for a shower where I could thoroughly wash my hands without plasters or bandages. Once fresh and clean I attend to my scar. There is still some scabby bits that I dare not pull at so I disinfect and Nivea cream the top of the scar and put on a smaller plaster. I suspect this is going to be a daily ritual for a few days.

With the hand care done I start the draft the blog before getting myself lunch. A busy morning. I try to relax by listening to Mark Steeles In Town but after a couple of episodes I decide to put the bins out and to weed through the front drive flower pots. I have a pair of claw gardening gloves and they are just the ticket to weed out the flower pots and to rake through the surface soil to aerate them. It is clear that many of the pots have Spring bulbs in them that are just beginning to break through the surface. The Iris’s in the big pots are also shooting but they need to be put against the south facing wall to warm them up and encourage them to grow and possibly flower, but I doubt they will as they had such a disturbed summer and winter. They are quite sensitive flowers and need it to be just right for them to flower. Its been too wet for them this year I think.

As I am just finishing my partner returns home with arms full of flowers from her retirement lunch with her managers. I help carry some in and then return to sweep the drive clear of the dirt from the flower pots. We sit and chat about my partners day and I read her cards as we wait for the Tesco order to arrive. Right on time the delivery arrives and there is flurry of activity and rapid squirrelling of goodies. The problem of buying items when they are on a good offer can sometimes me a stock pile accrues, so I discover packs of baked beans I did not realise we had with the result that we could live for a month on rice and beans for a month if the Trump, Putin alliance decide to hold the world to ransom for the rare earth metals in the Ukraine. The Rum Tint Pup duo will have lot to answer for. With everything squirrelled away I continue the blog as the darkness of evening descends and I have the difficult decision of whether I watch football, more Pennyworth or find something else to occupy me before I take my night meds and go to bed hoping to wake up with enough energy to train again and to go to the Shed to write letters, a true test of my mending hand.

Monday and I wake to the knowledge that I shall be taking the final bandage off my hand today and possibly just putting a plaster on it, or not. My partner brings me hot water to drink and I check my vitals. I get up for breakfast and meds and then I set about removing my last remaining hand bandage. It still looks a bit gruesome but I clean it up and for the first time since the operation I am able to wash both hands. I rub it down with a sterilising wipe, run Nivea cream into the scar and then put a plaster over it. I think its going to take a couple more days to get it fully healed.

Having sorted my hand out I get ready to go out with my partner. I drive us to a garden centre where we discover a Waitrose which instantly solved what we would be eating for tea. It was an impressive garden centre but like the others it sells almost anything other than plants, I guess there is less effort and risk involved in selling almost anything that you have to grow. Naturally we had lunch amidst the dozens of others who had exhausted the range of plants available and had lost interest in all the other goods available. In fairness we found some children’s books for our youngest grandchild.

Once home I set about getting my new journal ready as the current one is into its last week. With my life admin done its time for another round of hand exercises and joint compression. Unexpectedly I feel myself running out of spoons and spend time drafting the blog while my partner does singing practice before her singing lesson tonight. I have one last throw of my remaining energy and I unpack my new sack barrow and use it to move the newly delivered bird and squirrel feed to the back garden shed where I decant it into the storage bins and fill all the feeders. At this point I am truly out of energy spoons.

The evening was a mindless film and more Pennyworth before taking my meds and going to bed very tired. I have felt itchy and scratchy inside all day and not sure why. I have that restless sense of self dissatisfaction that I cannot put my finger on, something is roaming around inside, I just have to give it time to show itself.

Saturday, It was a day of sporting indulgence. One football match and two rugby matches and an evening of Pennyworth, the current binge watch. There was a quick interlude to chat to the garden guy and to eat. The main event of the day was to remove the bandaging on my palm and begin the process of cleaning and creaming my palm scar regularly. The use of the compression bandage is now more frequent along with a new hand exercise. So as I watch my day of sport I am regularly attending to my hand. It looks like my scar is healingly. Just one more day and I can take all the bandaging off. I ended my day with night meds, strapping on my night splint and looking forward to a lazy Sunday.

Sunday and I wake up after a disrupted night. It takes a while to settle when I am wearing my finger splint. I am hoping that it will become easier over the following five to six months that I have to wear it for. After taking my vitals I get up and then have breakfast with my partner. There then follows a lengthy period of clearing out my sofa side office area and then I moved onto junking all the out of date medications and reorganising the ones I need to keep. Its a sobering experience to find how much out of date and not wanted medication was lurking in draws and cabinets.

So having finished the clear out and the reclaiming of the lounge I set about organising the coming week’s menu, necessary job given that there is a lot disruption due to my partners retirement on Friday and a visit by our youngest grandchild and parents next weekend. With the logistics done and amendments made I watch the international rugby match of the day. With the game over it’s time to catch up on drafting the blog as the night darkness drops and the evening starts. I just want an early night so that I can get to tomorrow and get my hand free of bandage. It will feel a real landmark in my recovery and signal time the real start time to get going on my fitness recovery.

Friday the day I swore I would train again. I wake up after a restless night and go through my usual rising routine and ring the GP surgery to book my 28 jab that is due on March the 3rd. At first they seem confused but after some toing and froing the GP reception staff finally got it and so I now have my slot. With that out of the way I check my vitals which are all good. I get into my training gear. Its psychologically important to do this as because once I have it on there is no going back. Stopping only to take my now late morning meds I grab my new sailing gloves with the long fingers and head for the rowing machine in the garage. Thankfully the weather is milder so the garage is not as icy as it was 22 days ago when I was last able to train on the rower. Figuring out how I co-ordinate all the button pushing that needs to be done to get going takes a while in full finger gloves but I get there and I am soon off on a 30 minute row. Bugger me I am stiff, it only takes a few days for me to seize up these days and lose fitness, it’s quite perturbing really. So I grind out the session, changing my grip to minimise any damage to my still healing hand scars. I get to the end with relief and feeling knackered, but I have kept the promise to myself to train today. Its a very average session but I will take that. Just under 6 kilometres and under 400 calories but it has got me over the 100 mark on my fitness App. So a job done.

I head for the couch and record the session in my journal and then snack on Marmite crumpets and Red Bull, I have not quite mastered the balanced and well crafted weight loss diet yet, especially as I top it off with a Crunchie. As I let this potent combination settle I prepare for a shower by gathering up the necessary sandwich bag, gaffer tape and newly delivered Nivea cream. My partner and I are going out with fiends for a meal tonight so I feel I ought to make the effort although I might have over done it on the Nivea cream having misjudged how big a pot is. It turns out that 400ml is big and I thought I’d have two to be on the safe side.

The shower, the hair drying and the creaming take longer than expected but I am ready for the rest of the day ahead. My partner returns from he physio and plaits my hair before we go and have a snack at the nearest, and cosiest garden centre tea room. There is time to chat about my partners impending retirement plans before we return home, she to nap and me to draft a bit more of the blog.

I spend more time reading Paul Muldoon and Harry Martinson’s Aniara. I suspect I might have nodded of before it is time to get ready to meet our friends at a nearby pub for an evening meal. It ages since we have seen them and I am looking forward to catching up with them. I can feel the urge to write but I am not sure what. Its a feeling I get sometimes when there is “Stuff” washing around inside me but I do not know what it is until I sit down and write, but it has to be the right time. Its a strange sensation but usually my head lets me know by suddenly dropping a phrase or a couple of lines into my head and then its time to write. It can be awkward as it can happen at any time with the result that I can end up scribbling phrases or lines on anything I can lay my hands on, anywhere at ant time. I just have to be patient with brain while it sorts itself out and then waves the green flag at me to go.

Thursday and its the day I see the hand therapist so I zip through my rising routine and get myself breakfast and down my meds. I cannot be bothered to go through the faff of putting my hand in a sandwich bag to keep it dry so I save the delights of a shower. I am checking my website and YouTube channel when I get a bit display on my screen and a voice telling me my machine is locked and to ring the “Microsoft” engineers immediately as my IP address had been invaded and my personal data was at risk. What I was not to do was turn off my machine but to ring the engineers so they could guide me through a process of getting rid of the threat. The voice just kept repeating itself over and over. As I was on my way to see the hand therapists I just turned my machine off and left it to its own devices. When I returned I switched my machine on and surprise surprise it functioned perfectly. Nice try scammers.

The hand therapist was as lovely as ever and undressed my wound before giving it a clean and then removing the dead skin around the scar. The upshot is that I have a small area in my palm that is still healing and a couple of spots on my ring finger that are still not healed yet. So I get a reduced dressing, new hand exercises and a time table to remove my bandages. On Saturday I can remove my palm Dressing and on Monday the ring finger dressing can go, I just need to put an ordinary plaster on the ring finger if I need to. After that its all about, compression, the exercises and the Nivea cream. I think I should be able to manage that. The hand and scar therapist is pleased with the way I am coming along adn so am I.

Once home I have a late lunch and turn on my “infected” laptop. As I said above there is no problem and the scam alert has gone. I check here on my web site first of all to ensure it is functioning and it clearly is. I’ve noticed recently I am getting spikes in the visiting and viewing figures from all over the world and I have no explanation why. So what started as a way of keeping family, friends and old colleagues up-to-date with what is going on with me, my cancer and immediate family it seems that it has grown slight beyond that. Perhaps it is bits and pieces of content that I put in now and again or that if you do this long enough then statistically the visitors and views increase a bit.

Having checked my laptop and the website I wander out in search of Nivea cream and a paper, the reality turned out to be that Nivea cream does not exist in my village and you have to visit at least two shops to get a paper with the crosswords in. Of course on this peregrination I also managed additional treats. So after my round trip I still had to order my NIvea Cream from Amazon, who say it will arrive tomorrow. I do the crosswords for the day and cruise towards the evening having spent time with my partner picking out possible TV wall paper. All this time I am intermittently strapping up my finger and doing my exercise routine. So by early evening and having eaten I return to the blog before slipping into the pre selected TV wallpaper. So my evening saunters toward my night meds and putting on the night splint. Tomorrow I shall train. Yes tomorrow I will train, the proper start of hitting Christmas nine or ten kilos lighter.

Wednesday and I am up and around quite early for me having completed my rising rituals, breakfasted and taken my morning meds. This morning is all about getting new poems onto my YouTube Channel: PROST8KANCERMAN. I try to rig my laptops so that I can use one as an auto prompt, but I am not sure it works that well, however I post three new unpublished poems. I hope people like them. I have put them here on the blog so you do not have to hunt around for them but by all means share them.

For those interested in following up about Spoon Theory here is the wikipedia link to the subject, but there are lots of articles and posters by all sorts of organisations on the internet. It has become really popular due to its accessibility in terms of understanding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory

By lunch time I am done but I wonder if this flurry of video activity is my way of dealing with the fact that I might have to read a poem in public in March. Ideally I would learn one by heart so I could just perform it but memorising stuff was never my forte. I could get the emotional gist of things and some of the hooks but I was always better at holding onto visual material. That’s one of the aspects of my dyslexia.

After my morning of YouTubing and post lunch I decide to do just one more video. It takes an age to get it any where near right plus the fact that I had got bored with my green ice hockey training jersey and decided to go for the real thing and let my hair down. My vow not to have my hair cut after it all fell out after chemo has left me with the long flow I now have but I am very disinclined to have it tampered with as for me it is a powerful visual reminder of how long I have been fighting and winning, something I think the poem reflects.

Finally I have had enough, I’ve probably done more than I should so I take to drafting the blog and playing with the technology to try and get things roughly right. I’m not going for “professional” after all there is no such thing as living a professional life only of being a professional within ones life. It would be ludicrous to set out to live a “professional” life unless one interprets that as aspiring to some sort of ethical, principled lifestyle in which everything is perfect. My experience is that I fuck up and I am not even sure I know what a perfect/professional life would look like. I always relied upon the maximization of error to maximize learning most of my life, I’m unlikely to stop now. There or there about will have to do me. Not that I would not want the doctors, dentists and trades people of the world not to do their best. But I guess that’s being professional not living a “professional” life.

In this day there are real world things to attend to like the Tesco order and a football match to watch later in the evening along side a lot of little chores, like bringing in the bins, that need to be attended to. I do attend to the chores but have time to continue reading Paul Muldoon’s Selected Poems 1968 – 2014. I suppose it is inevitable that as poets age the content of their poems include more and more “learnt stuff”, by which I mean the experience of their culture, what they have read and who they have met. Some of the poems become cascades of names and illusions to others work and associations between events. Some how the straight forwardness of experience seems to get wrapped differently. I maybe making a broad generalisation but that is how it seems to me, and I wonder if that has happened to me, especially lately. I hope not, I would like to think that I could write about the experiences I am trying to capture without comparison to others or using others work as the counterpoint to my own, but I know that occasionally the work of other poets sneak into my own verses. Tomorrow I see the hand therapist for another session to see how well my hand is healing after my operation on the 30th of January. I am hoping the bandage can come off completely so that I can get both hands wet and start back into training. I suspect she will once again remould my night splint. So I get into the rest of my day, head for the evening and my night meds.

Tuesday I wake to my partner going to work, so I have time to check my messages and socials before checking my vitals. Having got up and taken my morning meds I go the village shop for a paper but what I am really excited about is the letter that I received this morning from a friend in Scotland. In my local pub I order breakfast and a hot chocolate and settle back to read my letter. It is a delight to get letters especially this old colleague and friend. It appears her ideal place in the world is being “developed”, which means that everything from the putting green behind her apartments to the dolphins in the bay are going to suffer the consequences. I enjoy my letter alongside breakfast before heading home to do todays crosswords.

Crosswords done, I return to the task of find the pen top I lost sitting on the sofa, a small but irritating task. Logic demands that it must be close by and indeed it turns out to be so. I find it snuggled behind a sock that had found its way underneath the sofa. With this little victory achieved I move on to checking the garden camera for signs of “my” hedgehog! To my delight he/she is alive and well and last seen very recently in the garden. Its time to put some food out again and prepare the hedgehog hotel for Spring. I get the videos onto my system and replace the camera before refiling the bird and squirrel feeders. Its a crisis, I’ve run out of peanuts and bird seed, so its onto the internet and a reorder. While I am about it I rearrange some to the garden pots, noting how many of the are sprouting bulb shoots and how much is breaking through the ground. There is a camellia that has already opened a bud and had it fail due to the frost. The seasons are really changing. With the initial tinkering to the garden done I return to the sofa to read and ease into the evening.

The evening slides in and I start to draft the blog while seeing if an Australian drama is worth a watch. It isn’t looking promising at the moment but as there is still time for a film there is hope yet.

My frustration mounts as I am inpatient to get get back to training, I can feel my fitness drain away and I am becoming more tired more quickly. I have decided that once I have seen the hand therapist on Thursday I will start to row again on Friday. For now I take my night meds, don my night splint and go to bed. Only 48 hours to go before I hopefully loose my finger bandage and start to train again.

Monday and my partner brings me hot water as I struggle to the surface. There is much to do before I can get up. There are birthday greetings adn gifts to send followed by a call to the doctors to try and book my next hospital bloods and my GP monthly injection. The hospital bloods are possible but not the injection as the calendar is no yet on the system, which I think is cutting it a bit fine. With that out of the way I do my first set of physio hand exercises. With all that out of the way I finally get up and discover I have missed a call from a friend.

I munch my way through a couple of croissants and a small coffee before waving my partner off to the gym. My challenge is to get tonight meal in the crock pot, usually a doddle but with my right hand still with a dressing its a bit more of a challenge, especially the peeling and cutting up. It goes okay if a bit slow and I wrestle the ingredients into the pot and set it going. With that out of he way its time to bag up my hand in a freezer bag and gaffer tape it up so that I can take a much needed shower. Its an art form having a shower and keeping one hand dry and still getting to all the essential nooks and crannies. By the time I was out and dried, lunchtime loomed. I started to draft the blog when my partner returned home from the gym so it was time to go exploring another garden centre for food.

A large chunk of the afternoon is taken up with tuna melts, toasted teacakes and warm drinks as well as conversations about future plans. Once home we walk to the village shop to get a paper and some bits and pieces before returning home. There are cross words to do before tea and an evening of Unforgotten. Most exciting of all is the arrival of the poetry book I ordered. Its a collection of Paul Muldoon who I am going to see in mid March. He is supposed to be one of the worlds leading poets so I thought I ought to read some of his stuff.

Not only have the poems arrived but also my desperate buy of sailing gloves to get me back to training as quickly as possible. I am hoping that at this weeks meeting with the hand therapist will see me loose the bandage on my hand and I can get going. These gloves are full gloves and not the usual training gloves that are cut off across the fingers that would irritate my scar. I am really pleased with them, I seem to have got this right, a real find.

Saturday was a day of the poetry stanza, so I spent my usual waking moments taking my vitals, checking messages and then getting up for breakfast. By mid morning I was alone in the house and putting the finishing touches to my poetry contribution. By noon it was raining hard as I lunched and then set off to the stanza venue.

There was just the five of us this time at the Stanza, which left time for chat and to nibble the biscuits that people had bought. We thought that people had not come due to the rain. All the poems were interesting and well formed. Mine was well formed but I felt no where near the artistry of the other four. As a result of small numbers we finished early and I was able to drive back in the light.

A fish and chip tea saw the family move into the evening and the film The Queen of the Dessert, a bio pic of Gertrude Bell an English writer, traveller, spy and political officer who became and expert and influencer in the middle east. The film had her literally riding off into the sunset on a camel across the desert having told two princess they would become kings, which in life they actually did. The reality of her life was that she died of an over dose of sleepi.ng pills some time later. So with the film over thee was football highlights and night meds to take before getting off to bed. Al day I had tried to keep to my two hourly routine of hand exercises and compression as my finger continues to recover. This night I took pre-emptive paracetamol before donning my night finger splint and also added a layer of athletic bandage round my palm to padding to the palm.

Sunday in general the pre-emptive paracetamol and addition padding on my hand worked. I slept reasonably well and both I and my partner rose late after I had made warm drinks for us both. Breakfast followed by some “puttering around” during which I wrote snippets of a poem. Once my small number of chores were done I settled down to make sense of my jottings and finally got them into some sort of shape. This had clearly been formed out of yesterdays experience at the poetry stanza meeting.

434
I wonder if I have killed poetry,
taken something from the indescribable 
that I seek to capture in words. 
All those meters, iambic, trochee,
Villanelles and sonnets, the swathes of
forms and 
analytic tools I use 
to dissect what is and isn’t there.
How strange a world we live in.
I stub my toe and yell FUCK!
and then I wonder,
was my full-frontal fricative F
F enough,
Or the soft and singular vowel 
sufficiently sibilant
before the curly K and 
kicking K guttural end
to let catharsis begin?
Is this this the explanation of what
I left behind in childhood
while I learnt to colour 
inside the lines?
Or is this the self-conscience seeking
of what I now call adulthood. 
I murder my Villanelle 
and return to my pen and ink 
hoping the flow returns.
                                                                       434 16-02-2025

A world of too much analysis I think is the message, However no time to rest on my laurels I accompany my partner to the village Co-Op and get a paper and other essentials like Tunnock’s Tea Cakes and Crunchies. Returning home there is afternoon crumpets and a drink to be had while I draft the blog. Its a very British afternoon, writing, nibbling crumpets and reflecting on the world, that a friend described as “living in a dystopian Sci Fi novel”. I might join her in a glass of red wine, which does not seem such a bad way to counter the current political pissing contest that is going on.

In all this is my desperate need to get back to training, I need to do that soon before I loose any resistance to the side effects of my medications. I need to row again. To that end I have ordered a pair of sailing gloves that should offer protection to my hand scar. Once I have seen the hand therapist on Thursday training must begin in earnest again. I am managing to keep my weight more or less on the hundred kilo mark but I need to drop eight to ten kilos before next Christmas.

Friday and I am awake early doing my vitals, taking my meds and getting ready to go and see my hand therapist. So its all a bit of a rush but I am soon in the car to arrive on time. The hand therapist removes my dressing from yesterdays stitch removal and then washes my hand free of the last remaining blood. My wound is examined closely and it appears I have two spots that have not healed on the surface which means they are going to have to heal from the inside out, which is going to take a while. The therapist redresses the wound and then instructs me on my next set of physio exercises. I now have to wind athletic compression tape around my finger for ten minutes before I do my hand exercises, which now include making a fist. She measures my finger straightness with a neat little protractor tool and jots down my progress. With the basics done she reheats my finger splint and remoulds it to my finger in its new dressing. After forty five minutes she tells me how much I owe her and I give her fresh notes and drive home with my new dressing and instructions.

I decide to wait till lunch time to eat when I can take my partner, in the meantime I begin to read Aniara : A review of Man in Time and Space. by Harry Martinson. He was a Swedish poet who had a fascination with science and managed to combine poetry with it. So I settle down to read the introduction to it and the explanation of some of the names for things that Martinson created. First published in 1956 it is an intriguing glimpse of how someone thought the future might go given all the new ideas in physics and engineering of the time. The fact that it is written as 100 plus songs in an epic poem form makes it a fascination read, and a manageable one. Interestingly their is no copyright on it as it was decided that this should be available to everyone. My copy originated from Trent University library, I am curious to know how it came to be available to me. Clearly the university was not big on Swedish Nobel Prize winning poets.

My partner and I go to lunch and pull a blank at our first port of call, of course it is Valentines day so there are more people than usual eating out this lunch time. We find a space at our local garden centre and I get to have a late, late breakfast. On our return home we walk to the village shops and gather up a paper and treats before retuning home. I settle down t do the crosswords and then move onto preparing for tomorrows poetry stanza. I had decide to take my stab at a Villanelle but realise at the last moment that I have one of the key elements wrong so I spend much time re writing it so that the all the “B” lines in the rhyming structure through the poem rhyme. So I end up with a second version of my Villanelle to Villanelle. I will take to the Stanza meeting tomorrow then that me done with Villanelles, I leave the the field and acknowledge the much greater artistry and poetic talent of the likes of Dylan Thomas, Auden and Sylvia Plath.

428.1

Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
with any weapon and fashion to inspire
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

This was no ordinary way for blood to spill
nor was it how most become immobile,
Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
.
The boots below the tailored twill
would step ruggedly upon a smile
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

no end of ways for hearts to still
liberating souls a darker style
Oh Villanelle Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill.

From acrid poisons to electric drill
Villanelle ran the gamut of versatile
She took their lives in ways to thrill.

For body disposal pigs fit the bill
their voracious appetites like hellfire,
Oh Villanelle, Oh Villanelle how she loves to kill
she took their lives in ways to thrill.

                                                                                                    428.1 14-02-2025
						  A Villanelle for Villanelle of Killing Eve

Having made my adjustments and run off copies for tomorrow I set about drafting the blog. I am rapidly running out of spoons, it seems to have been a long week, but just when I thought I might sink into the evening a friend rings me. She is collecting her mother in law and has taken the opportunity to ring me. We chat for a while and catch up on our week and what is going on before she arrives at the train station to collect her guest. I finish off the blog and sink into the evening, I shall watch TV and do nothing more than let myself be entertained in ways far different from last nights performance of Stewart Lee vs The Man Wulf. It will be night meds for me and then a night with the amended finger splint. Hopefully I will not need to get up it the night to take pain killers.