Thursday the 16th , this is re-retirement day. I finally give up paid employment and any pretence of being a professional in private practice or a consultant in any way shape or form. I am a true pensioner now. What a time to chose to throw myself on the mercy of my pension , but I guess there is never a good time to do that. So in my last day of status and employment I get up and make a celebratory coffee and fried egg sandwich. One of my nieces messages to say she has got a Princes Trust Award to set up as an independent counsellor with support. She has already found a share of a consulting room in town in a good location. So as I close my career so hers begins to blossom. I like the synchronistic feel of this. Mr doctor rings and we discuss my back pain and decide it is something for the oncologist and I to discuss as I probably need to have another scan. In the conversation he tells me I am diabetic based on some tests that were done on my urine sample. I admit to a sweet tooth but I am a bit taken aback. Then he relooks at the results and it tells me that has confused me with another “Rowland”, spelt differently to me. I chuckle, so good news after all.

I sit on the patio and enjoy my sandwich as the rest of the household slumbers late. As it is my re-retirement day I recalculate some of the “days since” related to my health. They turn out as follows:

• DAYS SINCE HOSPIAL IN JAMACIA 1193
• DAYS SINCE CANCER DIAGNOSIS 1093
• DAYS SINCE FIRST ONCOLOGY 1039
• DAYS SINCE FIRST CHEMO 1017
• DAYS SINCE END CHEMO 891
• DAYS SINCE DVT 829
• DAYS SINCE COVID START 11

As I calculate my neighbour mows his lawn loudly. I do not know if its possible but I swear his mower sounds smug. Anyway I am pleased that I have moved into the thousand day mark for some of them. It gives me motivation to begin to think about training again after a break of 30 days. Given the lay off I am surprised that I weigh only 96.7 kilos, I was expecting more.

So I am on my patio, fed, coffee’d and listening to my garden and of course I start to write because that is what I do when left to myself with the universe. So this is what I wrote on my re-retirement day.

I am alone in my garden
Sun on my back
The air is still.
This is my last day
No more employment,
Being useful 
Making a contribution.
Today I stop being A forensic psychologist,
Professional,
Expert.
I  am alone in my garden
With days to fill,
A brain to feed
And all the the fears
That stopping brings.
There is no me out there
No place in the world.
So this is it.
I am alone in my garden
Somehow the words are sticky
The ink blotchy
The flow difficult.
There are ghosts in the garden
And fears budding,
Flowers going over.
A noisy neighbours mower,
I am alone in the garden.  

So that is the start of my day. Now its time to open the Shed and see where the rest of the family are. A drift to noon has been easy and now to continue in the Shed. I should add that I have acquired a new set of Bluetooth training ear buds which means I can move around with sounds in my ears if I choose. Perfect for blocking out the neighbours mower or other extraneous sounds with the luxury of them monitoring for calls and messages.

I never make the Shed but lunch with my partner who has slept all morning. I continue to potter until we go to the village shop to buy food, papers and essential Maltezers. My partner tries to collect a prescription from the chemist but they cannot find it. We dutifully trudge to the GP surgery and back to collect the prescription and have the chemist fill it. We return home with our well travelled vitals. Coffee and time with the newspaper puzzles before our garden guy arrives. I move a car so he can hack back the private in the drive and continue to solve puzzles. He does his work and goes and all the while I sit on the patio enjoying the warmth going out of the day. We will dine on the patio tonight. I would light the chimenea but I notice the fir tree is over hanging it and the last thing I want is an exciting fire incident to end the day with. Tomorrow I will trim said tree and then we can indulge tomorrow evening. My evening is going to be gentle and domestic. If my toggle collection arrives I shall be sewing replacement toggles on to my light weight trousers, of which I have several pairs and so my re-retirement will see me sewing clothes. Will I be ready for next years Great British Sewing Bee? I doubt it but it would be nice to be able to knock up the odd garment now and again. To date I think I could only manage a pair of gownless evening straps. I have missed my colleagues at the conference but they have sent me pictures of themselves and short videos to say hello and to tell me they miss me. It seems odd not to be part of the team any more but perhaps I will get an opportunity to say farewell properly at some point.

Wednesday and I wake early to take my meds adn what I thought was my last antibiotic tablet, until I found two more in the packet, so at least today is the last day of taking them. I do a few puzzles as I wait for my lateral flow test to do its magic. Will I be a continuing leper or will I have a foot on the road to recovery?

I get up and make honied toast and coffee, which I eat on the patio and contemplate what I am going to do today. I open up the greenhouse and the Shed and then start to write letters. I am still catching up with my correspondence and as I do so I find myself writing about my transition and the plans. It turns out to be a useful thing to be doing. During the morning a card arrives for me from a friend who has sent me a re-retirement message. It is off one of my favourite writers, Virginia Woolf. I frame it and place it amongst my Shed gallery.

In the course of my letter writing I find myself doing an audit of my leisure, amusement and activity assets. It is these after all that will be my resources to fill my days. I find I am rich in resources as a result of years of work and accumulating the things and materials that interest me. I find I have loads of art stuff, jewellery casting wax and tools, musical instruments, books, IT toys, music library, a garden full of work to be done, I’ve a jacket pattern to make, people to write to and a life’s worth of poetry to fuel the poetry coyote. I also have a gym in the garage and a huge amount of tools. I am indeed rich. I also have the blog and a YouTube channel to feed. What comes to me strongly is my need to stop watching so much TV in the evenings. At the moment when I run out of spoons it is the easy option but I have a gut feeling that I need to be more selective in my use of TV. Tonight of course there is the Great British Sewing Bee and the rest of Stranger things to watch but I think that is not too much. What I need to stop doing is “grazing” the channels because its a habit or I’m too tired or lazy to do something else. So there it is the unintended outcome of writing letters.

I eat lunch as my partner joins me in the garden. I continue to write in the Shed but at some point we decide to see if we can get a peek of the hedgehog in the greenhouse. I carefully uncover what I thought was just a pile of leaves to discover a well built nest, which I have not got the heart to disrupt. It is a small wonder and leave it well alone.

I put the plastic sack back over it and leave my nocturnal loner in peace. My partner and I walk to the GP surgery where, after a bit of toing and froing I collect her sick note from the receptionist. I post my letters and I drop into the chemist to pick up my partners prescription, it is not there, but my monthly order is there. We return home and I am about out of spoons. I go to the Shed where I unpack a new set of Bluetooth ear buds that are adapted for runners and pair them with my phone. It is a step towards beginning the hard road back to physical fitness. I have enough spoons left to feed the hedgehog and close up the Shed. While my partner magics tea I start to draft the blog. I suspect I shall slip in to evening and bump in to the GBSB and then its anyone’s guess.

Tuesday at 6 o’clock i am swallowing meds and going back to sleep. When I do get up its to move the car so my partner can go to the hospital to be check for post COVID clots. I wave her off and head for the patio to drink coffee, munch honied toast and do puzzles. My neighbours have the tree surgeons adn gardeners in so my peace and quiet is rudely interrupted by chain saws. No warning, that would have been neighbourly, I knew I did not like them, bastards. So I struggle on through the racket and then retreat to the Shed. I stow the bird seed delivery along with the new bag of peanuts for the squirrels. I settle down to write a letter.

My partner reappears having been x-rayed, EKG’d and CT scanned. No post COVID blood clots but she has a hiatus hernia, which explains the reflux that she has been experiencing. Nice to know. We drink tea and coffee on the swing seat in the garden and chat our situation through. I’m hungry and prepare chicken soup which I eat in the Shed. To my surprise I have WiFi, it must be a calm and sunny day. I write another letter and then make my pilgrimage to the post box. By the time I return the new kitchen tap has been delivered as has my new Muriel Bradbery book, The Writers Cats. I retreat to the Shed and ring the plumber who gives me a date for next Wednesday at 8:30ish. I then settle down and read my new book cover to cover. If you like Muriel Bradbery you will like this.

The real world calls me back as I clear away cat sick from the garden stepping stones and then I feed the hedgehog. Whilst on a roll I review the garden camera and download the latest crop of hedgehog photos. I replace the camera, eat tea and draft more of the blog before settling down to watch tonight’s international football. To think I could be at a conference saying farewell to my working life. Onward.

Monday, feels a little odd. Its eight o’clock and I take my meds and drift off again. An hour later I am doing puzzles until I am asked if I have rung the GP. More medical crap to do, so I ring, and ring, and ring, ans so on until the universe gives up and I get through. I chat to the receptionist who obviously pulls up my record as she is able to tell me what antibiotics I am on and that my last urine sample came back negative for infection, not something I knew and not something I think the receptionist should know or be telling me. Anyway she takes a lot of info and puts together a note for my GP, she assures me he will see it and contact me in due course. Due course ended up meaning “not today”.

I spent the morning doing invoices, sorting out my farewell message to the services I worked with. I friend rings and we have a quick chat as she goes to the dentist. A few more puzzles and I am ready for the garden where I water the pots. Its an effort and it is slow work. As I go round I take photos of flowers that have popped out. I am constantly surprised by the way the garden always surprises me and provides moments of beauty.

Amongst all this I start to contact plumbers to fix our buggered mixer tap in the kitchen. No one responds straight off so I leave messages in the hope that someone out their will come back to me. A mid day bacon sandwich and I am heading for the Shed. For the first time in ages I am sitting at my Shed desk writing a letter. It a strange feeling and I rely on the pen adn ink to know what they are doing. A finish my letter and go to post it discovering on the way that Tesco had delivered. Back in the Shed I get a call from a plumber. The deal is I get the new tap, tell him and he rocks up sometime next week. So starts the great tap hunt. My partner and I agree one adn I try to order one from a variety of suppliers. Every time I go to pay my card fails, I become extremely pissed off. Eventually I find exactly what I want on Amazon who will be delivering it tomorrow. Just to complete my day I order next Mondays injection and then feed the hedgehog. We eat for the evening and then I settle down to draft the blog with a background of NCIS, new series.

Sunday and it is release from COVID isolation day ,in theory. I woke at 6 o’clock to take my meds and antibiotics and as it now usual I make honeyed toast and coffee as meds chasers. I take them back to bed and nibble them as I do the first Pitcherwits puzzle of the day. I weigh myself, a usual Sunday ritual, to find I weigh 96.7 kilos, down from last week. This is a miracle as I have not trained for weeks now having been ill. I go back to sleep and wake again at gone 10 o’clock. I put my washing in, make more coffee and join my partner in the lounge who is trying to “get on with it”. I start the blog and ready myself to do another Lateral Flow Test. I am obviously hoping that after all the meds, pills, infusions, potions, lozenges , general bone pointing over the shoulder, incantations, bestial sacrifices, appeasement of the gods and general desiring to be better, that my next LFT is negative. See you on the other side, as the Jamaican nurses used to say as they waved me off in the ambulance.

Lateral Flow Test done: Outcome: Positive. Consequences: more isolation, and no going to the BGSPD conference next week. Thus my re-retirement will not happen amongst colleagues in a conference environment but on my couch at home or in the garden. My Monday will be my day of finishing admin.

My afternoon has been spent resting, bring in and sorting out my washing and taking pain killers as my back pain is getting no better, so tomorrow along side my life admin I will be ring the GP. In the meantime there is Stranger Things to watch and discover if Hooper is still alive and whether El will recover her powers.

Saturday, early, meds followed by toast and coffee and a nap. A day follows that consists of two rugby matches, one football match, a lot of Pitcherwits puzzles, some WhatsApp messages, emails and grazing food. Of course the hedgehog gets fed. So here we are in the evening and its time to indulge in some Stranger Things series four. So apart for some more meds that’s it, that’ a day resting and hopefully recovering from COVID. However there was one stand out moment. I discovered a YouTube video of Alan Ginsberg performing America. It is one of my favourite poems but I never realised that he performed it as a performance piece and how powerful it was.

I like this stuff and it reinforces my project to become the Poetry Coyote. Its the performance element and the avoidance of the “poetry industry”. Ginsberg’s stuff, like Tempest’s stuff is meant for a room of people of their time.

Its Friday and I’ve got two more days to go of my COVID isolation, my partner has three or four. Yesterday was a recovery day. My partner adn I both napped for long periods of time in the afternoon as we recovered from my partners night in A&E. Fortunately I had the energy to put a meal in the crockpot for the evening. The evening was very much eat and watch TV evening. My partner took a long bath and I stared blankly into the TV screen at old Mock the Week episodes. We went to our respective rooms knowing it was the only way we would both get any sleep. I have acquired an irritating tickly cough which would have kept sus both awake. So I take my drugs, think about the blog, but its too late now I have run out of spoons radically. The light goes off, I cough and so my night begins.

Friday morning dawns and I dutifully take my meds at 6 o’clock and then then fall back to sleep for another two hours. On waking I check my messages and then compulsively do three more puzzles to get my head going. I eventually get up and make marmalade bagels and warm drinks. My partner appears and we dine while planning how to do as little as possible while covering the essential bases of domestic life and recovery. Of course our Eldest Daughter will do some odds and sods shopping for us but otherwise he world will need to come to us. This was something a friend had vividly reminded me about in the last couple of days. So my plan is to go ahead dead slow, one thing at a time and see how my spoons go.

I am aware here that I must be a purveyor of doom and misery at the moment, so I apologies to all of those people who I am messaging, writing to and otherwise communicating with. Of course as an adult we all know there is sod all that anyone can do about my current maladies and we also all know that hearing about such things is a pain. Being given such information raises all the issues around not being able to do anything, and the uncomfortable thoughts about “why can’t they just be better” , which we know is not charitable but would save us the discomfort the knowledge affords us. This is especially true for those whose Real Worlds are already full of challenges with their own and families struggle to survive and thrive in an increasingly harsh Real World environment. Is this where friendship, humanity and kindness fights its battles in that no matter where we are we are somehow able to recognise and acknowledge the difficulties of others. One of my favourite observations was by Gil Scot Heron and American poet and commentator. He was asked about his view on living with others to which he replied, “If you can help someone along the way, why wouldn’t you, yea why wouldn’t you?” I guess we all tell each other stuff because if we can we will help but know that its the “if we can” that is the rider clause in life. Its knowing we could and choose not to which is the harsh other side of this equation. That’s the wrestle and knowing that friends would if they could and its okay of they don’t because they can’t. At which point I go to contemplate this in a long and warm bath. I may be back later, there may after all be hedgehog news.

The bath was warm and long and as I accidently used a seaweed bath bomb I lay arranging floating patterns of aquatic leaves. I do puzzles, stare into space and gradually get more wrinkled and chilled. I would like to say that I leapt refreshed from my bath but it was more a choregraphed sloth dance which got me dried and dressed. I sat on the sofa exhausted! How can having a bath be so tiring? I start to watch an old rugby match and then I get a call from my sisters GP. Its an error but I promise to ring my sister and pass on a message about a prescription. I keep my word and ring my sister who picks up. We chat for a while and it seems that things are as good as they can be. It was god to hear her again being her old self. Call over I watch TV and then prepare pasta for my tea, my partner can not face the pasta so makes an alternative. I watch too much NCIS and get to feel twitchy, so while “My Name is Leon is on I write more of the blog. Its Friday night and barely 9 o’clock and I am knackered. I like to think that just like a cold I will wake up well and be back in the gym but it does not feel like it, the fatigue is inscribable. I know some people who know what this is like, it is them who taught me spoon theory and why I my blog, letters and messages are peppered with references to spoons. I’m sure I have referenced it before here in the blog, but in case I haven’t here it is.

I am now completely out of spoons. Good night.

Its Thursday and I am spoonless. I finally gave up and went to bed at 2 o’clock. As I said in yesterdays blog my partner and I were waiting for the doctor to call my partner. At about 6 o’clock she did. She got me to do a new set of NEWS 2 and was disturbed by some of it. She was going to seek an admission at a local hospital. When she rang back it turns out the only alternative was to go to A&E at the big city hospital. She also suggested that waiting for an ambulance would take hours, could we manage ourselves. Options? Me drive or an Uber. I was in no condition to drive so I ordered an Uber. We get ourselves ready and meet the Uber masked up with an overnight bag just in case. I know before I go that I cannot stay, which makes it feel like an even shittier deal for everyone. We get to A&E, the taxi waits and we go in. My partner gets booked in and as soon as they know we are both COVID positive they put my partner in a side room and I get ushered out to the taxi. I get home and clear up, feed the hedgehog, fill the squirrel feeders and try to keep busy. I field messages from family and a phone call from my youngest daughter. My eldest daughter is away tonight so I am on my own with this. By 11 o’clock they still had not taken the bloods they needed to do the tests. I stay up till 2am hoping that my partner would be allowed home. No joy. In the end I go to bed dressed just in case, but there is nothing.

Thursday morning I wake at 5 o’clock and check my phone, no messages. I get a message at 6:45 saying that they are still waiting for the blood results. I just have to wait, my partner must be feeling terrible, isolated with no or little access to anything. I make toast and coffee, take my meds and do a couple of puzzles. I decide to draft a bit of a blog, which I can update over the day. I need to duck out of a planned 9am work meeting and try to tidy the post holiday debris and sort the bedrooms out where we have both been isolating , they look like Tracey Emin art works. So onwards as I wait for news and get to know what I need to do for the rest of the day.

More to come…

It is good new, my partner has been released and sent home to serve the rest of her COVID sentence under house arrested. There will be an out patient referral to check one or two thing post COVID but in general all is good. So arriving back by taxi the priority was tea and marmalade bagel and time to sit and be back home. I suspect there is going to be napping in the near future.

Wednesday, another day of waking early in order to do toast and drugs before the rest of the family are up. My evening yesterday went to plan. football, Silent Witness and sleep. There was one nasty shock and that was I had not realised how much I had bleed from the canula site when it had been removed yesterday. I had had no reason to look until I was getting myself ready for sleep but when I did I was a bit taken aback.

I cleaned the dressing up and applied a new one, so no harm seems to have been done. Anyway on with Wednesday. I decided that I would try and attend a Zoom meeting with a group that I am a member of. I logged on successfully but became aware that my partner was not well. On checking I found her in an unwell state but wanting to be left alone. I finished my meeting and went to see my partner who was now back in bed and looking very poorly. My eldest daughter had gone to a meeting entailing an overnight stay so I set about my care duties. I took some SATs and rang the doctor to ask for a call from them to my partner, which they agreed to do. Having sorted that I got my partner to do a Lateral flow Test. It was positive so we both have COVID. I reported the test result, which was going so well until it asked for my partners nhs number. It took me to another page and through the same information and ended up saying it would send my partner her nhs number to her email address. I returned to the original web page and leave the nhs number blank and find that the system works with out it. So why, I ask myself, do they ask for it in the first place if they do not need it and also have temerity to send you down a rabbit hole that ends up not giving you what you need straight away? I’m too full of COVID to even guess so I put it down to them being arseholes, which is not reflective but has to suffice given my general state of health and copping ability.

So here we are in our separate rooms, isolating. We are hunkered down and hoping to get through. We await a doctors call and already my to do list is getting longer. I am not sure the hot tap in the kitchen is functioning properly, I have an experimental dishwasher load on the go, the hedgehog needs feeding, the squirrel feeder needs filling as it is now serving at least three new baby squirrels and then there is the window cleaner to pay and the house to tidy. The bin needs bringing in and the garden guy needs to told to avoid us this week and the blood pressure machine needs new batteries if I am going to be able to complete a set of home NEWS 2 measures. These are handy as they determine whether you get taken seriously by a doctor or not, 5 is the cut off for clinical intervention. Due to my condition we have of course got the required equipment to gather this data.

I’ve missed a call from a friend which I regret and I’m being slothful in my communications, I guess this is what happens in isolation. So here we are waiting, I have no inclination to do the “to do” list but will once we have doctored. My beacon of hope is the Greta British Sewing Bee, which I can watch on my laptop and a book of puzzles that are on their way to me. I’ve no creative juice, no insights, just an animalistic desire to sleep and wake up well. I might make the sleep but I know I am a way off waking up well. It is bizarre that for me to wake up well in my universe is to wake up to it being As Good As it Gets Again, and I am back to where my cancer is not getting worse, where my PSA level is lowering, I am able to train, read and write, letters or poems, and garden. Who would have thought life could be so well defined.

Tuesday, my third day of COVID, so much unwell admin to do. I wake at 5:30 very hungry but with a rasping throat. I leave Spinalonga (I’ve named the spared room where I am holed up) and go to the kitchen to make coffee and toast which I smother in honey and retreat to Spinalonga. Here I drink and eat after downing my usual meds plus the antibiotics. By my calculations I can take more antibiotics at about two o’clock. I suck Strepsils and reflect but in the end try to get back to sleep. I wake again at 8 o’clock to the usual working day sounds of the house. I am wondering what I am going to do for the rest of the day, I could like a friend take a long bath and watch Lucifer but I lack the IT water skills to do this with confidence in my current state. I ring the service that is supposed to be shoving a camera down my dick on Wednesday and get the answer phone again. All this and only nine o’clock.

My phone rings. This is a surprise and I have no idea who it can be. A friendly voice, one I understand, introduces himself as a doctor from the local COVID medication service. We chat and he offers me an “infusion”. He cannot fool me I know this a canular in the arm job. We agree that I will find my way to the unit for 11 o’clock. I get up and clean my teeth with a new tooth brush, daub myself with Calvin Klein One and dress. I organise my office bag, adding the The Elegance of the Hedgehog to it. I restore the car to its pre holiday configuration and set off to the hospital. I get there just fine but can I find some where to park, no I can’t. To crown it all I get a call from “camera down your dick” in response to my message. I try to explain that I have COVID and that I am currently at the hospital. There is a torturous exchange and I agree to phone them when I am well enough. All this while I’m trying to find somewhere to park. So in my desperation and annoyance I park the car on a bit of grass alongside another car. I walk to the unit and I am greeted and offered a proper hospital mask, they are insistent that my trendy, vented one will not do. I am seated in a reclining chair and I am immediately back in chemo, same set up. I’m in a dedicated chair with a time table.

I settle in, the canular goes in followed by a bit of saline. My SATS are taken and monitored during the session. Then the infusion of the anti viral protein is added. Of course there is paper work that gets done by the doctor and I sign a consent form. Could have been anything in reality. So I sit and be infused whilst I read occasionally interrupted by the SATS taking. My SATS through our are pretty good actually and apparently I stayed awake the entire time.

I get to 12:45 and I have shown no adverse symptoms, the team have been cheery and efficient and so I am allowed to leave. I have no doubt someone will ask me for feedback soon on how I found the experience. I leave and return to my car to find that a white van has been parked so as to leave almost no space for me to get out. Another example of “white van mans arseholeism”. I rise above the obvious “I’ll stuff you” intention of the WVM’s moronic mind and with deft and adroit skills manoeuvre out demonstrating supreme “up yours” determination. I drive home feeling drained and without spoons. How ever the team at the clinic deserve a cheer, they were very good, so a big thank you to them all, especially the one who got my cannula in first time. Hip hip hooray!

So I am home with coffee, biscuits and water. There are antibiotics to take now and a nap to have. Tonight there is a football match. Beyond this there are no spoons. I settle back into Spinaloga and see how my body copes with the cornucopia of drugs it now has inside it. I suppose its too much to hope for a rare mutation that will give me super powers. I like super powers.