This is my last day of chemo tablets for this cycle, so I am halfway through the treatment. I've actually been quite good this time after the reduced dosage, but in a contrary way I am now noticing the remaining side-effects more. There is a sort of background dis-ease, hardly ever amounting to pain, but enough to keep me aware that I am being poisoned in a good cause, and giving me ungrateful feelings that it had better work or I might as well not have wasted these precious weeks. I am hoping that this week will see me feeling more like me, which will at least reassure me that the symptoms, which are centred on the abdomen, are entirrely due to the treatment and not to some sneaky lump of cancer left behind.
We've both been tired this week. It's not just feeling flat after saying goodbye to the family, but also catching up on sleep after a week of disturbed nights. We didn't hear the boys at all, it wasn't them, but several trips to the loo every night and difficulty getting back to sleep takes its toll. I hope when I am better we will be able to break the habit of going to bed in the afternoon!
All is not gloom by any means. I have been setting myself a task every morning, and getting on top of some jobs I have been putting off for months. Yesterday I made a start on my annual accounts for the tax-man. In fact that is now on hold on the conservatory table, waiting for various bits of paper that appear not to be available. I feel better for having made a start. This morning I emptied the bottom drawer of the kitchen unit where I keep tea-towels, freezer bags, Dave's chef hats, rolling pins, waxed discs for jam, jelly bags and so on. It's one of those drawers with open sides and a low back, so stuff had gone over the back and was sticking out of the sides and shutting it was a daily fight.
That was my easy job. This was cupboards day, but the next cupboard took the rest of the morning. It was a horrible job that I steel myself to do once every seven or eight years - sorting the preserves cupboard! I now have as many jars as I could possbily want, and tomorrow the dustmen will take away four heavy bags of old jam, pickle etc. Some was dated 2003! Even so I hate scraping out jar after jar, thinking of the picking, cleaning, boiling, testing, pouring into jars, sealing and labelling. To say nothing of the pounds of sugar! Well, I should learn to make just enough for ourselves and maybe a few gifts. It's like the garden where we still tend to grow rows of veg like Mum and Dad did, with no hope of using everything.
Notice to all those who keep saying: 'don't forget to save me a jar of cucumber pickle': You are welcome to a couple of jars labelled 2008 or 2009, but I am making no more this year! In fact the cucumbers are making a shaky recovery from an attack of red spider, courtesy of Green Gardener's phytoselius, and before I found the store of one and two-year old pickle I was seriously thinking of buying cucumbers for my annual quota.
On Monday I transcribed three letters written from Australia by Grandad's brother Harry and Harry's son John. I got them off to an Ancestry contact who is Harry's great grand-daughter, and on Tuesday heard from her. She opened the e-mail and read it at work and cried to think she was reading words written by her great-grandfather and grandfather. Isn't the internet wonderful? I bet those letters took weeks to get to England in 1928 and 1933, and I have sent them back overnight!
Dave is making mutterings about 'reading in bed'. That's a euphmism for an early night, but I don't mind, I'm always ready for bed. Baking tins and casseroles tomorrow. Got to get as much done as I can before I am laid low.
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