I can't believe it is a month since I blogged. Partly this has been due to finally sending my laptop in for repair of an unreliable mains lead. I rarely use the battery, in fact I don't think it is much good. HP used to send me all sorts of warnings about faulty batteries, but they were vague about who had got them and all the click here buttons to find out were useless. So I use mains and keep an eye on the charging button at the bottom of the screen and give the lead a wiggle if it goes off. Joe was fairly convinced it was the connection inside the laptop that was damaged (by me tripping over the lead all the time) but the repairers said it was the lead itself and also that there was a lot of dust and rubbish making the fan work overtime. It's true, the fan was on most of the time, and I think the failure to successfully burn DVDs all the way through was due to over-heating, so that part is better after their work, although the mains connection is still intermittent.
I hate to say it, but I felt disabled without my laptop. Sitting in Dave's office catching up with e-mails is not the same at all. The really frustrating thing was that I had an e-mail from someone I met on the Christian writing week, and she keeps me in touch with the local group even though I haven't been able to make the meetings. She mentioned that she was thinking of signing up for a project called National Novel Writing Month, which occurs every November. It involves signing up with the intention of producing a first draft of a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. We both signed up, primarily for the discipline of writing every day. I am several thousand words behind schedule at present, with so much to do, mostly domestic trivia, but still important. If I had any intention of writing a best-seller I could justify treating it as a job, and disappearing into the annexe for 6 - 8 hours every day, but it isn't like that at all. I am incorporating recent experiences into a fictional novel, and because I am working in the first person even I can see that there are implications regarding the other characters and my relationships with them. Even so, it makes more sense to write about situations that I have first-hand experience of than having to do research on background that I know nothing about. My lead character is as fictional as I can make her. I have even made her experience of the chemo day-ward different from mine by letting her go on her own, and even make a relationship with a male patient. She is divorced, and her background bears no resemblance to mine in tems of events, and if Dave chooses to read any wishful thinking into that we have wasted 44 years.
Mary-Ann was there when I was trying to explain to Dot what I was doing, and her reaction to my lead character's situation was very negative, which tells me that quite enough of her life at the moment is centred on my cancer. That was discouraging, but then I thought she doesn't have to read it. I really am doing this for myself, as a challenge, and because I have always found it easiest to order my thoughts and understand where I am at when I write it down. I don't hold out much hope of acheiving the 50,000. I don't find complete drafts very easy, but keep going back read through and .make corrections.
Tomorrow is chemo 3, so today I have taken 60 steroid tablets and three piriton with some ranitidine to protect my stomach. After chemo day the routine is 4 steroid tablets a day for 3 days, and even that, with the second dose of 2 tablets at lunchtime, keeps me awake. This afternoon I slept for two hours and then didn't want to get up, under the influence of 2 piriton tablets, at breakfast and lunch. I had started to feel lively by tea-time, and recognised that this was the steroid kicking in rather later than the piriton, so we went off to cell-group reserving the final piriton until bed-time. Even I recognised that I was unusually talkative, enjoying the fact that my brain seemed to be making connections and producing the words in a way that has eluded me lately. I wonder how many much of what I said made sense to anyone else Dave was a bit fed up, because we didn't get away until 9.0. I was still buzzing when we got home, so I have cleaned my teeth, got into my nightie and dressing-gown, had a mug of camomile and settled with my lap-top until sleep intervenes.
Piriton is quite quick to act, so I am going to try to get a few words on my novel. If I am going to catch up by the mid-month I can see the weekend giving me typist's RSI. Anyway, here goes.
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