28th July

Today is a day to treasure; a final day of freedom; the last few precious hours before my next chemo treatment tomorrow.

A chemotherapy regime is a relentless series of steep downs and not very big ups; a really rubbish rollercoaster ride in the Cancerland theme park. As soon as you are feeling better from one treatment, and the horror of it is fading in your memory, the next one rears its ugly head and knocks you flat again. It is enough to test the mettle of any canceree.

There is a temptation to pack as much as I can into the run-up to chemo, to make the most of my time before the next soul-sapping onslaught. Many of the nasty side effects have abated over the last week or so, and my energy level is about as high as it gets in my current cancerous state of health. However, I have learned the hard way that doing too much is far from wise. What would have been a perfectly normal day’s activities for my ‘old self’ has proven far too much for the new me, and renders me exhausted the following day.

I will need to call on my fuel reserves to cope with spending the day at the hospital tomorrow,  so I paced myself today. A little reading, a little writing, a short, slow walk with our dog over the fields surrounding us, and that was sufficient.

My husband and I are lucky enough to live in a lovely part of the country, on the Essex/Suffolk border. We have a tiny cottage, but it has big skies and beautiful views all around. Even when I am not well enough to get out and about, I can still relish the rural idyll from my bedroom balcony, in the company of a cup of coffee and a good book.