I am experimenting with writing as if i were Mahler writing the 10th symphony while suffering from throat cancer or Mozart dictating the Requiem to Salieri on his death bed and discovering i am not up to it. Not a hero just a big baby. So here goes with a blubbly moan

I was fine yesterday first thing. We had agreed with the cancer team that I would have a Covid jab in the morning as they have never troubled me greatly. This was followed by an afternoon with the obsessively punctilious Rob showing me how to inject myself in the belly for the second time with a (new to me) chemo treatment. I have one more exam before hopefully being able to do it myself avoiding two extra trips to the hospital per week. Things have tightened up loads since I first did the injecting 10 years ago, it was all much more slapdash. I remember feeling very unprepared, this time i am too prepared and it makes me nervous and less efficient. Eg. Now if I spill any of the drug I have to put on full protective gear and a mask and use a special kit to clean it up. Its like a nuclear incident. I had never really taken on board that all the drugs can induce cancer as well as cure or in my case slow it down. Anyway Rob went through it, I did all right according to Rob, probably about a B- and I was sent home feeling fine. By the evening one or other of the drugs started to get grumpy and I started to get proper poorly. Sweating like I have never ever sweated or not since hooping cough in 1960, hot and cold, shakes, diarreoa, zero apetite, muscle ache (all pretty standard stuff for the covid Jab) but with the other stuff it’s been like a bulldozer bucket load of symptoms all vying for presidence. I also managed to forget my opiate which started to give me withdrawal (probably imagined) and I wanted my mummy and felt teary. St Maria is an absolute absolute complete total Saint and my gentle but unstoppable collapse over the  12 hours was scrupiolulsly monitored by her until about 10 minutes ago when I started this and I think I am getting better. So lets do a fact check – actually it hasn’t been as bad as many people experience even with just the covid jab – I am not in screaming in pain at all – I just feel ill – like pretty bad flu. I have medication to do everything but while they don’t actually conflict to take an anti diarreoa with anti constipation cant be easy for your system to deal with. So I think it throws up its hands from time to time and just panics and so do i. I feel like my body is running like an overwound clock and any minute a load of parts will go flying round the room embedding themselves in all the soft surfaces.

Its getting more and more likely that I will cancel the NAC trip. It would be absolute torture in this state and of little value but I won’t decide till Monday.

Last week I did nothing much creative (no 10th symphony for me)  just keeping up my German practice in tiny doses. I bought a beautiful second hand scholarly edition of Grimm fully annotated but I still think G’s distillation of Grimm is perfect. Better than the Harvard professor that wrote the book and a load better than ASByatt who provided a much too clever dick forward.  G is referring to ‘Hans my Hedgehog’ one of the wierder ones.

‘I really like the specificity of the unlikely details and the matter-of-factness with which they are presented. The morality of the story seems to me secondary to the more fundamental Grimm worldview, which is that people are arbitrary in their wants and actions, that injustice and danger are waiting everywhere to punish you for daring to be alive, and that to succeed or even survive you need to be both pretty wily and, even better, lucky.’

 Coincidentally H has been corresponding with me about my current state, always a delight and always helpful and I was looking for a response to her complaint about injustice – ‘its not fair’ which she freely admitted was unhelpful. Setting aside helpful or not it caused me to think about fairness and I realised that admidst so many other complaints about my circumstances this is one I don’t have in my grump arsenal. Unfairness can only occur against a moral backdrop that is shared by a community. My community, ie the one I subscribe to in my head has no moral backdrop and is pretty much perfectly summed up by Grimm according to Georges analysis. So no wonder I am so attrated to those stories not just stylistically but also philosophically. Mind you big bad mark for some gross antisemitism and christian cobblers in some of the stories. Oh btw – I have abandoned reading them in German and gone back to ‘crimis’ – it was too exhausting figuring a translation for hedgehog dung.

So i sent down an order for boiled egg and soldiers via alexa so things are definitely on the up. Unfortunately I have still to take a bunch of nasty stuff now to accompany my boiled egg so I am not looking forward to the outcome. Nourishment I am told is important along with hydration. The advice is to drink loads and eat whatever you fancy whenever you fancy.

I must admit this seems to have been a very worthwhile experiment. I feel physically and mentally a lot better. No requiem dictating yet and roll on another 11 years if I can just learn to endure feeling a bit ill most of the time.

Thanks for reading xx

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