Day 5 - Staying with today and loving Autumn Days

Poetry Prompt: a 31 day poem writing challenge. This has given me the impetus to write the story of my dance with renal cell carcinoma. It contains snapshots of life lived on death row which I hope will give insight into how the dying cope with daily chemotherapy and the knowledge that death is on its way. This follows the poem and reading one or both is optional. 

I welcome questions and comments although they will be removed if they demonstrate an unkind disposition. 

Here's your challenge (if you chose to accept it): Write a poem influenced by your feelings about autumn. Do you see autumn as a beginning or the beginning of the end?  Chose at least three from this list of words below.

The words: 

                              chill

                              renewal

                              death

                              rebirth

                              harvest

                              melancholy

                              ageing

                              change

I love this Autumn of my life.

Its vibrant blaze of colours.

The melancholy drift of memories

Of a long and beautiful summer

Like a gentle, welcome haunting. 

I love the chill of the morning 

The mists that linger like my mind,

Soft clouded, a little out of focus, 

As I rise once more renewed

By the restoring gift of sleep.

I love the sense of such an ageing,

Falling away in the drift of leaves,

Transmuting the world and me

In the alchemy of dying and death

Welcoming whatever may be. 

I plant for Spring and hope. 

A daily snapshot of life with cancer

The nausea faded out as the evening turned into night so I felt much more comfortable, so comfortable and so tired that I slept through uninterrupted until nearly 10am which is very unusual. My poor husband pops in from time to time to make sure I am still breathing and missed out on his morning walk in the woods as he will not leave me until he makes sure I am up and well enough to fast dial if I need him. I always tell him that if I need him that urgently he is second on the list, emergency services will be first. We have had a few alarms in the last three years, two of which involved ambulances and fast trips to hospital so we have developed a black humour around it and about most other issues related to cancer. 

All was well until around 11 am when the curse of the bowels struck and I spent rather too long in the smallest room. At least there was no pain and just a little nausea. Sometimes there are horrendous stomach cramps which make me feel very sick so I counted myself lucky and took my loperamide starter dose. I had a gentle hour reading the latest DI Banks novel, murder most foul in the beauty of rural Yorkshire. Then came the next bout followed by the next dose of loperamide. I know that most of us experience this form time to time but when it happens almost every day, it gets a wee bit tiresome. It also causes dehydration and that is especially dangerous when you have cancer. 

The sun shone brightly in between very heavy rainfall so I was tempted out for a walk around the neighbourhood, We live in a long crescent moving gently up a hill and as we live at the bottom of the hill, I have a lovely circular walk which takes around 25 minutes. I can make quite a bit of speed up the hill, pushing my supportive rollator . This is a support frame with wheels and a little seat for when I tire which prevents me crashing to the ground due to balance issues. When I started I could only manage a half of the route and had to turn back when it became too much for my weakened body. Now, most days, I can manage the full round and at a much faster pace. I must have looked like a snail at the beginning and had to stop frequently. Now recently I have been managing two and sometimes three rounds a day depending on how fatigued I am or just how nauseous. This really makes me feel good and I am convinced it helps the fight again the cancer, It certainly helps blow the cobwebs away and brings me energy. 

I had a brief call from my GP who gave me the results of my fortnightly blood tests. These are critical because the cancer drug I take daily can lead to life threatening side effect which have to be dealt with quickly. My blood pressure had shot up last time the district nurses called to check it and to take my bloods. Fortunately, it has fallen again and it looks as though I will avoid having to take a third blood pressure drug. My other results were excellent and even my thyroid which requires medication had improved. Good results. Next visit from Dracula is in around two weeks in time for my four weekly oncology clinic. 

Every afternoon we Skype with our son who is in Taiwan teaching for a year. We use it as a debrief for his day at school and do our best to be an antidote to his very self critical mind. We offer him a little wisdom from our life experience or a little laughter. He is our heart walking out in the world and we are prouder of who he has become than of anything else we have done in our lives. He had a very successful day so we were very happy for him. 

Now it is getting late and I must take my second daily dose of axitinib and set it loose to shrink that liver tumour. I swallow them with my mind visualising them surrounding the tumour and any others that might be thinking of popping up, causing them to self destruct until they are swept harmlessly out of my body. 

I will continue the story of how this all began tomorrow.