Cancer 172

I am continuously conscious of my limitations in life, my inability to do things I used to find easy, my slowness, my lack of energy, my failure to get up and do, how I look at a job that needs doing and don’t do it, how my lethargy ensures a lack of action. It is not just the physical work that needs doing, it is the mental work, in my case it is often writing, though it can even be a lack of motivation to read.

This does include what I mentioned just a short while ago, that I can’t walk as far as I could just a few months ago. It is an effort to get up and walk, and difficult once I am up to walk more than a few hundred metres. Everything begins to ache, to hurt. I become breathless – not in the normal sense (there is little normality any more), just a difficulty in breathing.

Even the little jobs at home don’t get done. I have been putting a door catch on my wardrobe for months. It is held shut by a scrap of paper, and the components to do the job are sitting on top of the wardrobe.

I can’t do anything outside. Partly because it is cold and I should not expose myself to the elements – good old dysfunctional immune system – and partly because I am not able to be bothered.

I think my body’s main effort now is in sitting and fighting the cancer. This means it is difficult to get any energy to do the everyday things in life. I just sit unless I make a real effort to do something. When I makethe effort I tire very quickly and need to sit down again.

It sounds pathetic – at least to me – and lazy, but honestly I am not being lazy, though I may look it. I sit in my comfy chair surrounded by necessary junk (books, computers, notebooks, pens, books, etc). If something falls on the floor it is an effort to pick it up. I have always been messy but this is silly. I am writing this in the middle of the night while changing my stoma. I can’t even be bothered to pick up my computer to write so I am doing this on my phone.

I fight it, naturally. I get up and do things. I go about my business and I think to people I am getting on with things. We go on holiday. We go out. We see people. I help make marmalade.

But underneath this exterior, this physical adonis, this mighty Hercules,  doing the slightest thing is often an effort.

I can’t be bothered to write any more.