Post 41: A mental analgesic.
Temp: Perfect 
Other items: Admin for her and me.
It’s complicated lying in bed with a hundred things on my mind.
My Darling is dozing beside me, and I couldn’t be happier that she had the weekend off work due to stress and anxiety—but knowing I’m the cause of that sickness leaves me cold.
There are a few work-related things I need to sort this week.
I’ve already applied for an extension to my sick note via the Anima web app—that needs to be sent to work, as per the usual regulations.
The welfare meeting, postponed from last week, is now due after my oncology appointment. Hopefully, by then, there’ll be a new medical plan in place.
I want to ask for a face-to-face meeting, to show the managers that I’m well.
But I’m not well.
I’m recovering.
———
My Darling has contacted her GP for a chat about her own stress and anxiety, which has led to her taking the last two weeks off work. But with the big meetings and even bigger decisions coming up this week, it’s clear we’re not yet at the apex of our anxiety.
We’ve talked about so many things, though much of it has been slotted in around other pressures.
The medical facts speak for themselves—and they’re alarming.
Being six weeks since the first chemo was never the plan.
But here we are.
To be positive often means looking the other way and ignoring the facts.
But that’s what we travellers do every day, just to get by.
Dwelling on the bad stuff is natural—but disabling.
I must be brave. Ignorant. Selfish. Positive.
So, I’ll put on the bedroom TV and drift off into a Korean Jekyll-and-Hyde fantasy. A colourful feast for the eyes and mind.
Just a distraction—but essential for my sanity.
Because I can lie here thinking myself into a mental tangle more complex than the chaotic strands of a large bowl of glass noodles.
⸻
Looking at my future with realistic eyes, I realise the strongest connection I now have—aside from My Darling, family and friends—is with the hospital. Especially since the clots.
I’ve turned into my late mum.
She loved her clinics and wards and I used to take her to them all.
I’m not saying I’ll ever adore the hospital like she did.
In fact, the Covid isolation was incredibly hard for her. I was the nominated carer, and we got through it without disaster.
But when Mum was finally admitted after a fall, she thrived on the extra human contact with the staff. She eventually became… instituted.
I’m not sure that was a good thing, but it was clearly what she wanted—and maybe deserved.
I’m not that person.
I dread any clinical sleepovers.
Not because they scare me—but because, in my heart of hearts, I don’t feel unwell.
I can’t get my head around bothering the experts. Wasting their time.
I suppose I’m a bit like Jekyll and Hyde.
One minute, I’m spiralling down the “Why me?” highway, and the next I’m strong, positive and dismissive of all my many illnesses.
But I am a Gemini—the twins—so it’s in my spiritual DNA, I guess.
Yin and yang?
No way!
More like Laurel and Hardy :-)
⸻
If My darling and I lived in a fictional world, I’d love to be beamed aboard the USS Enterprise for a trip around the solar system—a once-in-a-lifetime cruise.
We could pop down to the sick bay and have Leonard H. McCoy (aka Bones) wave his dermal regenerator over me and give me back my feet.
I say feet because wherever they go, I go too. It’s them that I desperately want back.
Then we could look forward to celebrating our golden anniversary in 15 years’ time—with the grandchildren we might meet along the way.
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Looking back to my formative years, watching TV and dreaming of space and adventure, it saddens me that so little of what “Tomorrow’s World” promised actually came to pass.
Worse still, today’s world doesn’t even dream of tomorrow.
Where are the flying cars?
The cities on the Moon or underwater?
Less work, more free time?
ESP?
Breathing life into dinosaurs?
A Sunday roast in pill form?
Where have all the creative dreamers gone?
I wonder where the USS Enterprise is now and what danger lurks around every corner on the next planet they’ve chosen to investigate?
Where did all the explorers go?
In my lifetime, did we evolve without the urge to strike out on new paths—to boldly go where no one has gone before?
Perhaps it’s just another of my distractions.
A mental analgesic.
But at least, the hundred things on my mind are gone—replaced by childhood memories of black-and-white adventure stories, from the days when the TV channels, were only three.
One day closer to the answers.
I’m still standing.
And My Darling’s always on my mind (Elvis, Willy, Pet shop boys & 297 others 1972-present day).
