46. New Year Resolutions

Mile 43 – Nice and flat, although rather muddy.

Some people might start running as a New Year’s resolution. For others returning to training and ‘dry January’ seem to be common routines this time of year.  It is probably a good time to at least plan the big races for the year.

As for exercise, I feel I have been rather lax this week. I have completed week two of Couch to 5K and started week three but other than that have only managed one static bike session and two physio exercise sessions. I was put off by Christmas and a slight twinge in my right knee but am confident that it will behave as it usually has in the past and recover after a few days’ rest. Of course, it might have been caused by the extra weight I have put on recently.

I am starting to think about sporting events in which I might take part, although I haven’t booked places yet as even a 5K parkrun seems daunting at the moment. Perhaps I’ll give the Brighton Marathon 10K a go in April – that seems a long way off – and the Myeloma UK London to Paris bike ride is high up in my list of targets.

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This week saw us happily pass 100 days since the Stem Cell Transplant, the end of isolation. We visited UCLH for (hopefully) the last time to see my consultant and say thanks and goodbye. I told him about my levels of activity and he agreed I was doing well. I mentioned the numb toes and he expected that to improve gradually.

Regarding de-isolating, the way he put it was that my level of immunity is now 95% that of a normal person and I’m very unlikely to be hospitalised if I catch COVID or flu, whereas I might well have been just a couple of months ago. I can go to restaurants and eat indoors now, which was just as well because we had lunch at Pizza Express on the way there, and instead of just passing by the British Library, we went indoors and looked at their ‘Treasures’ exhibition (although still wearing a mask).

I had my flu jab on day 99 and was offered a Shingles jab too, but said I would check with the consultant first. He advised that it would not be very effective just now, so I’ll arrange to have that in three months. He reminded me too that I should have the childhood jabs a year after the SCT (so in September) but, although they recommend this, there is apparently little evidence that it does much good as it is very rare to catch any of those illnesses anyway – it is just something they have always included in the treatment plan. 

We are allowed to take holidays now, certainly in the UK and in Europe, but he urged caution if we were thinking of going to any countries where there might be a malaria risk.

He sent me for one more blood test at the end of the day just to give a nurse a chance to see my juicy veins once more. The results came through showing creatinine as the only value out of range, so I need to drink more water to protect my kidneys. My haemoglobin, platelets and neutrophils have all recovered to normal levels after being wiped out by the Melphalan high dose chemotherapy.

The visit to the hospital felt very different to our first trip, back in July. Everything now seems so familiar: we recognised the staff in the apheresis room where I had my stem cells collected, and the waiting room receptionist on the fourth floor. We know which floor to go to and even which buttons don’t always work in the lift.

With the afternoon free, we walked around the now familiar streets near Tottenham Court Road, through Fitzrovia, and on to Oxford Street for a quick look at the sales. Having spent so much of the summer there, we recognised a number of restaurants where we had eaten outside, now feeling much more like locals, even on the train home.

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On Christmas Day, however, we were still in isolation, so it was very quiet and peaceful, with no travelling. It was quite nice in its way. Watch out for me playing the lowered immunity card in future. 

We delayed the celebration until my day SCT +101 when we met up for dinner with the family at the Oak Barn restaurant. I couldn’t help feeling guilty at first, that I was doing something I shouldn’t, but it was lovely to be able to go indoors without a mask and to hug people again. I was remiss in not taking a picture of us all digging into our meals.

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On Saturday I volunteered to be a timekeeper at parkrun and saw another bunch of friends. I must pick a different role in future as I always seem to double click a runner crossing the finish line. Thank goodness I was paired with someone competent, so they didn’t have to rely just on my set of results.

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This week’s photography project has concerned panel competitions. These involve a set of three to six pictures which are related and consideration must be given to the way in which they are laid out. There are two competitions: one for prints and one for digital images and I have decided to enter both. To produce images with matching sizes involves an awful lot of calculation, making sure the rough crops that I started with can be adjusted to a precise aspect ratio (i.e. width/height).

As for printing, the output from our little A4 printer seemed too small for the 40 x 50cm regulation mounting boards. Luckily my sister Liz, and partner Alan, had bought an A3 printer, so I went around there to set it up on her computer in return for a few prints. It should have been easy enough, just loading a printer driver, but as with all these things it took two days. I know there are hundreds of different types of photographic paper to choose from – varieties of gloss, matt and metallic – but luckily the local camera store only had one packet of A3 left, so no difficult choices in that respect. I‘ll let you know how it goes when I tackle the mounting boards and try to cut the windows in them for the pictures. 

Happy New Year, thanks for reading and take care.