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Into Lister hospital first thing to get my blood tests done. One of the many advantages of having had cancer is that the NHS want to see you every few months to check you’re OK. So I get a little check up four times a year to make sure nothing bad is going on. The appointment is a couple of weeks away, but they need to look inside my blood so they took some of it out.
On past visits I have waited 30 or more minutes in a long queue to get this done, but today I turned up just after 9am and there were only three or four people in the room and I was seen before I could even get my phone out of my pocket.
More remarkably still I was done and out of the hospital before I could even get charged for parking. You get the first 20 minutes for free (and then it leaps to £3.30 for the first hour), so this incredible efficiency had saved me the price of a cup of coffee. I decided to donate it back to the hospital by way of
my just giving page. I doubt the hospital gets much, if any of the parking fee so it was cool to give them the whole lot.
I was a bit thrown to be home only about 50 minutes after I’d left. I got on with researching tomorrow’s RHLSTP guests and rewatching a few episodes of Garth Marenghi, which is even funnier than I remember it being. I also managed to read all of Jay Rayner’s latest book. It’s quite short, but that’s not a bad thing. As much as I like food, Jay's passion and thought about the subject shows I don't properly love it. He's right to say that food is at the heart of everything. He originally thought being a food critic wasn't proper journalism, but this is a really entertaining and sometimes poignant book.
And this evening my wife and I had the novelty of a date, heading to the cinema to see Black Widow, which I enjoyed more than I thought I would. It was just cool to have the feeling that things might be returning to normal. They even had pick n mix back on sale. Though I didn’t buy (or steal) any. We’d made some sandwiches at home to eat during the adverts, so it was dinner and a movie and the dinner cost hardly anything (both in money and in calories). Somehow it felt better than being in a restaurant. My wife may not agree.
The cinema was quite empty though - not a bad thing for us not catching Covid, but not so great for the business. I still felt hope that things might be returning to normal. Tomorrow I do my first non-socially distanced gigs in over 17 months (though we're in a tent so maybe that counts) and sales are good. I don't know if my immune system has recovered fully from the chemo yet (maybe I will find out when the blood tests come in) - It's nearly five months now and I've only been ill once, with a bug I picked up from the kids (it wasn't Covid, we did tests) but my wife was hit harder by it than I was. I've been double jabbed, of course, but I'd still like to avoid getting the Rona if I can. I'm weird like that.
