One last reprieve... again

We got up early this morning and headed back into the hospital, where mum dropped me off before heading off to work. I had my blood taken and settled in for the day, so I was quite surprised when the doctor popped around at eleven to announce that my platelet count was still too low for them to begin the next phase; they really want to see those at seventy-five billion per litre before they start me on the new poisons. I'm told I shouldn't worry that things are getting a bit behind schedule; my platelets should just jump up all at once, after the marrow-suppressive effect of phase one wears off. Anyway, it looked like I was getting home again for another day on the outside. I stayed for lunch (moong bean curry, which I had with some crisps) and mum picked me up after her half-day at work.

Once I got home, I discovered that my Leica had finally arrived from Oxfordshire. I lost no time unpacking this and loading a roll of Tri-X 400, and wasted a handful of frames just snapping stuff to familiarise myself with the controls. Mum and I took a little walk in the park at about three o'clock, and I took another couple of shots in the nice light. I find I'm getting quite a lot of my old strength back, now that I'm getting all of this exercise walking up and down stairs and so on; hopefully I'll get enough of these days out this phase that I can get back to something like my old self. Mum went out to buy some shopping, afterwards, and I pottered around the garden for a bit taking pictures of the bare branches; eventually the light failed entirely, and I gave up and went back inside.

Despite my early morning and considerable exertions, I found myself to be remarkably awake and alert during basically all of the day; I suppose this might be due to sleeping better on my tailing-off dosage of steroids. Anyway, I tried and failed to take a nap at about four; instead, I spent a while on my Grand MP3 Collection Organisation project. It won't be long now before I can set iTunes on random and never have to skip a single song. I broke off this effort for dinner, which was a delicious home-made lentil soup with rolls and (for some reason) potato scones. I managed to get a couple of hopefully quite nice photos of everyone at the dinner table; it'll be interesting to see those ones, at least, from this test roll. After dinner, I grabbed a bottle of beer and we all relaxed in front of the fire for a while.

The rest of the day passed mostly uneventfully. Dad was unreachable on his mobile, so mum had to drive off to the hospital to collect my bedtime medicines; I've been started on a new antifungal, Posaconazole, but the rest is just the same old. He got in later on and popped up for a minute before going to his bed; the exam he was taking today seems to have gone okay. I sorted out my drugs, after he'd gone, and settled down to write this up. I still don't feel particularly tired, but I'm going to try to get to sleep anyway; very early morning, tomorrow.