Starting Again

2026 June 18th

I’ve managed to go six weeks without adding anything to this blog. Looking back at what I posted in May, you can probably see why. I was having trouble at work, I was at the tail end of a pretty awful period of ill health, and all of that was getting very on top of me. That didn’t suddenly fix itself, but I have emerged, after a fashion. The chest infection, after two batches of antibiotics, a false start, and a lot of recovery time is a bad memory. The work problems haven’t gone away, but they’re well on the way to a solution, and I seem to be vaguely on top of life again. There’s a big personal project come to fruition as well, in what passed for spare time - I’ll talk about that soon, but not today.

Is this about cancer? Well partly. I am certain that my immune system is still badly compromised by the aftermath of chemotherapy, which finished about fifteen months ago, and speaking with my oncologist he agreed that the effects of that can last well beyond a year. Also it’s well documented, and definitely my lived experience, that androgen deprivation therapy (ADT, a.k.a. hormone therapy) does your emotional balance and control no favours at-all. So I’m afraid that my emotional response to illness and stress, and especially when I’m not able to exercise is not what it was two years ago. Exercise is my main mechanism for managing my mental health, and the seven weeks that I couldn’t exercise wreaked havoc with mine.

The good news is that I was well enough to start exercising again early April, although it’s been an incredibly slow build-up and I’m still not up to doing as much as I could in January. I have just, this week, managed to hit my previous target of three thousand calories of exercise in a week, and that feels absolutely amazing. Maybe soon I’ll be able to run more than about 3½ miles at a go as well, and if I can keep it up I’ll get rid of some of the excess fat I’ve built up this year, on top of the excess fat I built up last year! Let’s not share the numbers on that.

When am I going to get to the point? Well the point is that so much of going through a long term experience like cancer treatment is about starting over again. And again. And again. I talked about this a few times last year, but I think it’s becoming even more stark to me this year. As you go through this godawful journey, over and over again, you’ll hit potholes in the road. Chemo was a big pothole, radiotherapy another big one, the pneumonia that I had in February and March was an absolutely huge hole in the road. And every time you come back out of a pothole, you have two choices. The first choice is to dust yourself off, accept that you are at the bottom of the hill again and start that draining push to rebuild your health, your energy, and your emotional stability. The second choice is to finally say “fuck it”, and stop trying.

Clearly, the first of those two should always be the right choice. But from where I’m sat it gets tougher every time. I go back to a poorer state of fitness than last time, I hit a new emotional low, I take longer to get back to where I was before. This is causing me to re-assess how I deal with this, and I’m sure this must have happened to many thousands of people like me who thought they were superhuman, or at the very least able to keep going and do their jobs and hobbies. It is still massively baked into me that I don’t take sick leave, I stand up to my commitments to work, to my friends, and to my discretionary activities.

I’m clearly wrong aren’t I. I need to find the mechanisms to help everybody else to help me. To enable other people to step in and fill the Guy shaped gap when I am getting over the most recent shock to my system and frankly just need to sit in the garden, or go walk and eventually run in the woods, to give my mind, body and soul a chance to rebuild themselves.

But if only it was that easy. I lose track of the number of people who have said some variation upon “Guy, it’s really important that you reduce your workload and take it easy, but of course, my project is the most important thing and that’s the one you won’t be compromising on, will you.” I don’t think that people even realise they’re doing that - but they are. Playing fair, before I became a cancer patient myself, did I really recognise when other people were going through something similar? No, I probably didn’t, and that’s not to my credit.

And most of us have personal projects as well that matter to us emotionally: whether that’s writing a book, building a kit car, redecorating a bedroom, or just getting to the next level in a computer game. Life’s not just about existing, ESPECIALLY when you’ve been badly ill. Those personal projects are massively psychologically important. So, for many of us, is simply being useful.

And here’s a question. When you’re not up to doing something, and your colleagues don’t have the capacity to do it, so it either doesn’t get done, or gets done badly - just whose fault or liability is that? Answers on a postcard please!

Do I, dear reader, have a solution to all this? Nope, I really don’t. I think that anybody in long term medical treatment, or with a long term medical condition probably lives this delicate and painful balancing act. I’ve certainly seen it in people I cared about in the past, just never really believed that I’d ever have to live it myself.

I can only say that if you are living this, like me - or you have somebody in your personal or professional life, please try and deal with this consciously. Know that you are going to hit another health pothole sooner or later, and when you do, find ways to recover manageably. That will be frustrating, difficult, and as other people around you think that you should be doing more than you are, or handle things better, it will bring you into conflict with them. Which brings me back to those work problems again!

Until next time, look after yourselves.