Howdy all. It feels like a long time since I last posted… Mainly because it has been a long time. I’m on a quietish train to London, the weather is cold but sunny, and I now have less than ten weeks to the due date, and less than four until my next set of bloods.

The time between now and my last tests seem to have flickered past me, quicksilver fast. I can’t believe its going to be March next week, and yet that is always the way years work now. I guess because I have a couple of strong events coming up it puts in perspective the lapse of time.

Otherwise the days and weeks and months and years tend to blur into one heavy mass of time, able to be looked back on, quantified, but not really fully remembered.

I also find it strange to think of my last self. It always seems like they didn’t actually exist and I am the real me, always have been. That’s not the truth though. Before diagnosis I was a different person to the one I am now. In my twenties I was different, and as a teenager I was pretty scummy and  different (long hair anyone). The me’s of the past had their own thoughts, feelings, reasons for any action, and I can no more access them (on a general basis) than I can anyone else’s around me.

All decisions in the past would have been made by someone who isn’t quite me. Sometimes, with big watersheds like getting diagonosed with cancer, or become a parent, it’s obvious there has been a big change in behaviour (sometimes not) even so you are still largely the same person, just not quite the same.

It’s a weird thing trying to work out what I was like before diagnosis. Happier? Probably not. Less concerned with my health? Definitely.

When you are free and healthy (or maybe just don’t know you are Ill) you don’t really think about mortality, or time without you in it. We all kind of feel like we have forever to decide things, and time as a limited concept is not really something we consider.

After, you still think about the things that will occur in the future, but your mind immediately jumps in with a, if you’re around, or if you are well. before diagnosis I was a different person, I thought about things with no definite window, and would think about all I could achieve in my life.

Now I am concious that this isn’t forever, and although I don’t have a definite window (unlike other poor sods) I try and think about doing more.

Ironically this doesn’t mean I actually do more than before, I just feel more guilty when there is something I mean to do but don’t get round to it. Hohum.

Even so I do count myself (and all my other selves through the years) as lucky with how things have turned out. I know I owe a lot of it to the people around me, the way they shaped me, and continue to shape me day by day, as I change to another version of me, inperceptably and inevitably.

Maybe the next version of me will be Better, maybe worse (note there are probably no actual definitions of better when it comes to people, just individual moral constructs) but I do hope they continue to enjoy life, as I try to. Ultimately I’m going to be a father and also experience the uncertainties that blood tests always bring, and who knows how that will change me.

Just bear in mind, day to day, that you only really have the now. As even though most of you will leave for years to come, it won’t be the same you. And they won’t be able to access everything you can now, taste, smell, the world, in the same way you can’t do the same with the yous of the past.

Meanwhile I’ll try and stop being philosophical. I’ll use the past mes money to buy the current me a doughnut. The future me can excercise it off later. 🙂