Bad nights

I am working on a small painting called “Insomnia,” showing my arm reaching out in the dark for the buttons on my digital radio, as it does several times a night. It contains my glass of water and my tissue, essential items on the long journey into night. It sums up a large part of my life at the moment, I am sad to say. Voices from the ether broken up by short bouts of sleep.

Evenings and the early hours are difficult. It’s then that I start to feel odd symptoms, and at the moment I wonder if the cancer has come back (as predicted so strongly by doctors) but I can’t tell because symptoms are hidden behind these problems I’m having with the botched hernia op.

I am still bleeding and praying, literally, that the anti-biotics will work so I don’t have to go under the knife again. It is a real game of chance. I resent that my life has gone like this, so full of darkness and shadows.

There is a special problem for a single, childless person who gets a diagnosis of cancer because there is not enough to distract them and turn them back towards LIFE.

I meet other people with cancer, I hear stories all the time, my life is full of it, but if I had children their needs would come first and I would be preoccupied with getting them ready to face the world, to use their talents. It would be the start of their lives with everything ahead.

The nearest I got to parenthood was writing about Dada. I invested in myself, maybe it was a poor investment.