Thursday 12 February 2026: Freedom!

Another lazy start to the day yesterday as I headed off for my last (hopefully) appointment for the light therapy treatment. The dogs hadn’t kept us awake half the night, so we were feeling quite relaxed.

When we got to the hospital, it was rammed. It really was. The worst we’ve seen it over the past 3 months. A train of cars was just circling around the car park, coming out to go back in again. After about 6 circuits, the poet gave up and just waited close to the exit, so he wasn’t far when I called him.

Inside the building, the corridors were 4 and 5 thick with people milling around. There must have been two dozen waiting at pharmacy. I arrived at the right department about 2 minutes late for the appointment, but she took me straight in, confirmed it was my last appointment, assessed my skin, and said she’d now refer me back to the doctor, but it could be a few months…

She didn’t offer me an extension and I didn’t ask. 

Hurrah! I’m free! We’re free!

I know it’s not chemotherapy or radiotherapy or kidney dialysis or anything like that, but it’s still a chunk out of my week. It still takes an entire morning (or afternoon for the pm appointments) 3 times a week. I still have to put outside clothes on, get there, take the outside clothes off, get in, get out, put outside clothes on again, get home, and get changed again. And we’re reliant on traffic and how far behind the department is running when I get there.

And it’s been going on for 12 weeks. Thirty sessions, all but 3 of them for 3 days per week. Three months of upheaval.

We *think* my skin is much better for it, though. The itching has all but stopped. The spots are now just freckles. They don’t bleed. They don’t spread. My skin is smooth. And I have ever such a light tan. Fingers crossed it’s enough to stop it all flaring up again. 

We got home expecting the usual puppy carnage, but we weren’t gone as long as we usually are and only the spaniel was waiting at the glass door watching for us. Who knows what the puppy was doing? Probably sitting on the back of the settee in the conservatory watching the birds in the garden. 

The poet didn’t have time to stop, he just checked the (lack of) carnage with me and then continued on to an appointment at work. I did the dog poo patrol in the garden, played with them until they were both tired (with my hood up, even though it’s very cloudy still) (not raining, but very cloudy and a bit foggy this morning), then fed the birds. By the time I came back in it was time for my midday breakfast and I started today’s blog post while I had that. 

An email came in from the Kickstarter I’ve backed, saying they’ve hit all stretch goals, and when I looked there were 201 backers (now 265!). I wished a couple of friends a happy birthday, one of them from us both. And I saw that we have a snow warning for today and tomorrow…all the way from the top of Scotland to just the edge of Nottingham. That means us, if they’re right. And we’re on high ground…I bet it’s just a bit of ice.

I completed an entire pop-up workshop, this one the Born on Page One Problem. But because it was a pop-up, there were 11 videos instead of the usual 5 or 6 daily videos and that took me over into the next pomodoro. 

The assignment for this workshop is a short story, 3,000 to 6,000 words, which isn’t something I can rattle off in an hour or so. So I made a note of the requirements and set it to percolate against an existing idea. 

There’s no due date for the pop-up workshop assignments. We can just do them in our own time and send them in. If they like the look of it, one of them might read it. But there’s no guarantee. Hence, I’ll peg it against an existing idea with an existing market way into the future and give it a dry run by sending it in as an assignment.

The pomodoro the workshop ran over into was the Patreon and Medium pomodoro. At the moment, that’s still date work. It’s too big a job to do in one go, so I do a bit of it every day until I have a full list of ideas and prompts. I did another week of dates and now only have one more week to go for this big, time-consuming part of the task. 

I’ve decided to do the articles for this in threes, ultimately. What to be thinking now, what to be writing now, and what to be sending now. I should really add in what to be querying now too, but that will add a month on to the overall time constraint of the articles’ content. 

Because we technically started in January this time out, I only did July ideas for January thinking last month. This month I’ll do August ideas for February thinking, and July ideas for February writing. Next month it’ll be September ideas for March thinking, August ideas for March writing, and July ideas for March sending out. 

If I do add in the querying part, it would go between the thinking and the writing. So I may do a fiction special first, which can be sent out on spec more successfully than non-fiction can be.

While I was doing this I realised I wasn’t keeping track of what I was publishing where, online. What I needed was some kind of social media content calendar, but one I’d prefer to include dates. 

And then I fell down a rabbit hole looking for just that. I didn’t do my client edit, and I didn’t finish today’s blog – I had to come back to that this afternoon when I remembered I hadn’t posted it!

This post appears on Words Worth Writing, Medium and Patreon.