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You know those maths questions that start with
“A train leaves Pittsburgh at 12:30pm carrying 27 passengers, 5 cows, 3 circus elephants and a partridge in a pear tree ...” and finish with
“What colour was the driver’s uniform”?


As soon as I hear a maths question with the word ’train’, or indeed any vehicular transport, my eyes glaze over. I don’t remember being maths-dumb in high school. I grappled with logarithm tables like the rest of us. I worked out the value of “x”. It just seems that over the years, any facility I had with with numbers has dissipated. Vanished into the ether. *Poof*. Gone.



I’ve lost track of the number of times I have looked at the calendar and thought
“So this is Week 8!” and then thought
“IS it Week 8? Should I count from the beginning of Week 8? The end of Week 8? What is time anyway? Is it an artificial construct? Do we just move through a succession of ’nows’? WHY CAN’T I WORK OUT IF THIS IS WEEK 8?!?”

I even rang two people I worked with, gave them my starting date and asked them when I would finish. I got two different answers. Mind you, one of the people had just consumed three glasses of champagne, so they might have made an error of calculation.*

So if you’ve noticed numerous Week 8s, or indeed NO week 8s, now you know why. I really have no idea where I am on the space-time continuum. Or even what that is.

Let’s just say, for entertainment’s sake, that I have just ended Week 20. Or begun Week 20. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s getting close to the end.

I’m not silly enough to taunt the gods and wonder what it might be like to live without hepatitis C after these ’x’ number of weeks is up, but I do wonder what it will be like to live without the  onslaught of tablets I take each day. I don’t even register that they are affecting me any more, it’s just the way it is right now and that’s life.

I just know the end is getting closer. And I know that because I start my last bottle of pills next week. 

Ever onwards.

*If anyone wants to tell me what week I’m in, I took my first tablet on the morning of 24th March this year.