An Anniversary

and March trees

Today, 28th of March 2026, is the first anniversary of the operation that saved Dónall’s life. We were in Southampton, 50 miles from home, after disembarking from a cruise ship on February 28th, Dónall by ambulance to an Intensive Care ward in Southampton University Hospital and me to take our luggage home and then to return to book a room in a boarding house nearby.

What had appeared to be a treatable stomach ulcer had turned out to be a voracious duodenal tumour that suddenly flared, halfway through our holiday, to become a killer condition. I was terrified that I would lose Dónall, and spent five and a half weeks at his bedside every day, sitting there for as many hours as the nurses would allow me. It took four weeks for him to gain enough strength for the surgeon to agree to operate on the tumour.

Heavily sedated, but still in a lot of pain, Dónall was aware of little during that month. We were both aware, after the cancer was diagnosed at the end of his first week in the Intensive Care ward, that the longer the operation was delayed, the more serious the cancer would become, and Dónall was determined to gain the weight and strength to convince the surgeon that he was fit enough for the Whipple procedure that he needed. As luck would have it, he was a patient in the best hospital in the UK for that operation: they perform 100 Whipple operations every year. And he achieved the level of fitness that convinced the surgeon to operate on the 28th of March.

So exactly twelve months ago I was keeping as calm as I could, waiting in the little boarding house in Shirley, near the hospital. Malgorzata, my landlady, knew what we were going through, and gave me all the robust support that her tough life as a Polish immigrant enabled her to give. The memory of her kindness and good humour will stay with me for ever.

I also survived this traumatic time through the kindness and support of the readers of this substack, which I had opened in November 2024, little knowing then that three months later it would become my therapeutic means of recording and trying to make sense of everything that was happening to us.

And I must mention Judith, who gave us tremendous support through all of our time in Southampton last year. Her Welsh cakes were wonderful but they were the least of it—my morning visits to her helped me to keep my cool through it all.

In the months after we returned home (with Dónall still almost too weak to stand and in great pain despite strong medication), Dónall battled through every twist and turn in his recovery. Told by the oncologist in Guildford that he was too debilitated to be allowed a course of chemo, he was determined to get fit enough and he began walking about three miles every day, downhill and uphill.

He began chemo in mid-June and competed the course on my birthday in late November. The next day he was in the Royal Surrey A & E with what turned out to be Bell’s Palsy. He had to take a crushing dose of steroids and recovered relatively quickly but it was a miserable time for him, involving CT scans and visits to the ENT department as an outpatient.

Dónall has met all these challenges with his usual strength and has never lost the sense of humour and the courage that sees him through every setback. I knew he was going to recover when he wrote this poem, soon after being moved to a general ward from the Intensive Care Ward in Southampton Hospital. It’s called ‘The Penis Whisperer’.

On April 8th this year, which by coincidence is the first anniversary of our return home from Southampton last year, Dónall has an appointment with the oncologist at the Royal Surrey Hospital. We’re hoping to be told that the chemo has been effective, following three CT scans since last August.

Dónall is still recovering from the Whipple operation, and we’re still fine-tuning our management of the diabetes-3 condition that he’s been left with. He feels debilitated and weak much of the time and in February suffered from a sickness bug that was quite frightening. He still gasps if the car jolts over a pothole in the road, because his redesigned digestive system is still very tender.

But life is resuming normality. The video above was shot at Leith Place near Dorking in early February and we’re attending local poetry meetings—the Wey Poets group, Adam Gary’s weekly Library Hub in Guildford, and monthly poetry open mic evenings at the excellent independent bookshop, Paper Moon, in Guildford. We’ll also be joining our friends in Farnham to read poems together again, now that the evenings are getting lighter—the clocks change to British Summer Time tonight.

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This March I’ve been drawing, too.

Winter Trees in March 2026

My drawings in March this year have been limited in subject matter: I stand at my easel at home and draw the trees I can see from that standpoint, following up the two paintings I finished in February. The more I explore their intricate silhouettes, the more I enjoy the light that the low winter sun casts over these trees, especially on fine early mornings recently. They’re sycamore trees — not my favourite species (I spend all year weeding out their seedlings from our little garden) but I’ve grown to admire their twisty trunks and energetic thrust upwards and outwards, and the mosaic of sky in the interstices of their branches. The first image here is an impasto oil painting and the rest are drawings in charcoal and soft pastel.