DVT 165

Today has been long and a bit of a curates egg. It started with my kidney blood test results popping up on Patient View. It was overall good news. My potassium spike has dropped back into the normal range, hurray. Although my eGFR (roughly the percentage efficiency of the kidneys) is outside the normal range of 60+ it has gone up to 54, which is not bad for a guy that had kidney failure 18 months ago, and 60+ is for average healthy folk. Go me. My sodium level is good. Yippee. My Urea and Creatinine levels are still outside the normal range but not far off and getting closer in the right direction. More go me, reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3.

So a good start to the day and not even a first coffee done yet. Next on the list was taking my partners car to the garage for its MOT, I waited in the café down the road eating bacon and sausage sandwiches washed down with coffee. During this time I had a WhatsApp conversation that introduced me to Spotify as a way of listening to the Umbrella Academy sound track. So one download later I have Spotify on my phone and a strange range of music suggested to me. I’ve yet to play with it but I am looking forward to the experience. Back to the garage an hour later and Bingo, the MOT has been passed, £45 of joy, go me yet again.

So back home and time to open the shed up before preparing for the Open Forum I host on behalf of the Enabling Environment team at the RCP. So an hour flies by in cyber space as the ravages of COVID get explored and dealt with. Once the hour is over their is a short debrief with a colleague and I retreat to the shed to start writing up my session notes. I am half way through this task and the woman from the financial ombudsman rings to tell me what her view is. I go into the house and put her on speaker phone and for an hour we listen to her talk her way through her understanding and her view. There is no way to describe what it was like going over one of the most distressing time of ones life not mention that of the rest of the family. The conclusion was that, in simple terms if you call something a good will gesture you can withdraw it when it becomes too expensive, which sounds to me like good will with ill intent. So she mentions a figure and we stay silent, eventually saying there is a lot to take in and we want to examine the documents when they arrive and have time to think about our response. Being told how much someone appreciates the distress we have suffered and then putting a price on it is disconcerting when the figure is so low.

A walk to the shop to buy chocolate, zero alcohol beer and other comfort food. Home to clear the kitchen and to eat the traditional Thursday tuna pasta. The evening passes quietly and I write the blog feeling a bit numb. So as I said at the start, today has been a curates egg, good in parts.