My latest blood results are in and they are a pain. The good news is that my PSA is still 0.2 and that my kidney functions are stable as before but my potassium level is up 1.1 to 5.4 and outside the normal range. Means my body is not processing potassium out and dumping it in my blood, which is not good. So I am spending my time learning low potassium foods, what I can and cannot eat. I’ve been downloading nhs diet sheets and reading potassium information. If I cannot reduce my potassium then the medics will want to give me potassium binders. More shit medication. So diet first is my chosen option. I’ve also been in the bike for a while hoping that I will have dropped weight at tomorrows weekly weigh in..
So another interesting day. In the midst of this I mended my daughters laptop that seemed to have mislaid its hard drive. A bit of IT surgery and the laptop recovered to full health. The rest was just domestic tidying and preparation for Monday.
Today started with an early morning trip to the GP to have more blood taken. A quick trip and then home for breakfast. I retreated to the shed to paint, and there I stayed till lunch time.
After lunch I ordered an Olympic barbell and case for my daughters birthday on Monday. We reviewed what was available and chose one that will take the weight she needs to train to her potential. Then it was back to the shed to finish the painting. Later in the afternoon my padded bike saddle cover arrived so it was time to exercise. The saddle cover was a success.
Dinner of home made pizza followed by a Netflix film and the blog while I wait to see if my blood results have come through.
After a day of Teams open forums, reading criminal justice system COVID recovery plans, stupidly trying to use acrylic paints like water colours and completing my cycle training session I ate tuna pasta and settled down to read my latest copy of the Visionary. I am an ordained minister with a doctorate of divinity from the Universal Life Church Monastery. I was bored one afternoon and got myself ordained over the internet and in incidentally bought a Liouville slugger baseball bat the same after noon. Me, boredom and the internet is not a good combination. Any way I regularly get the Universal Life Church newsletter the Visionary drop into my in box and provides a really interesting insight in to American life and culture. A couple of things caught my eye this time. The first was the moment to cancel Darwin on the basis of racism. See link below:
The second thing to catch my eye was the the reversal of the New York City law banning gay conversion therapy by a group of advocates for the “therapy”. See link below:
I find both these articles depressing and wonder where this regressive mental state is going to lead. It seems that peoples need to believe in anything that is simple rather than require some cognitive effort and reflection. It could of course mean that as population increases that intelligence regresses to the mean and in a first past the post voting system then so will the arguments used to gain power. Simple arguments based in self interest that require little thinking will increasingly command more votes. Its tempting to think that America is doomed, but I cannot forget the nice American couple we meet in Mexico who were embarrassed about Trump and who were frustrated at what was happening to their country.
So I end the day slightly bemused and sore from my exercise bike, my injection and the thought that I am due at the GP for another blood letting tomorrow morning. I am missing the outside world, or more precisely the people in it whose company I crave.
Late last night I read the Amazon reviews of Haribo sugarless Gummy Bears and cried with laughter on the sofa. I cannot account for my sense of hilarity or the school boy nature of the humour but it hit just the right spot after a day during which I felt tired, under the weather and pissed off. This was just the lift I needed and went to bed much uplifted.
SUGAR FREE GUMMY BEARS: READ THE AMAZON REVIEWS.
Just open the link below and then the link in the post. Or you could search google for Amazon reviews of gummy bears.
I woke this morning still smiling from the previous evenings fun. Back in the real world I made breakfast and started to review some enabling environment work. What started as a routine task turned in to a mornings work. A quick lunch and I was into back to back Zoom meetings, the first a stimulating open forum for therapeutic community staff, however the latter was an AGM of the British and Irish Group for the Study of Personality Disorder, affectionately known as bigspud, which was more business than excitement. The major issue being whether the reorganised 2021 conference will happen. It seems like it will depend on what sort of winter we have in relation to COVID. At times it felt like we were slipping into the “Game of Thrones”, winter is coming.
By late afternoon I was zoomed out and retreated to the shed and the exercise bike. I now put on my training mask for the first ten minutes to make my lungs work and then it was a flog for the rest of the session. I think it is beginning to make a difference to my fitness but I have a long way to go. Dinner followed by football. A terrible night for my team Brentford, who managed to throw away the opportunity for automatic promotion to the premier league. I write the blog and prepare for bed.
Its been a long day of meetings, writing and trying to get over the soreness of my gut from the injection. I managed 35 minutes on the bike including 10 minutes in the sports mask to exercise my lungs a bit more. Apart from that we received the quote to have our heating re piped. So that’s going to be an interesting time in a few weeks time, doubtless we will face time redecorating. At least the heating will be good for the coming winter. Oh yes, I almost forgot I discovered that I have an oncologist appointment next week, which meant arranging more bloods to be done this Friday. Cancer is a drag.
Monday and its up early for a shower before going to the GP for my 28 day injection. Before I am dressed my youngest comes into my room laughing and shows me a picture taken by her partner of the three cases of Lindt chocolate balls in three flavour that have been delivered to her house. She is an assistant buyer for a large chain of retailers and had jokingly said to the Lindt representative that she missed the face to face meetings they had pre COVID because of the goody bags that the chocolate companies always brought with them. The representative said she would send her some goodies. My youngest was not expecting three cases, each containing 8 boxes of chocolate truffles! I think her partner was rather taken aback as well, but I am sure that they will manage the situation.
Three surprise boxes of chocolate!
My partner drives me down to the surgery where I ring reception to tell them I have arrived. Always tricky at that time in the morning as it is “Can I have an appointment “time on the phones. I get through and I am directed to the back door. Donning my mask with a newly acquired head strap to hold the mask on I wait at the back door. I should explain that due to the insubstantial nature of my ears they will not support the elastic strap of the masks. My nifty plastic strap provides “buttons” that the elastic straps can be attached to, therefore no irritating slippage or sore ears.
Simple but effective mask straps.
I am let into the surgery by the practice nurse and shown to the clinic room. The injection is mixed as I loosen my belt and provide access to the relevant flab. This injection is not quick due to the volume of stuff to be pumped into me. It is always sore due to the nature of the bulk and the ingredients themselves. At the time of the injection it’s the usual “sharp scratch”, it is afterwards that the soreness takes hold and then it’s a case of keeping busy and having hot baths.
We return home to make breakfast and to organise the rest of our day. I roam the garden making sure I know what the young guy who is coming to tidy the garden is going to be doing. I also do some pruning and tidying to pass the time. When he arrives, I make him strong builders tea and show him what needs doing, he is young and enthusiastic, which I need to keep in mind when talking the work through with him, otherwise the pruning and clearing might border on the blitzkrieg style of gardening. He sets to and I make bread before lunch. We sit and talk and then my youngest daughter assists her mother with a home hair kit, which goes exceedingly well.
I do some work and start the blog until lunch time when we sit down together and chat and idle for a bit. The young garden guy leaves and a little later we wave farewell to our youngest daughter as she heads for home and her treasure trove of chocolate. I return to the garden and start to plant out what is left in the green house and to tend the plants already dotted around the garden. I harvest my first crop of broad beans and peas. Not a huge haul but enough for tonight’s pie that I shall be making.
The first harvest
I beaver away continually planting and tidying till I am too tired to do more, is pie making time. I set to and prepare the pie while my loaf finishes. So by six o’clock had pie ready for the oven, fresh bread and an aching back from todays work. The rest of the family are out for a walk so I return to the blog and TV football. I am annoyed to have missed a phone call, the second one of the day. It doesn’t sound much but to chat and hear different voices from the family is important. I Spend time unpacking my new resistance training mask, which I am going to use to exercise my lungs and build my breathing capacity. It is the equivalent of training at altitude so there is a possibility that my blood platelet count will rise, which it could do with at the moment.
The new training aide
Its going to be an early night for me and a possibly a soothing bath to ease the soreness. Tomorrow I have a research meeting but apart from that I am hoping to write. I find that writing helps to keep me focussed and in touch.
Today I rose first and read on the patio sipping coffee until joined by my partner and youngest daughter, breakfast followed and we chatted for a while. I then started on the garden, I am not sure I intended to but I did. I started on one or two simple tasks but somehow it ended up in some major tasks. Several hours passed and the garden became increasingly weed free and trimmed. Lunchtime passed and the work continued till I was tired. So I spent time looking at the flowers and the visitors.
Dinner is a proper roast Sunday dinner, a real treat, which sets me up for the FA cup semi final on TV. Of course once the fun was over there was of course the Tesco deliver slot to organise and the blog to write. Actually my main preoccupation is with tomorrows 28 day injection at 8:30 in the morning. I have never got used to them and know I shall be sore for a couple of days. So a reasonably early night for me.
Saturday and the house is full. This means bacon sandwiches I do not have to negotiate and the smell of baking in the house. We briefly visited the garden centre and came away with more plants, an oil spray and a rotary cheese grater. Oh yes, I almost forgot yet another Wired Fish jumper. Of course this meant a lot of time in the garden.
It is a strange but true fact that bumble bees hibernate and they do so in my hanging baskets that I leave out over the winter. This means that as I emptied the old ones to replant them several very sleepy bees emerged from the loam. The up shot of this is that we now have six newly planted hanging baskets and one which is a permanent bee dormitory. Of course the bees do not know this and are likely to choose whatever hanging basket they fancy but at least this years late risers are all in the same place, except of course the ones I missed.
There is little else of note except Brentford managed to blow their chance of automatic promotion to the premier league by losing to Stoke of all teams, and I trained again for 45 minutes on the bike. But the highlight was the lemon drizzle cake that was made and eaten for pudding with coffee after the evening meal. The juice of three lemons and the zest of two certainly made it zingy. In fact is was so “zingy” that at times it so contracted our mouths that we appeared to be doing goldfish impersonations. It was smoothed a little by the addition of ice cream. We have half of of this delight to go tomorrow!
I started the day lazy and found my partner and youngest daughter on the patio drinking coffee and obviously doing that mother daughter bonding thing that they do. I made toast and more coffee and joined them. Really nice to sit out and chat about nothing much in particular. We were interrupted by my eldest daughter all of a flap as she had forgotten to get up in time for her PhD supervision, she just about made it. We set about planting the flowers we had bought yesterday and my youngest got the sewing machine out to make face masks. I was fairly quickly summoned to see if I could mend the sewing machine. I noted the lamp was still on, so there was power. A tentative tap of the foot pedal and away it went, hurray. It then stopped, the light went out and it sat there silence. I checked the mains socket, it was good. I checked the plug fuse, it was dead. Hurray I can do this. Put in new fuse and full of confidence plug it all in again and threw the switch, BANG, the machine made a loud noise and proceeded to smell of battel field.
Out came the trusty electrics kit and tool kit and pretty soon I had the guts of the machine in front of me. Running my trusty meter over it I soon found that the light bulb was in good working order to I switch attention to the motor and the rest of the electrics. All the power cables were fine as were the neutral circuits, the coil on the motor was fine. What wasn’t fine was the component that in effect controls the power going to the motor. This component is over 40 years old and the tell tale blacken plastic around its housing plus the smell told me that it had just died.
The guts of a Beranina 801.
The dead component
I hunted for a replacement part but to no avail, so my partner and I had a conversation about a new one and came to the conclusion that a new one that self threaded ( old eyes find this helpful), can do a button hole in one operation and sow silk to denim in countless ways was a good and timely option. Singer are having a Sewing Bee Sale and you pick up really good machines from between £200 and £300. So there will be research done and a lot of umming and aahing and perhaps a new one will arrive.
So with that excitement over it was time for lunch and then more gardening, during which the Tesco deliver arrived. At three I joined a ZOOM farewell work do. Its a very peculiar way to say farewell to a colleague, sipping non alcoholic beer and nibbling a coop cupcake. It was okay but it lacked the hug and walking off in to the sunset. Just pressing a leave key and clearing the screen is pretty cold.
I dithered a bit and then went and changed in order to train. I sweated out for 45 minutes and decided that was enough for the day and dripped may way to the patio for sandwiches. My partner lit the chimenea and we sat amid smoke and ash until it got to the delightful flame and ember stage.
I got post training cold and went in doors to run a bath and use my gold finger bubble bath. A long soak while reading Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. Basically tales of neurosurgery, but an interesting read. By the time I emerged everyone else was heading for bed, so here I am blogging again.
I remain shielding and missing the outside world and the opportunity to go on holiday. A friend has departed today with her family to beaches and cosy cottage, I am envious but glad to see others are able to do it, it gives me hope that I will soon be able to re-emerge.
Today started out with fun, the boiler wasn’t working so I was texting the boiler man very early to see if he could fix it. He is a hero as despite being about to collect his caravan and go on holiday at 10:30 he duly arrived and solved our problem. Apparently our system is developing a vacuum that is stopping our boiler flowing properly. Okay in the short term by may need bypass surgery in the future. So we can now entertain our youngest daughter for the weekend and not all smell.
My blood tests have arrived fully after a bit of a delay due to one result being missing. The PSA result was the one missing and the crucial one but it eventually turned up. The good news is that it has stayed at 0.2, which is a good thing. The rest of the results are about the same as they were, the only ones that are outside the normal range are those related to kidney function. Nothing critical but a timely reminder to look after the kidneys and to keep hydrated.
As can be seen my Urea is dropping towards normal, which is a measure of kidney function, but my Creatine level has risen a bit, also a measure of kidney function. My eGFR at 50 is the more or less percentage measure of my kidney functioning, which at 50% at my age after having had kidney failure in March 2019 is not bad at all. In fact its as good as it gets. Go me!
In the midst of this we got a delivery from Japan, very exciting to get a big envelope with lots of strange writing on it addressed to my eldest daughter.
I was surprised when she handed it to me and said “Happy Birthday”. So this was a belated birthday present for me that she had been waiting to arrive. I opened it and was at first intrigued and then delighted. It was a genuine antique hand painted silk kimono, for a bloke obviously!
Does anyone know what the writing means?
Obviously I am delighted with my present and was wafting about in it when the plumber arrived. So I am writing the blog for once not being tired and have most of the day in front of me. The pleasured of hosting an open forum is to come as is greeting my youngest daughter when she arrives. There is also Jeff to arrive to survey our heating system with a view to re-piping it. So a day of fun to come.
