DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 9

Today the net around me tightens as the over 70s with medical conditions are advised to hide away and to take their families with them. I am not chuffed and resent being written off as a risk and something to be ordered out of site with no realistic way of fulfilling my needs. So I try to ignore the mass anxieties and try to make reasonable rational decisions.

Has it happens today there are some chores to be done so it is up for breakfast and then the daily self stabbing. Once that was over there was some domestic things to be done but I was waiting for a delivery which a text had alerted me to. I was hoping that it was my computer parts but as the suggested delivery time came and went I began to doubt myself. Eventually I went into the tracking site and found that it had been delivered at 10:45 and signed for. Looking at the signature it was possible to work out that it was probably something that I had paid for as a present to my youngest daughter. She confirmed later that the item had arrived but she had not signed for it, so the signature had been forged that was on the delivery tracking system.

Once lunch was over my partner and I sat down with the new i phone and the instructions that we had written down at the phone shop. The biggest and trickiest bit was getting the SIM card out of the old phone and into the new one. Having achieved the basics we hooked up the new phone to the power and the cloud and set the controls for the heart of the sun (Yes reference), and to our surprise the whole process went smoothly. After a short time the phone pinged and said it was ready. I rang it and sure enough it responded. All that was left to do was put on the screen protector and pop it into the new case. Job done.

So while on a roll we sat down to edit the civil partnership album from the photographer. We found several areas of it that we wanted to have changed and duly notated the pages and sent them back to the photographers. We will wait to see what happens. So time for more food and an evening of blogging and some TV. I’m looking forward to bed as last night I slept well due to the fact that we remade the bed and put the bedding on the bed the right way round. Surprisingly making a small change has made a big difference to the comfort of the bed and the quality of sleep.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 8

So let’s be clear. I started this blog on the 1st September 2019 as a way of keeping a record of my experience of prostate cancer and as a way to keep my family and friends informed of how I am. I figured that it would help people keep up to date without having to ask or have difficult conversations .It also meant that I could learn how to live with cancer and to accept that normal mundane life goes on for me. The normal boring stuff is no longer normal and boring for me, it is the everyday stuff to of which life comes, or as a friend put it, it reflects the generative power of everyday life. So I guess my blog will at times appear boring and mundane but always the fight is going on inside to maintain direction and to keep making meaning from my life. I mention this as it seems that I am slowly gaining a wider audience that appears to be leaving lots of comments. Part of this is technological cyberspace accident and malfunction as many of the comments are repeats and some of the functioning of the software is beyond my understanding. I am learning how to keep up with the most recent comments on the most recent blogs.

So if you are moved to comment on the current or recent blogs then I will respond. Where new people stumble across my older blogs then they are unlikely to get a response. I am hoping in this way that the original purpose of keeping family and friends in the loop will work. As I face the possibility of being confined to my home I want to find all possible ways of staying in touch with all those I love and care about. One thing that having cancer has reinforced is that it is the people in my life that are the most important and significant element in my life. As a neighbour tells me that another neighbour has been told they must isolate by the now godlike nhs111 it seems the general anxiety has crept up close. A friend tells me that their wife has self isolated and that this means a difficult time ahead. It seems that there is an inevitable creeping towards social paralysis and social distancing where those that find their own company difficult will suffer the most unless they are able to adapt. None of this of course deals with the lack of food delivery, lack of food and toilet rolls on the shelves or the inevitable bump in the birth rate in nine months time as the fertile population of England endeavour to bonk their way through the crisis. No matter what the crisis the carbon based mammals of this planet seem never to lose the ability to copulate to save themselves.

To all those other people who have stumbled across me and my blog you are very welcome and I am content for you to share the contents of it, make comment (although I may not be able to acknowledge you) and to take from the blog anything that you feel is useful. One or two people have asked how to contact me. There is a contact part of the site right at the start, which I hope is working.

My dyslexic journey is of indeterminate length although probably foreshortened by my cancer and is going in phases from Chemotherapy, to the Fingers Crossed Phase (the three months post chemo where we wait and see what effect chemo therapy has had), then comes a meeting with my oncologist, “he who made a pact with the devil”, on the 24^th of March 2020. At that point I shall slide into another phase. If all has gone well and there is nothing the medics can or want to do I will be sent off with a three month telephone call and an annual consultation. I have dubbed this phase “Fuck off and die”. If there are things that the oncology crew want to do and can do without reducing my quality of life out of sight then I shall find a name for this phase if and when it happens. I have been criticised for naming my “fuck off and die” stage as I have, it has been suggested that it is negative and not positive and forward looking. Looking forward I am going to die, which does not mean I cannot have a rollicking life between now and then but it is the reality. I, as an existentialist, much prefer to keep death alive and well in my life as it means I pay attention to the here and now and appreciate what I have and what I am experiencing. “Pay attention” is my watch word, phrase, thingy.

Back to the mundane of life as today I wake up and know I am going to the GP for a B12 jab and blood sample taking. So in deference to the GP nurse I take a bath during which I have breakfast and check my e-mails. It is a lovely sunny day and it is a pleasure to lay in the bath with the window open listening to the birds. Once clean and wrinkly I get up and dress, to help with the bed making and some other chores. Of course at 10 o’clock I retreat to the spare room to self stab, right side today. I find a spot of flab and do the deed. Today it stung again but hey ho I’m alive and I think my calf is beginning go to go down in size. It is not long before it is time to go to the GP surgery. My partner accompanies me as she wants to check an issue on her medications. I have a brief wait before being called in. I produce my blood sample slip to be met with “I cannot do that today it’s too late, the bloods have already gone!” I point out that this is the time I was given, but to no avail. So the bloods that were supposed to check if I was having a bad reaction to the blood thinners will have to wait till Friday when I have my other bloods done. I take the B12 injection, this also stung more than usual. We leave with my partner having sorted out her medication. Still the village co op has no toilet paper or biscuits. We buy a paper and rolls for bacon rolls and walk home.

Bacon rolls go down a treat as I do the crosswords and then run off a post retirement work questionnaire. I might get to do that at some point. A friend calls and updates me on a work call that he took part in and we chat about the effect of the corona virus on us. My friend may have to cancel several trips but worst of all he will not be able to watch his beloved Rangers. In my turn I doubt I will get to see Leicester Tigers play again for a while.  My partner and I decide on a trip into town to get her a new phone. Town is almost empty as we walk to the O2 shop and engage with the salesman. It’s all straight forward apart from the tech bit on how to get the information of the old phone onto the new one. We write the instructions down and also the codes for getting an air tie discount, buy a new case and screen protector and go to find coffee. So there we are in an almost empty Costas with our coffee and buns. The Belgian iced brioche was a mistake, far too much sugar in it but I ate it anyway. I am becoming averse to anything that is sugary, apart from honey, as I see it as a poison that will make my cancer worse. Apparently those impish cancer cells feed on sugar as well as testosterone in my case. It’s a real bug bear as I have a very sweet tooth as my mouthful of nhs fillings testify. We drive home to prepare tea from the overnight marinated chicken and to write the blog. I write it earlier in the day than usual as I suspect that once tea is over there will be a period of technology wrestling to get the new phone up and running. Wish us luck as we wrestle with the new red i phone.

DVT DAY 7

This day started as usual with breakfast, e mails and a self stabbing at 10 o’clock. the appointed hour. The day starts well but somehow the day loses it shine when it comes to injection time. As I said the actual self injection is not the issue it is the not knowing how it is going to go. Some days it goes very smoothly without any discomfort, however today it was not like that. Today it was painful apart from the sting of the drug which is usual this time it was painful as if the needle entered something other than the pinched fat. I have no idea why this should be but it is just how it is. It always takes me a moment to gather myself together before continuing on with whatever it was that I was doing before the stabbing. That’s how it was today. Fortunately on this day the Sainsbury’s delivery arrived to distract me. No toilet roles of course, or hand sanitizer, limited cleaning products and a replacement  peanut butter laced with salt and sugar.

So after a relatively slow start I take a second look at the now dead laptop that is waiting for me to contrive a Lazarus moment. I have a solution but not until this coming Wednesday, so I tidy and tinker. In a moment of enthusiasm I try to download the photos from my partners i phone. In the ensuing process I managed to create a back up of the phone on the computer but have no idea where the computer has hidden it. Then I managed to down load the photos into a preloaded file. I thought all had gone well until I started to check the contents of the sub-files. I do not know if it is the nature of i phones or my system but I found the files full of photos from my files as well as the phone. For three hours I tried to untangle them, sort them and refine them. At every turn I was thwarted and found myself deleting the same photos over and over and then found photos had turned up in already cleared files. I gave up and deleted the whole file. Maybe I will give it another try, one day, perhaps, maybe…

I started to get messages from friends about corona virus. I share them below for you to make up your own minds about them. I am concerned that according to the media Boris is thinking (difficult to believe) that it is a good idea for all over 70s (that’s me) to stay at home in quarantine for four bloody months while he and his medical gurus flatten the curve. Really? Yes really. I am in theory to become house bound.  This is not viable as I have things to do, for example robbing co op delivery trucks for toilet rolls and tinned food. In these days of empty supermarket shelves a chap cannot sit around and “be at home”, some of us metastatic prostate cancer and DVT suffers have things to do before we die and sitting on our arses at home is not one of them.

This did not amuse me!

“From an entirely disinterested economic perspective, COVID-19 might even prove mildly beneficial in the long term by disproportionately culling elderly dependents”

writes @JeremyWarnerUK business writer for the @Telegraph.

My GP sent me a survey by phone. I am due to go for a blood sample tomorrow morning and the practice was checking I was not going to infect them all with anything. If I was a tad off well what would they do, come to the house to collect my blood? I think not. Madness in the guise of common sense will take us all.

https://youtu.be/BNsTndy9CZo

I also decided to stop fooling around and looked at refurbished laptops. To my surprise I found it was possible get a good HP notebook with 8 Gb of RAM, a 1 Terabyte SSD run on Windows 10 with a lifelong licence for Windows Office for less than £300. Now that’s a bargain and its warranted for a year. After all if I am to be confined I need to have something to take to bits now that IT has become the new elder person’s jigsaw.

So tonight is spent warming my leg, writing the blog and half watching TV.

DVT DAY 6

A day of failure and a cracked motherboard means no long blog today.

DVT (deep vein thrombosis) DAY 5

So today starts with a false start having misread my watch as 8:20 when in fact it was 06:20. So the kitchen got cleared before I went back to bed to get the rest of my nights sleep. The next time I get up there is just enough time to have breakfast before the days self-stabbing. Its not the actual pain of doing it but the anxiety of doing something to myself and never being quite sure how it is going to feel or how my body is going to react to it. Each time is feels different so it creates a certain amount of anxiety.

Apart from the annual council tax demand arriving in the post there was a letter from a friend in Scotland. It was, as ever, thoughtful and supportive. I always appreciate letters and it spurs me to write them myself. The personal nature of letters is addictive. I find when I sit and write letters the flow of them comes naturally and they seem to have a life of their own and will wander around my mind and fall out the end of my pen. I still use a fountain pen for letters although this format accentuates my dyslexia. I am told that at times they pose a challenge to the reader.

I spent some time researching the work I will need to do to repair and upgrade my lap top. Fortunately I have all the tools I need, all I am waiting for is the now disc drive to arrive and then it will be hours of concentration and playing by educated ear.

So with the homework done it is time to go for afternoon tea at a posh hotel, one of the gifts for our civil partnership.  Good way to spend the afternoon sipping coffee nibbling delicate sandwiches and mini cakes. What it does provide to time to talk and to plan and as we were the only people in the restaurant it felt quite unique.

On the way home we called into the big Sainsburys near us to buy ingredients for a couple of new Indian dishes. What was appalling was the number of empty shelves that had been cleared by the suggestable, over anxious and under thinking general British public. They are so thick they cannot even get the symptoms of a pandemic right. As a woman being interviewed on TV noted when asked about the panic buying of toilet rolls; “wrong end”. So we found what we wanted and made for home. Once back we settled down to an evening of sport relief, Vera and blogging.  The blogging has taken a strange turn in that I’ve started to get literally hundreds of comments but many of them are the same. It looks like I am being spammed but in amongst them are some people that I recognise. The vast majority are very complimentary although there is the odd troll in there. It is interesting that the odd troll voice sticks more than the other more complimentary ones. How British a response is that? However  as I have a life limiting illness the trolls can fuck themselves and more to the point they need to consider that if they piss me off enough I will take them with me. Not a good idea to piss off a dying person.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 4

I took the back compartment off my laptop, put it back on and the bloody thing stopped working. It’s just ungrateful. I have bought it a new power connector and a new SSD hard drive to upgrade it and it does this to me. So I’ve scheduled major surgery on it tomorrow, which means cloning its hard drive, fitting the new one and soldering in a new power connector. I will be pig sick if the processor or mother board has become defunct.

As for today the highlight of the morning was the 10 0’clock self stabbing and the prolonged bath that followed it. Having soaked, I dressed and went into the garden to see how it was doing and I was pleased with what I saw as I took a phone call in the fresh air. The plants and trees are waking up and showing all the signs of spring, not long now, while the rest of the garden is showing some signs of the battering it has had this winter. I sympathise with it, I feel like I have had a bit of a battering myself, losing out on the holiday was the last straw really. It will get better, I will get better and soon be able to get back to training, writing and doing the things I like and need to do. I miss my friends.

We took a short trip to the garden centre for lunch and to look to see if there was anything that we could spend one of our civil partnership gift vouchers on.  We ate and chatted before wandering around the garden centre looking to see if anything “called to us”. Nothing did so we returned home empty handed. We will wait till Spring is well under way and look again for something to come and live in the garden with us.

Once home I book an evening meal at a local pub and tinker with the laptop. It dies. I retreat to the main PC in the office and write the blog before getting ready to go out. One thing I have done is buy a syringe carrying case so that I can take my injections with me if I am out and about during my time to inject. I guess it’s no different from being diabetic but it is new to me. Always something new in this staying alive adventure.

A friend reminded me that today is Terry Pratchett day and that he wrote of death the following:

“No one is actually dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away…”

Terry Pratchett. 28th April 1948 – 12th March 2015.

DVT DAY 3

“There is nothing more truly artistic than loving people”

Vincent Van Goth 1853 – 1890

What a day. The morning was taken up with writing my report from the accreditation visit to a TC that I did last week. The pain of filling in boxes with the relevant evidence was nothing compared to the panic that set in when I thought I had lost the work I had done. I eventually found the file tucked away in a temporary file in the bowels of the computer. I was much relieved when I had sent the required report to the programme manager who was waiting to complete the full report. Once the report was done I was free to enjoy the rest of the week with my partner task free. Of course at 10 o’clock I had to take a self stabbing break. It went okay, I guess it will get easier as time goes on.

I found that the “Van Gogh the immersive experience” was still on in town so I booked tickets and my partner and I went to have lunch in the Cosy Club. After a good meal and checking the route to the venue we set of to All Saints church in the centre of Leicester.

What followed we a sheer delight. There were some biographical material and explanation of the installation. The experience included a real size mock up Van Goth’s bedroom and some graphic projections. The central experience was a display that filled the entire adapted church space with music and moving images. The final delight is an opportunity to use the virtual reality headsets to go on a journey in Arles and to see the inspiration for some of Van Goths most famous paintings. This was for me something I could get addicted to, its lucky that I am not into video games I would never get out of the virtual reality worlds.

Out of the church we retrieve the car and return home via our local shop to get food for tea. Home and my partner prepare tea while I start the blog and down load some of the videos and pictures I took at the Van Goth experience. My evening will be completing the blog and keeping an eye on the Liverpool football match.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 2

So today I was supposed to be in Spain but I am not. Today I am into the second of a DVT and my first day of self-injecting. So it’s a slow start to the day with a muesli breakfast and coffee as I work up the nerve to go and self-stab at 10 o’clock. Apparently keeping to the same time of day is important, although I am already planning to ease it towards a more socially friendly time of day, earlier if possible. I cannot be playing around excusing myself from meetings or anything else to go off to stab myself in some grotty toilet in a corona virus invested world. It isn’t really infested with corona virus, after all three people have died so far in the outbreak which compared to the six hundred people that have died from flu this winter so far is not something to get worked up about. Clearly the toilet paper buying British public’s greatest fear is being isolated without enough of the commodity to survive.

Anyway I go and self-stab. These are thinner syringes and needles this time with a smaller dose of drug. So all I have to do is select the area of flab to pinch and then lance it with the needle at 90 degrees, push the plunger and then release the flab and watch the needle pop out. Sounds easy and in fairness it is, however it is the getting to the point of stabbing that holds the anxiety. I am assuming that given that I have to do this every day for the next six months I will become proficient and if I am lucky, super cool about it. So I find some old alcohol wipes, clean the stab site, pinch the required inch of flab and stick myself. Over and done with, apart from snapping the needle on the syringe cradle and popping the whole lot into the sharps bin.

My partner and I get ourselves organised and we go off to seek a tea room that we believe is near to us. We find tha t it is somewhere we have been before and is a combined tea room and antiques trading post. Rooms and containers full of “antiques” are in the courtyard of a farm and there is a converted stables full of “antiques”. We head for the café and order food and drinks and sit and discuss how we are and I explain about my dandelion clock sense of time and how people have responded to the news about my DVT and the cancelled holiday. Which by the way has been lovely and surprising, many of my friends have told me that I am loved and cared about and offered to help in all sorts of ways from driving to places or teaching me yoga. We eat and talk and eventually drive home.

I check my “patient view” app and find my latest blood test results are in and a busily set about comparing them with my last results. My results are in fact good and yet again my PSA level has remained at 0.4. There is nothing outstanding or worrying in them, no sudden jumps or deviations. I would be doing okay of it wasn’t for the DVT. There is one new test. It looks at glucose levels and it looks like that I am out of the normal range (“not bloody diabetes as well”, is my first thought) but when I read the information about the test it appears that I am in the normal range for someone who is not fasting and has had a meal. Clearly glucose is a more up and down and complex variable than the other tests I am having. So there are going to be new things to learn around this if they keep testing me for it

Glucose is a common type of sugar that is essential for the body. It comes from many types of food as well from common sugar (sucrose). Running high levels of glucose in the blood is damaging, and is called diabetes.

Glucose result	Comments
below 2.5	Dangerously low, may cause confusion and unconsciousness.
3.6-6.0	Normal glucose level when fasting (when you haven’t eaten)
6.1-6.9	A rather high level if fasting (called ‘impaired fasting glucose’), OK after a meal.
7.0+	If fasting, and more than once, diagnostic of diabetes. If 7-11 after a meal (or strictly in a glucose tolerance test, 2 hours after 75g of glucose, glucose = 7.8-11) this is labelled ‘impaired glucose tolerance’.
11+	Too high. Diagnostic of diabetes if it occurs more than once.

In the midst of this my new shoes arrive via Mr Amazon and I try them on. They fit and I am pleased so all I now have to do is get the swelling down on my right ankle and life will, in terms of footwear, be tickerty boo. The early evening is taken up with the blog while my partner thinks about substitute things to do while we are not in Spain and preparing the evening meal. This evening I shall warm my calf and try to relax while I think about the life admin around claiming for our lost holiday and completing a service report. I will also be thinking about how I reorganise my life to get yoga into it and tighten up on my food selections and restrictions.

DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis) DAY 1

Well here we go again. Up at 06:30 for toast and jam and a coffee supplied by my partner before driving to the hospital for the 8 o’clock appointment at the DVT clinic. At least as a dyslexic DVT is less of a challenge than metastatic prostate cancer. I choose to drive and as sods law would have it we have the fastest run into the hospital that we have ever had. The entire car park is ours to choose from. So we manage to arrive before the night team have gone and the day team arrive. I hand my letter to a nurse and we sit and wait to be called. We both read. I also check my phone and Amazon account and notice some rather nice men’s Sketchers, I could not resist, so they will arrive tomorrow. Just after 8 o’clock a nurse reassures us that we will be seen soon and sure enough I get called. A very efficient and people skilled nurse takes me through the initial assessment and checks my details She looks at my calf and measures my thighs, not something that happens often, if at all.

The nurse explains that because of my cancer they are not bothering with the blood test they are going straight to a scan; they have a slot at 9:20. So having done the initial interview we wander off to find coffee. The café is still not open so we get water and paper at one of the hospital shops and return to the waiting area. My partner reads the paper and I continue to read Radical Remission. 9:20rolls around quickly and I get called to the scan room where a couple of technicians are looking at screens and the nurse bustles around doing the privacy dance with the curtains. I drop my trousers and get on the couch and the nurse covers the non-offending leg with paper towel. The lights go down and then the head tech goes into action. First it’s the bloody cold gel from top thigh to knee and then the magic begins.

It is true magic, the sort that makes my heart leap. There on the screen are my arteries and veins as clear as day. In my arteries the bright reds and yellow indicate a good blood flow but it’s a different story in my veins, just loads of white/grey stuff, no flow at all or very little. The probe is up at the top of my thigh and the technician plays hunt the end of the clot. He finds it and shows me the end both length and breadth ways. The clot extends from my ankle up wards, I try not to find this alarming and try to stay with the wonder of the technology but inside I am saying to myself “Fuck that’s a big clot” but I notice that the technician and the nurse seem to be taking this in their stride so I guess this is not unusual. Then all of a sudden it’s over, I am wiping scan gel off my leg and from under my knee pit and pulling on my jeans again. I feel like that was an easy one for them and I did not pose much of a challenge to them but I guess with a clot that big it was always going to be easy for a competent technician to find it. We are invited to wait while they sort out the findings report and get it to the specialist nurses. We sit in the waiting area, I do the crosswords and my partner goes off to find coffee, which she does quickly. There is no time for coffee as we get called in to the nurse specialist prescriber who begins to explain the outcome and the treatment in detail. I had been made aware that the drugs would be delivered by injection but I think I had pushed it to one side as I loathe the whole ritual of self-stabbing. She tells me that she will write to my GP so that the step down dose can be given after the first month. Medication (self-stabbing), would last six months due to my cancerous state. My partner calculated that this would be approximately 180 times and kindly informed me. The nurse very kindly got me started by giving me my first injection with the cheery words “its stings a bit at first but it’s not the needle it’s the drugs that do that”. She was not wrong, it did sting, more than I had bargained for. She put together my meds pack including a sharps bin and a letter for my GP having checked the blood results from my blood test earlier in the morning. Apparently my platelets were around 115 which was up on last time, so all well there then. I am hoping to see the ful results on “patient view” later when they update the system. Thankfully my partner was with me as she asked about the letter for the insurance. The letter was duly produced and printed out on headed note paper. So that was is it, I was to make an appointment for my bloods to be done at the GP in seven days’ time to check I was not having an allergic reaction to the drug and I would get a follow up letter in due course. The oncologist would monitor in the longer term and the GP would oversee the future drugs administration. So with two green bags full of drugs, sharps bin and paper work we left the department and headed for the car.

• 

• 

I drove into town and we went for an early lunch at the Cosy Club. Always difficult to make interesting conversation over a meal after the sort of morning we had just had. We ate our mains but the waiter had a good attempts at spilling the after meal coffee over me, luckily my lightening reflexes spurred by my memory of having hot chocolate dashed in to my crotch avoided any harm coming to me. I of course got a new and free coffee as a result. Bill paid we headed for home.

Home and the life admin started. I had already cancelled the holiday taxi for the early morning but now it was time to tackle Tui. I got through the usual maze of press button instructions till I got to a person who was sympathetic and did the cancellation effectively and sent a cancellation invoice to use with the insurance company. So holiday in the trash can it was time to go to the GP surgery. We walked down and found a lone receptionist who booked me in for the blood I need on Monday and at the prompting of my partner I also booked in for my B12 jab that I had to cancel yesterday for this very morning. So come Monday I will get them both done. A brisk walk back as it is getting colder and will rain soon.

Home and time to rest. I put my feet up, wrap my calf in a heated blanket and write the blog. One thing I am going to investigate as a result of this is yoga classes or retreats. Since seeing the programme that demonstrated the ability of both exercise and yoga to lower blood pressure, the latter by dilation of the veins, I am persuaded that it is something that I could benefit from especially now I know my cancer is a risk factor for DVT. I am hoping bendy makes me better.

Almost a year to the day I am back in medical shit. I get up to have a bath to ease my foot and calf and to make me sanitary enough to go to the emergency care centre at the local leisure centre. My partner drives me to the centre where I am seen by a chirpy para medic. He prods my leg, asks me questions, he takes my temperature and blood pressure. He does this emergency care service to keep his hand in as he mostly spends his time teaching physiology. That was comforting. Any way the crunch comes when he presses my foot and it makes a dent that does not spring back, Fuck, pitted edema! That’s not good. When I ask, lets call him Jon, whether I could get pitted edema without a Deep Vein Thrombosis he tells me its unlikely. We discus next moves. He makes a call and makes an appointment for me at the Leicester Royal Infirmary at 8 o’clock on Monday morning. He tells us that the unit will take a blood sample and test for an elevated D dimer level. They may also do an ultra sound scan of the calf. He suggests we take reading material as we will have to wait for the blood tests to come back. We know that game only too well. I ask about flying and the likelihood of being able to go on holiday to Spain on Tuesday. He notes that the DVT would not be affected by altitude but it will need medication which comes as an injection form, a dosage of three self-injections that I might be allowed to do myself. My partner’s immediate response is that the holiday is not possible, the medic is more cautious and says the medics try to be helpful if they can. It’s a balancing judgement but one to be made soon as possible as at the very least there is a taxi to cancel and a holiday company to inform within the small print. The para medic prints out my letter for the hospital appointment tomorrow and we leave with me knowing I have no temperature but a blood pressure measure that is elevated.

We drive home, I’m hungry, I expect we both are. My eldest daughter cooks us scrambled eggs for breakfast. I set myself in front of the TV and wrap my offending calf in a heating blanket in order to keep it warm enough to dilate my veins and keep my blood flowing, it also keeps my leg elevated, which is a good thing. Mr Amazon delivers some ankle supports and calf supports that I ordered yesterday. 

So I am sitting on my sofa, leg wrapped and elevated and that is how I will be as I watch the rugby this afternoon and probably for much of the day quietly seething and being unsociable. I find it impossible to be nice about this, which is not reasonable but it feels like a real kick in the bollocks having made such an effort to get myself able to even think about going on holiday. Now it is a moment by moment, step by step situation where any final decision will come at some time tomorrow in the guts of a hospital. Until then I shall “keep calf and carry on”.