DVT: NO MORE DVT DAYS
Its Thursday, a busy day so I am up and around quite early being careful not to invade my partners yoga space. I get to the kitchen and rustle up a bacon and coffee breakfast which I eat with my meds and my emails. I start to prepare for this mornings meeting and wait for the DVT clinic to ring me. I do not have long to wait. The consultant rings me at 9:20 and we have a five minute chat during which I tell him the vital statistics of my thighs and calfs. I reassure him that I am not bruising easily or profusely bleeding, and my kidneys are back in the normal range. The prophylactic dose of Apixaban, which he confirms is the best of its kind, is not producing any nasty side effects so there was no other sensible option other than to discharge me. I am duly discharged. After 440 days I am free of the DVT clinic. Go me. So as from today the DVT heading will disappear from the start of the blog. It is the icing on the cake of a good week. So all I have to focus on is my cancer, it simplifies my life and allows me to plan my future well being and lifestyle.
I go to my next work meeting and spend the best part of two hours discussing training issues and rationales along with other issues. It of course allowed my colleague Drew to tease me about how Scotland had beaten England in the Calcutta cup on Saturday. He even demonstrated how Alexa worked by asking it who won the Scotland v England match. Fun over it was time for a quick smoothie lunch, or so I thought. I was cold so went to switch the heating on. The boiler refused to relight and made a gurgling sound that I recognised as trouble. I tried several times and got no joy and it was getting colder in the house. I rang the company that had refurbished it and who provide plumbing services. I am told Monday is the earliest they can get to us, I plead a bit, the woman tries, we have a conversation and she asks if I have checked my outflow pipe as many of them are freezing in the current cold snap. I say I will try it and ring her back in due course thanking her for her suggestion. I’m late by two minutes for my Open Forum. Its a tough one. Tired people on the edge and being blamed by people in their organisation for perceived poor judgement. It feels like COVID is taking a toll across all levels of organisation functioning.
I finish my forum with a quick chat with my co host, we talk about the session, the paper that we are sending to be considered for a journal and out of the blue he asks me to be interviewed for a pod cast that he and a colleague are doing on people in the TC movement. I agree, so at some point I will be on the net somewhere.
No time to waste. I am out side with buckets of hot water trying to unfreeze my run off pipe from the boiler. The vertical stack just fills with water each time I plunge it with a piece of moulding and then pour water into it. The pipes are clearly blocked with frozen liquid. Bucket after bucket of hot water gets poured over the pipes with no joy. I add some windscreen washer liquid but to no avail. At last it begins to clear and there is a pleasing gurgling sound as the hot water drops down the pipes and does not back up. I add some antifreeze to the last lot of hot water that I pour down the pipes. Success. I go in doors and my partner makes me coffee and wonders if the pipes should be lagged. Of course I have lagging foam tubes in the garage and a foam cutter. With a roll of gaffer tape, a knife and foam tubes I head outside and begin to lag the pipes. The task is to get the job done before the temperature drops again. This needs to be done before I can turn my attention to the boiler itself. I press on and get it done.
Frozen solid 
Unfrozen and lagged
I return to the boiler and see if I can get the front cover off, I cannot but figure if I have cleared the blockage the boiler has a chance of firing up and clearing itself. I switch the system back on and set the boiler controls for the heart of the sun and behold it fires up minus the previous gurgling sound. I’m sitting here several hours later and the radiators are warm and the boiler working, so I guess the problem is solved. The key element is whether the lagging stops the pipes freezing tonight and the coming cold days.
I put everything away and have coffee. I notice an old colleague had tried to ring me so I return the call and have a chat with her. It’s time to make tea, Thursdays tuna pasta and to settle down to watch a cup match on TV while I sit and write the blog on my lap. I’ve not trained today but feel okay given the pipe problem that needed to be solved. Tomorrow I will make up for it.
