Archives for January 2023

Saturday, 21st January 2023.

Today I’m back with the NHS. Not cancer related this time, with the foot folk. Podiatry. More in a minute.

I managed to get the bone scanner appointment rearranged at a cost of only ten days. It’s now just a month since I saw the Urology consultant, a month and ten days since the GP’s feedback on my blood tests and my Killing Zone PSA levels. The NHS is capable of attracting all sorts of adverse observations, my own experiences on the front line of emergency procedures has been consistently excellent. I am well aware of the horror stories of people waiting long and weary hours in overrun and understaffed Accident and Emergency units, let alone GP’s waiting rooms, maybe I’ve just been lucky. But the consistency across different units, Neurology, Haematology, Pulmonary Hypertension and Cardiology, now Urology and soon Oncology, has been excellent. And consistent. Maybe it’s because I live in a ‘Shire’?

Where’s some wood? Even fitting into five ‘at risk’ categories announced at the onset of Covid-Time, touch wood, so far I’ve avoided any contact with the NHS’s Covid units, excellent, again, as they proved themselves to be. From the chronic damage caused by DVTs in my lower right leg, that limb looks like something from the Elephant Man. Blood doesn’t flow continuously through arteries and veins, the heart pumps it in beats, hence a ‘pulse’. With each pause, gates in the veins close to stop liquid flowing back down as a result of the downward force of gravity. My gates don’t close owing to damage, thus there’s excessive fluid, causing excessive swelling in my lower leg. This ‘oedema’  (from the Greek, as always with modern medical science, the words of biology and its ailments are thousands of years old, ‘oidein’, ‘to swell’) doesn’t seem to be pernicious to my health. But it does to the mind. It is unsightly. Gross, in the vernacular of the modern young thing. Other genders are not attracted to the unsightly. A possible solution, wearing a disguising cloth sack from my waist doesn’t strike me as a babe magnet, and a long dress might take me to places I wasn’t expecting. With numerous high-end health conditions, you’d be forgiven for thinking a possible sex-life — or otherwise — might not be high on one’s list of priorities, but the whole business of sex can be a funny old game, right? And I don’t mean ‘business’ in a business sense there. If many disabilities lead one into the world of taboos, the sexuality from within disability is ten-X taboo. Maybe I should get my lower leg inked, I could then write about a tattoo taboo. You-hoo! Poetry, huh?

‘Pod’ (I think from the Latin, but it must be Greek) means feet. Of course it does. The first time I saw the podiatrist she cut my toe nails with these enormous hoof-shearing clipper thingies. One sight of them and I was ready to tell her anything she wanted to know. I’d make it up, if necessary. Once I’d been clipped I had a revelation. One of those life-changing insights. I suddenly became aware of why girls ‘got their nails done’. It was an immense, hidden and unexpected, pleasure. And free too. God bless the NHS!

Monday, 09th January 2023

So it’s now a new year, a time for New Resolutions, emphasised with camel-case lettering; new attitudes, new stuff. Living a new, or different, life. All that sort of thing. Today I’m due in the bone scanner. Different day, same headache. Ironically, dealing with cancer’s a slow process. The time lag from diagnosis to treatment for my other diseases was fast.

Today, next step in the process.

Different day, same old problems. MS, cancer, I live on my own, whatever, life’s ‘normal’ problems don’t suddenly go away because life somehow ought feel sorry for you. It doesn’t.

My cab is due in five minutes. I’m taking a cab because my trike’s close to VOR, but mainly I’m not sure of the internal geometry of where the bone cancer scanner is, so I need to take my powered scooter. Trike for distance, scooter for building internals. 

No card. 

Bank card, not a scooter thing. My bank card, this card, lives in the same place All of the Time. Right now, at departure minus five minutes, it’s not there. Despite looking in the same place at least five times. It’s too late to take the trike, too late to call anybody. I’lI just check my bag again, where the card usually lives, for the sixth time. The card might have magically turned up since I last looked. Obviously.

Tomorrow, confusing writer time travel, but today as I write (AIW), tomorrow / today (AIW), it will turn up in the garden having fallen out of the back-pack pocket whose zip I can’t do up with fingers that don’t work properly.

Confusing, what? Oh, ‘VOR’. ‘Vehicle-off-the-Road’. It’s an Army term, maybe tri-service. Some of the old vernacular lives with me still. In answer to a question, ‘Wait One!’ as I pause to think, ‘Dobbie’ for washing — probably a derogatory imperialist / racist term from the old India days, but I hope not. ‘Scoff’ for something to eat. ‘Stickies’ for a sweet, fizzy drink. (From Belize, in the topics. Spill some on a table and wait one. The spillage becomes stickier than glue.) ‘Stills’ for Falkland Islanders. The MOD banned the term ‘Bennies’ from an ’80s TV Soap character, so the military switched to ‘Stills’: they’re ‘still’ Bennies. Army humour, huh? ‘Numpty’ for being an idiot. I made that one up. The term for being an idiot in the Army vernacular is not repeatable here.

‘Checking out’. A euphemism, not that the Army tend to do that sort of thing, euphamise, for dying. Not like being ‘slotted’, that’s when someone else holds the agency for your death. Checking out is the natural, if a little premature, processes.

In life, an old Ireland hand used to say, there are no rehearsals.

There are no rehearsals for cancer. No script. No pre-knowledge of how to deal with what goes through your head. Or how to get rid of that ear-worm loop of I don’t want to die, yet. Dying’s easy — when it’s quick.