A Letter

Dear Left Leg,

Please give it a rest with the aggravating muscle twitch you’ve got going on at the moment. It’s been two days.

Yours sincerely,

Your Owner

Can you hear me now?

Question: why do my eyes move from side to side when I’m concentrating on the stereo effects of a song on my iPod? Just because I’ve got Moni Drasch yodelling in my right ear doesn’t mean I’ll see her when I look over to my right.

The sun was shining again today and, according to my weather widget, it was about 7ÂºC, so I decided to go for a short walk. I left Mum and Dad scraping the woodchip from the walls of the landing and set off. The temperature may have risen from what it’s been recently, but no-one had told the wind and its icy breath whistled through the fibres of my fleece. Out in the field beyond the railway bridge, it was ever so exposed and my fingers got so cold that they nearly dropped off, such was my suffering. Someone was enjoying the wind though, paragliding up and down a few fields away. I pulled my sleeves down over my hands and watched for a moment through my binoculars, but as the paraglider kept disappearing out of sight, I soon returned my hands to my pockets and continued walking.

Suzy rang this evening. A lot. She seemed to be having issues with her mobile and each time she rang, all I could hear was motorway noise and the occasional very quiet sound of her voice. I didn’t know if maybe her phone was unlocked and she didn’t know she’d rung me (or maybe I’m the only one who does that) , so I made sure to shout down the phone at her, “SUZY … SUZY, CAN YOU HEAR ME? … SUZY! … SUZANNE!” I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether all the noise meant she was driving back home down the motorway, or she was tied up in the boot of a car on the motorway, but concluded that she would probably keep trying either way and I needn’t alert the royal marines just yet. Eventually, on the sixth attempt, (by which time, I must admit, I was having fun with all the shouting) Suzy made things work enough to barely hear my shouting and told me that the phone was acting up and she’d ring later. I hope I get to shout again, it was fun.

Cabin fever

There was a smattering of snow last night. Wintry showers had been forecast, but I didn’t believe that they would mean anything at all white for us. When I ventured out into the cold this morning, there was just enough snow lying to betray the midnight visit of the local fox.

The tracks came over the compost bin from next door, went all round the garden and, just in front of the 6 foot high fence, there was a bigger mark, where he’d crouched down before springing over the top to continue his patrol of the village.

I’m really tired of not being able to do much at the moment. My mind is working faster than my physical self can at the moment and, once it realises that it’s sped ahead once more, it tends to get grumpy. It was nice that the sun was shining today, meaning that there was good light for taking some photos. It was pretty cold outside, but while my fingers were turning pink, I enjoyed standing in the garden, looking for the next shot. I’ve been looking at the world differently since I had the D50. I wonder what it looks like from down here, from over there, from up here, through that, with that out of focus, with that reflected in that.

I’ve started to make a list of places I want to go to take photos this year. Trouble is of course, I get a bit mad when I realise I need someone else to take me to these places. Then I have to put my iPod in my ears, turn it up loud and lose myself in the music until I get the grundlewiggy look off my face again.

Thursday’s random facts #2

* The four days I spent in Salzburg in December 2004 were hitherto the best holiday I’ve had
* I liked Enid Blyton’s “Secret Seven” stories, but not the “Famous Five”
* If I was taller, I’d dress completely differently
* I have almost no recollection of Suzy from the first year of grammar school
* I don’t believe in fate, but I do believe that some things are simply meant to be
* Self-deprecation is a weakness I’m working on
* I read and write German well, but it all goes decidedly arse over tit when I try to speak the language

Fresh out of stones

I know you’re all dying to know how the x-ray went yesterday. All 4 of you.

Well, as with many of my hospital visits (except the one where I was carted off to London in an ambulance and they used all the different sirens they had) it involved a fair amount of hanging about in waiting rooms with slightly strange people. First of all there was the waiting in Out-Patients, before I was eventually sent off with a bit of paper to get an x-ray.

In the x-ray department I had to give my date of birth and the spelling of my first name (w-o-n-d-e-r-b-a-b-e) to the receptionist as the doc’s handwriting was utterly illegible. Then there was some more waiting to do. Behind me sat two women I would have gladly bound in duck tape. They did not stop talking ever and the tone of their voices just hit the annoying frequency in my head. Utter busybodies who really needed to just ssshhh.

I was summoned for my x-ray by a slightly crazy woman, whom I had a hard time understanding. She took me to some cubicles and told me that I needed to strip off and put a gown on. “You need put it on backwards,” she said, “The ties are on the back.” Causing me to wonder if she meant I thus had to put it on with the ties at the front. No, I decided, that would be ridiculous and with the size of the marquee I was to be slipping into, the ridiculous factor needed no help.

Once within my tent, Mr Nurse came to find me. He and Mrs Nurse couldn’t decide quite where to take me and when mrs nurse asked me what x-ray I was having done, I replied cleverly, “P.U.B.” I’d read my letter, I knew stuff. “K.U.B.?” she said. “Err, yeah.” I knew that, I was just testing. “Oh, you didn’t need to get into a gown, we could have undressed you on the bed.” Sounds good. Anyway, I was already gowned, so we went back to deciding which x-ray room to use. One was apparently lower than the other, but the one we were right next to had a step stool, so I assured them that this was fine.

I hopped (read: clambered inelegantly) up onto the bed and lay down beneath the enormous throbbing mound of radiation that hung from the ceiling. “Sorry to ask you this,” said Mr Nurse, “But is there any chance you could be pregnant?” “No,” I replied. “Well, you’ll still have to sign this,” he said and proffered a sheet of paper. I couldn’t help but notice the slight disbelief in his voice though, as if he’d heard some unsavoury rumour about me.

I signed my life away and Mr Nurse set about positioning everything so that there would be a picture of my K, my U and my B, rather than my S, my A and my H (some kind of prize may be awarded to the person who can correctly guess which body parts I randomly chose here). I breathed in, breathed out, held it and the room glowed neon green as the x-ray was taken. Mr Nurse wandered off (read: walked purposefully away) to check the result and then I went back out to get changed and wait for the film to be developed.

After a while, Mr Nurse returned with my x-ray and I took it back to Out-Patients. On the way I took the film out of the envelope and showed Dad (for he was there too, you see). There was no stone in sight and you could see my shunt pipe curling through my abdomen like some kind of magnificent tapeworm and down towards the bottom of the picture there was the little bright white v-shaped image of the stent.

Having handed the x-ray in at Out-Patients, I didn’t have to wait too much longer before I was summoned before the consultant. However I did get to see a mad woman called Mrs McSomething fly out of her chair at speed when the nurse called one guy in to see his consultant. Their names were in no way similar, but it was only when she saw the real Mr NotMcAnything getting out of his chair that she sat down again. But I saw her. And then wrote about her. Be ye shamed, strange lady.

Anyway, Mr Kidney Man asked how the stent was treating me (not too badly, but the romance died long ago) and said that the x-rays showed no more stones, so it was effectively job done. In a week or two, the stent will be removed under local anaesthetic. The last time I had people messing about down there while I was only under local was not immensely fun, but this only takes a couple of minutes, so maybe it won’t be quite so bad. Apparently it’s simply a case of going up (great…), grabbing hold of the stent and pulling. Back to peeing cherryade again for a while methinks.

In a month or so Mr Kidney Man will examine my wee to see if there’s anything I should or should not be doing. Like, not eating rocks, I guess. Well, as long as “surfing the internet” doesn’t appear on the “should not” list, we’ll be fine.

I thought this was what friends were for?

Having cruelly and recklessly abandoned me in order to gallavant in Germany for a few days, Suzy has now re-graced the country with her presence. I was informed of her re-entry into Kentish airspace by a text message from her and was delighted to read that there was a “yummy Geschenk” in the offing. However, when I asked for her permission to melt said Geschenk and lick it off her in an inappropriate fashion, I was informed that “the Geschenk is meltable, but it might be a bit scratchy. So, after some deliberation, no, you may not.”

Almost, but not quite

I went for my first walk in a very long time today. I thought that I might finally be able to make it more than 2 yards beyond the end of the drive before the burning desire to pee descended upon me. I didn’t expect to do the whole of my usual route of about 3 miles, so I planned either to double back on myself, or head to the village after the stream. I put my binoculars and camera in my backpack (although the light was rubbish) and set off. I spied on a few birds with my binoculars and took a few rubbishy photos before heading to the village as my bladder started to make its presence felt. The walk home from the village was rather more aerobic than usual, rather more purposeful than my usual amble. Back home my bladder hasn’t quite forgiven me for the hour it was without constant drinking and loo-visiting and I’m absoutely knackered. It used to be that I couldn’t go out. Now, I can go out, but I seem to drop dead afterwards. Still, I can’t complain too much, as my life has been brighter since yesterday’s discovery that the German for “pee break” is “Pinkelpause” (pinkel-powza), which, I must admit, made me laugh like a drain when I saw it.