Category: Health

God Save the Queen

NNUHRegular readers might remember that, last year, I had keyhole surgery when a double stent was inserted into my abdomen to deal with a narrowing of the arteries supplying blood to my legs. It was affecting my mobility and a major pain in the arse (or to be precise, the calves). Although the operation itself was successful, one of the stents failed almost immediately. This happens in about 10% of cases (trust me to be in a minority yet again). After a period of reflection and torture on a treadmill three times a week, I chose to advance to Plan B – an aorta bi-femoral graft, a more traditional way of bypassing the logjam. I went under the surgeon’s knife at the end of July.

BypassAs I was wheeled to the anaesthetist, I hummed ‘God Save the Queen.’ It seemed appropriate and helped keep my pecker up and my blood pressure down. The bypass was a major op but relatively routine and given my age and general good health, everything went like clockwork. Please give a hand to Darren Morrow, a vascular surgeon with talented hands. He stitched me up good and proper (actually he super glued me up good and proper). I was discharged a few days ago and have been recovering at home ever since. I’m sore but otherwise in fine fettle, largely thanks to the liquid morphine (highly recommended). Those familiar with Blackadder will know that every queen has a nursie and I have mine. Liam is famed throughout Christendom for his bedside manner and grape peeling. I’m a lucky boy. But at times like this I wish I had a proper job – just so I could get three months off work with full pay. I was rarely ill during my time as a municipal bean-counter. Maybe I could apply for a back-dated payment?

A Healthy Intermission

Normal broadcasts will be resumed shortly. In the meantime, here are a few random shots of the micro-loft.

 

Holding Out for a Super-Hero

Holding Out for a Super-Hero

Just like good old Auntie Beeb, I aim to inform, educate and entertain. It’s for others to judge whether I succeed or not. I find myself rather indisposed at the moment (more of this later) so my ambitions will have to be curtailed for a while. I am, therefore, delivering on the daft instead.

Superhero

Apparently, I’m Kick-Ass Destroyer. Who knew? And you?

Who Ate All the Pies?

Big Belts in Norwich MarketEast Anglia is England’s breadbasket, a land of milk and honey, a cornucopia of plenty. From crab to duck, sugar, saffron and samphire, poultry and pigs, mustard to mint, wheat, barley and acres and acres of rapeseed that in spring turn the patchwork of fields an iridescent yellow, the flatlands provide some of the most abundant land on Earth. But you can have too much of a good thing. Back in the day, being fat was a sign of wealth and health. Skinny was the fashion of those at the bottom of the social heap, a consequence not a choice. But now, the flatlands are the fatlands; fat is the new thin.

Who am I to talk? Now I’ve reached my midriff years, I’m no longer that skinny little waif whose 26 inch waist played to packed houses in the late Seventies. Yes, my middle age spread is, well, spreading. But I’m talking about carbon hoof prints of heffer proportions and they’re attached to people half my age. It ain’t clever and it ain’t pretty. So, my fellow East Angles, if you want to outlive your parents, it’s time to go easy on the pies and the fries.

Normal for Norfolk

N4N1As a recent interloper to this green and pleasant corner of England, it’s not for me to suggest that the north folk of Norfolk are less blessed in the old grey matter than those in other parts of this sceptre’d isle. Those in a better position to judge such things tell me that a long history of cousin-shagging has indeed narrowed the gene pool. So this isn’t just a malicious rural myth spread by the smug metropolitan elite. It seems there was little else to do during the cold and dark winter months before the advent of commercial TV and Super Mario, not even a brass band or a male-voice choir. Even today, whenever a local yokel says or does something, well, a bit village idiot, there’s a time-honoured, well-worn phrase that trips of the lips of the spectators to the fall. With arms folded they mutter with a casual shrug, “normal for Norfolk.”  This might also explain the popularity of the UK Independence Party.

Other references to the N4N phenomenon (as it’s abbreviated on medical files – I kid you not) can be found on the Urban Dictionary and Literary Norfolk.

Cooking on Gas

Cigarette Chain

To badly paraphrase England’s greatest Queen, “I have a weak and feeble body…” I have miserably failed to ditch the dreaded weed several times, even with the help of a shipping container of nicotine products. I’ve been worshipping at the altar of the god Tobacco since I was knee-high to a grasshopper (well since I was 14) and have been impervious to the risks, the health warnings and the images of diseased lungs on the packs. Only the ever-spiralling cost put any kind of break on my habit. As smoking became increasingly anti-social, I joined the pariahs at the margins. Ironically the smoking area at work was anything but anti-social as lights were offered and hot gossip exchanged between puffs; it was also a great leveller as gaffers and workers communed in sin.

The smoking lark couldn’t go on. Not with my dodgy circulation and not unless I wanted to be legless in a decade or so. So last year, I had a chat with the smoking cessation nurse at the local quack’s. At first, she suggested I should attend a quitting clinic. I politely declined. Opening circles and tales of woe weren’t on my agenda, not after 25 years in social care where opening circles and tales of woe were part of the job description. When she took one look at my medical notes, my concerned nurse decided to push the nuclear button and prescribed Champix, the anti-smoking wonder drug. Now we’re cooking on gas, I said to myself. Champix is manufactured by Pfizer, adding to their very profitable line in little blue pills.

My last cigarette was on the 1st December 2013 and I haven’t smoked since. During the treatment, I experienced no withdrawal symptoms and no cravings, even when on the sauce. A minor miracle.  There was a price to be paid of course.  From the long list of possible side-affects, I endured long nights of restless sleep, disturbing dreams and terrible flatulence. I almost blew Liam out of bed several times and felt drowsy and bloated for three months. It was all worth it. I am now a non-smoker.

Liam came out in sympathy. His last fag was also the 1st of December and, apart from the odd patch to relieve the pressure points, he hasn’t had a nicotine fix either. A major miracle. He’s a real trooper with Spartan self-discipline, my Liam, and my number one crutch. As it were.

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Oo-er, Missus

Most_PopularLet’s face it, the days between Christmas and New Year can be a bit of a damp squib. Unless you’ve been forced onto the tills by the hordes of hysterical bargain hunters flashing the plastic, it’s a time to tread water. The entire western world is stuck between the over-bloated, over-indulgent and sometimes over-wrought Noel (a time when suicides soar) and the over-bloated, over-indulgent and sometimes over-wrought New Year’s knees-up (the most popular time to get dumped). Even the desk-bound know that it’s the graveyard slot with only the filing to do.

Sadly, Liam and I both succumbed to the dreaded festive lurgy. Our inter-feast days were spent on the sofa under a duvet with a keg of Lemsip and a crate of Kleenex extra absorbent. Sadly, there were no hide-the-sausage shenanigans either: we had neither the energy nor inclination for a furtive fumble beneath the eiderdown. Still, I did manage to get my stiff little digits moving and before long I was fingering the internet with gusto, a willy-nilly and desperate attempt to amuse myself. Judging by Perking the Pansies, I wasn’t the only one who swallowed the boredom pill. And what a fruity lot the pansy readers were. On 28th December, four out of the eight most popular posts (as revealed by my sidebar) featured racy images. The lean, semi-naked scaffolder was particularly popular. I hope my thrill-seeking surfers weren’t too disappointed by what they actually found. To quote the late, great Frankie Howerd, Oo-er, Missus.

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Back on the Treadmill

Back on the Treadmill

treadmillRegular readers will know that I’ve been under the doctor because of something called PAD (Peripheral Arterial Disease). It’s caused by the thin veins I inherited from my father and a wayward lifestyle of sex, drugs and sausage rolls. The condition affects my mobility and is quite common in old farts of my age, apparently. Following the double stent to unblock my dodgy groin, my consultant (and Dr Green from ER lookelikee) decided that exercise was the best way of evading the surgeon’s knife. This was uncharted waters for me. Apart from a healthy amount of rumpy-bumpy, I’ve always taken the path of least resistance in the physical therapy stakes – buses, tubes, taxis, piggy-backs. I’m a hop on, hop off kind of guy. Ask Liam. He knows. I always figured that if God had wanted me to walk further than the pub, She would have given me more than a 27 inch inside leg. Still, to avoid going the way of my dear old Dad (who didn’t make it past 50), I took the quack’s advice and joined a city-centre gym (no sniggering at the back). It’s a low-cost 24/7 DIY affair, fit for the age of austerity. Stripped-down and ultra-modern without a fluffy robe or juice bar in sight, there are just rows and rows of hi-tech instruments of torture and wall-to-wall mirrors for watching the inquisition. Thankfully, I’m not too intimidated by half-my-age beefed up muscle marys on steroids. While they’re pumping iron on the top floor, I’m fast-walking with the girls downstairs. Life’s a catwalk and I’m back on the treadmill.

Warts and All

WitchI noticed a little growth on my head beneath my slowly receding hairline. An ugly little lumpy bump popped up without warning. I didn’t know what it was. Best get it checked out, I thought. A childhood spent splashing  around in the tropical sun fleeing leeches as an army brat and four years under Anatolian skies squashing mozzies as a lotus eater and I could well be asking for trouble. My fierce (her word) German GP didn’t know what it was either. “Best get it checked out,” she barked and sent me off to a dermatologist. He didn’t know what it was. “Best get it sliced off,” he said. Four blue stitches, a neat little scar and a lab report later, it was just a wart. Not the viral kind of my carefree childhood days but the worry warts of my impending dotage. Wisdom warts Frau Doktor calls them. Witch’s warts I call them. I’ve already got a thicket sprouting from my nose, silver short and curlies and unregulated wind. What next? Gout?

From Little Acorns…

From Little Acorns…

Jack and John in EphesusOnce upon a time in another life, this seasoned old cynic met and fell for a handsome young man with razor-sharp wit and a glorious smile. His name was John. We collided in a long-gone dive in Earls Court called the Copacabana. He stayed the night and never left. Eight years into our fine romance John fell ill, quite suddenly. Within just six weeks he was dead. He died in my arms. It was quite a Hollywood moment but not one I care to reprise. That was 10 years ago. Even though I’ve been given a second time around, I still miss him.

John liked a slice of Turkey. We’d visited many times. When Liam and I first pitched our yurt in Anatolia, we bought an olive sapling in John’s memory and put it in a patio pot. It did remarkably well and bore fruit in the first year – a lean harvest but a harvest nonetheless. After we decided to wade back to Blighty, I asked Annie of Back to Bodrum fame if she would take care of John’s little twig in her Bodrum garden. Annie went one better and offered a sunny spot in the olive grove of her fabulous country pile.

My old mucky mucker, Ian, and his much younger squeeze, Matt, were our final gentlemen callers in old Bodrum Town. Back in the day, John, Ian and I had been the three muskequeers blazing a gay trail and frightening the locals from Ephesus to Antalya. Annie invited the lot of us out to her rural idyll for a spot of lunch and bit of aboriculture. She knows quite a lot about both. A gorgeous sunny afternoon of feasting, wine and gay-boy banter was polished off with a tree-planting flourish. Notice me proudly holding the big spade. Don’t be fooled. Annie’s husband did all the hard graft. All I did was plop the tree into the hole and pat it down like the Queen at an opening.

Now there is a little corner of Turkey that is forever John.

Thank you, Annie.

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