… lady came to see me this afternoon, with a student trailing along behind her.

“Is it Thursday already” I asked innocently. Nothing like knocking them out of their stride. But then again, if they say that they’ll see me on Thursday then what do they expect?

Their plan apparently is that they can send me home in an ambulance and my health insurance would pay 80% of the costs.

“So what has happened about this physiotherapy at Pellemberg?”

“Ohh that’s another department looking into that”.

In other words we have a couple of different departments looking into different things and consequently working against, if not competing against, each other. I shall have to scotch this straight away before it’s gone too far.

But the idea that I’m too ill to go home under my own steam so they have to send me home in an ambulance is a horrendous idea. What happens next when I have to fend for myself with no after-care?

If anything signifies the beginning of the end then this is it, isn’t it? If I need an ambulance to go home, how on earth am I supposed to be well enough to come back?

And come back I have to as well. Not only do I have an appointment on 6th December, there are several more on 2nd January and then another on 13th March.

As I expected, the story about my breathing issues is going to run and run. And as I don’t have much longer to live, I may as well not bother. I told the Social Services person that I may as well stay at home and let nature run its course.

We talked about euthanasia but I don’t think that she took me seriously. But as for me, I’m in … errr … deadly earnest.

Especially after last night. Having gone to sleep at something like 22:00 I was awake again at 23:15 complete with headphones, listening to the radio. I switched everything off and lay there trying to sleep for several hours, watching the clock go round and round.

Eventually after several hours I must have fallen asleep because the alarm went off at 06:30 and awoke me. And having slowly come to my senses (which takes much longer these days than it ought given the amount of senses that I don’t have these days) I prepared to face the day.

There was some stuff on the dictaphone. I just dreamt that the whole floor here had been whitewashed even when I awoke and wanted to go to the bathroom I still didn’t leave my bed for a good few minutes thinking that it had been whitewashed and someone would come in very shortly and give me some instructions. It took me a whole 5 minutes to be able to pluck up whatever was necessary in order to put my feet on the floor and to find out that it was still the same old floor that it had been the last time I’d got up to go to the bathroom.

It really was quite amazing.

Nothing much happened for a while and eventually I fell asleep again. I was however shaken awake on a couple of occasions, most noticeably by someone who wanted to take me to an echography.

No schoolgirl around this time but I had a nice long wait in the cold and draughty corridor until I was seen. And then some technician poured all over me with the machine thing.

When she let me go I had another wait until someone came to fetch me. Back here my lunchtime meal was already served up. We had different Quornburgers for lunch and they were quite appetising.

The nurses came along shortly afterwards and they gave me an infusion of antibiotics. And immediately afterwards the Social Services people turned up.

So here they are, talking about releasing me from hospital with one hand and giving me an intravenous drip with the other hand. What on earth is really going on with all of this?

Later on in the evening there was football. Pontypridd v Cardiff Metropolitan.

Cardiff played some really nice football but lacked a cutting edge up front as they have done for the last couple of seasons. Pontypridd, second from bottom, played like it and offered even less but nevertheless it really did look as if anyone was going to score it would be a Pontyridd breakaway against the run of play.

However, a hopeful, aimless cross from the Met into the Pontypridd penalty area and a wild slash from a defender took it out of the hands of the Ponty keeper and that, dear reader, was that.

The match was rather like how I feel like now. A desperate rearguard action combined with a few moments of brilliance, only to be brought down by something completely out of my control.

So what do I do now? A taxi back home is not the answer but if it’s the only game in town I’m not sure what is.