Tag Archives: hospital

Thursday 20th April 2023 – HAVE YOU ANY …

… idea of just how difficult I’m finding things right now?

Today at the hospital they had no fewer than 5 goes at putting a catheter into my arms. My left arm is hurting like hell as a consequence and my right arm isn’t much better. They finally managed to fit one into the back of my right hand and they’ve left it in there for tomorrow.

Consequently even the most simple of tasks like going for a ride on the porcelain horse is … errr … somewhat complicated, and I’m going to be in a right mess by the time that they remove it, if they ever do.

So that’s the bad news. How about the worse news?

According to the neurologist I’m in quite a mess (no surprise there, but she’s actually referring to this infection in my nervous system) and I mustn’t count on this week being the only week during which treatment will be given. They will take a blood test before I leave here tomorrow, let the nerve specialist here in Granville know the results and see whether (as is quite likely) further treatment will be necessary.

Apparently this stuff that they are giving me is quite vicious so they can only give it to me in dribs and drabs. As a result it seems that some kind of plan about coming back here for a week every month or two will be on the cards for the foreseeable future.

In other words, one week in every 4 I might be in Leuven and a second week in every 4 I might be in Avranches. So I don’t know why I’m bothering to buy an apartment. I may as well rent a hospital bed.

Some people might be wondering why I don’t simply have my treatment in one place. Well, believe me, that was the initial plan but regular readers of this rubbish will recall the events of early December last year and how that ended up. At least, here in Avranches they are taking it seriously.

But anyway, I digress.

Last night wasn’t as good as the previous night’s sleep. Once more it took me an age to go off to sleep. However I was awake at 06:20 this morning long before the alarm went off and by 06:45 I was up and about.

After the medication and a good wash Caliburn and I hit the road and headed off for Avranches. I’ve found a new way to the hospital which while being slightly longer, is rather quicker as there’s a section of dual carriageway where I can open Caliburn up to 110kph. He needs a good run like that to blow the soot out of his fuel injectors.

There was something of a wait while they sorted themselves out and fitted my pipes and tubes, and then they pumped me full of the stuff. The neurologist came for a chat while it was all going on, and then when it finished she gave me a few tests – tests that confirmed what we all know, and that is that there is no power at all in my right leg.

As a result of all of this I was later than usual coming home and after having my toasted fruit bread and coffee I … errr … crashed out for an hour. This stuff takes it out of me right enough

Once I’d recovered my composure I had a listen to the dictaphone to find out where I’d been during the night. I was in Shavington at one point, living in our house and I had to go to pick up the post. For some unknown reason the post was delivered in the back garden of the next-door neighbour. We had to cross through the gap in the fence and walk down their path to the end of the garden. When I did that there were 2 kids playing in the back garden. One of them wanted me to tell his friend about the 2 dogs we used to have. I said “if you want to see them you have to have very good eyesight. They aren’t here any more”. There was some music playing. I asked about it. There was a record player there that had an amplifier with a speaker attached and then there was a separate speaker. The lad said that the amplifier and connected speaker and the other free speaker with it were on sale for £80. I thought that that was a good deal and I gave some serious consideration to buying it.

Later on we were living on a farm somewhere. Our next-door neighbours were Percy Penguin’s family. We were working in collaboration with them. I had to go to pick up something from there but I didn’t really fancy meeting their dog. I went anyway. WHile I was there I picked up the bicycle that her father had had. I noticed that the wheel was buckled but I had a ride all the same. Then he said that he’d been out on it a few days ago but had had a puncture. This was obviously what he meant and I wondered if I should mend the puncture for him. But that’s not going to solve the problem of the wheel. There was another neighbour round at her house too so I went back with this bike and propped it up in our yard but it fell over with a couple of other bikes too. We had a chat but I suddenly looked at my watch. It was 09:54. I thought “God! I start work at 10:00. I’m going to have to go”. I had to hurriedly make my excuses, at the same time talk about this bike and get ready to clear off for work.

But it was strange being round at Percy Penguin’s house talking to her father and she wasn’t there. She must have heard me coming.

The rest of the day has been spent in an unsccessful attempt trying to track down a copy of a single entitled “Lucy Brown” by a musician called Trevor Williams. At another time he was bassist with a group called Audience whose album HOUSE ON THE HILL has been on my playlist since the day it came out.

Apart from that, I’ve been writing a few more notes here and there but it’s not at all easy given the state in which I currently find myself.

Tea tonight was one of those curried burgers of which I seem to have a shed-load, together with some spicy fried rice with onion and garlic, and some spinach for good measure. And that was really delicious.

But right now I’m off to bed. I doubt if I’ll sleep tonight because I’m in agony and in any case it’s not easy to make myself comfortable with this needle in the back of my right hand. But I have to go through the motions.

Tomorrow I hope that I’ll be free to go on my way but if these treatments have to continue I’m going to see whether I can persuade someone to fit a catheter port in my chest like I used to have.

That was painful but they only had to do it once in 5 years. 5 times in one day is going completely overboard.

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Wednesday 19th April 2023 – MY LEFTOVER CURRY …

… tonight was even better than before. Adding some of that soya yoghurt that I bought instead of the soya cream has certainly made a difference.

And so has mopping up the curry sauce with a home-made garlic naan. That’s the final touch to what was a really excellent meal and I am well-pleased with that.

In fact, just as I am pleased with my night last night. Although I went to bed rather later than planned and took an age to go off to sleep I remember absolutely nothing whatever of the night.

It was 06:50 when I awoke spontaneously so I didn’t hang about. I was out of bed quite quickly.

After the medication and a good scrub Caliburn and I hit the road for the hospital. Once again, I was in and out fairly rapidly although there was a different crew of medical personnel there today who didn’t seem to be quite as rapid as the lot who were there earlier in the week.

Nevertheless, at about 11:30 or so they heaved me out after my perfusion and I was back here by 12:15.

A couple of my neighbours were outside so we had a good chat – it seems that I’m quite popular now that I’m to join the ranks of the owner-occupiers – and then I came in.

But coming up the stairs I was surprised to find that,, at least for the first 7 or 8 of them, I could come up the stairs without leaning on the handrail or heaving myself up with the crutches. Only one step at a time leading with the left leg, not alternately leading with each foot in turn, but this is real progress.

It has to be said that I couldn’t do it with all of the stairs but even one of them, never mind seven or eight, is a vast improvement on what went before.

After my lunch I had a look – or rather, a listen – to the dictaphone. And to my surprise there was some stuff on there that I can’t remember at all. I was with a girl last night who reminded me very much of a girl whom I knew quite well at one time. We were living together in a small apartment. There was a guy who had come round to see us for something. She was standing on top of a ladder working away at something up on the ceiling. She was flirting a little with this guy. I pretended not to take a great deal of notice. I thought that I wouldn’t let it pass by unremarked. They were talking about things. I was standing underneath the ladder looking up. I said “the best view in the apartment is from where I’m standing at the moment” and things like that. Eventually she came down. I grabbed hold of her and gave her a great big hug saying “I’m glad that you’re down and not up there”. She replied “yes, I could see that you were a little worried”. “Yes” I answered “but I didn’t stop you did I?”. “No” she replied “but you made it quite clear that you weren’t happy”. “Yes, but I didn’t stop you all the same”.

Yes let’s imagine that she had 3 Father Christmas impersonators sitting on our front lawn instead of one so she was upset and threw a stone at her but it missed, hit a rock, bounced back and hit her instead. She ended up in hospital. How would you feel if that happened to you? And if you wonder what that’s all about, so do I for I don’t have a clue. I can’t believe that I dictated it and I’ve no idea what it’s supposed to mean.

Later on I was in my beige Cortina driving around mid-western USA. It was becoming dark and I was looking for a place to stay. I came across a place that was advertising cabins to rent so I thought that I’d go there. It was a right run-down place like something out of a Steinbeck novel. I went into a barn and there was everything there, a couple of old coaches, all sorts of stuff. I started to chat to the proprietor telling him what I want. We talked a little about what I’d been doing etc. He pointed up into the loft “there’s a bed up there. You come into the house, walk up the stairs and there’s a gangway across into the loft. You can sleep up there”. “How much do I owe you for that?”. “Nothing” he replied. “Don’t be silly” I said. He answered “you can stay here for nothing”. I wasn’t going to turn that down even though it was rather primitive. We had a chat and went outside. By this time I was driving a coach, an ancient Plaxton thing from the early 60s. He noticed the signwriting on the back and asked where I had the coach signwritten. I said that it was on the coach when I bought it. Then I went back over to the Cortina (which was strange), opened the boot and found the boot keys on the floor. I wondered how they got there. I started to go through the boot to sort out the stuff that I’d need for the night to take with me up to the bed in the loft of this barn.

The rest of the day has been spent pairing off the music that I started yesterday and then researching some stuff about what happened on 12th January in the history of rock music and then writing notes about it. Interestingly, that’s the date of release of led Zeppelin’s 1st album and also the date of the last album by Deep Purple II – at least, until that line-up reformed in the 1980s.

Tea I have already mentioned, and it was rather rushed because there was football on the internet – the replay of Y Fflint v Caernarfon that was abandoned in contentious circumstances a short while ago.

Once more, despite it being two basement teams, it was an excellent advert for Welsh football with both teams desperate for points and throwing everything including the kitchen sink at each other. No dramatic goals from any goalkeeper this evening but nevertheless watching Y Fflint’s former Burnley keeper Harry Allen make a decisive tackle against 2 Caernarfon attackers in the centre circle while the rest of his team was in the Caernarfon penalty area was exciting to say the least.

Caernarfon just about scraped home with a winning goal in the 85th minute and they are now safe from relegation. But Y Fflint need to do better than Aberystwyth on Saturday in order to keep themselves up.

So on that note I’m off to bed. Day 4 of the hospital tomorrow and my appointment with the neurologist. I wonder what she’ll have to tell me.

And I wonder when this stuff that I’m taking will start to work.

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Tuesday 18th April 2023 – TODAY AT THE …

… hospital was even quicker than yesterday.

For a start, I didn’t have to sign in. Then I knew where I was going, and they didn’t have to weigh me or give me an electrogram.

And with the catheter already being in my arm, I didn’t need to have one fitted, so it was simply a case of giving me the medication.

Consequently I was in there at 08:45 and on my way home by 11:30. I even managed to catch the second half of my Welsh class.

Not that I felt much like it because I had another horrible night. And for some reason or other I awoke bolt-upright in the middle of a dream at 06:59 exactly so I fell out of bed immediately, just so that I can say that I actually did beat the alarm once again.

But not by very much.

It’s not possible to have a shower with my arm swathed in bandages so I had a good stand-up wash and then Caliburn and I headed for the hills.

The people at Avranches are really quite nice and pleasant. They have a good sense of humour too which always helps.

Back here afterwards I had a strong coffee and some of my fruit bread toasted with plenty of butter and then joined my Welsh class. Surprisingly it all passed off quite well and I was surprised.

After the lesson I sat down and listened to the dictaphone. And just look at where I went to during the night. It’s really no wonder that I was feeling so exhausted this morning. I started off in my apartment making breakfast. I put the beans on and a few other bits and pieces. Then I went into the bathroom to fetch some sliced bread from the freezer. I must have had the bread out previously and forgotten to put it back because it was just sitting on the shelf looking moth-eaten as if rats had been eating it. Of course there are no rats or mice anywhere in my apartment. I took 3 slices that looked really sad and put them down on top of the worktop. A huge pile of ants were suddenly disturbed from somewhere and started to scurry round all over the bread. That lot went immediately into the bin. Before that I forgot to say that when I went to go into the bathroom I couldn’t see a thing. I had to play around with the fuses in the wall to switch the fuse back on that control the lights at that end of the apartment. After the mess of the bread I went back into the kitchen. The beans were burning, the toast was smoking as if some bread from before was stuck in there and was on fire. It was all becoming a right mess with everything being burnt and I had nothing to eat.

And then I repeated the same dream pretty much again – about the bread and the kitchen etc being on fire and being eaten by ants and so on that I had earlier. I step back into dreams fairly often but to actually repeat one is rather strange.

Later on some Italian couple involved in some secret society had upset some group of Londoners. We’re going back into the days of Sherlock Holmes. He was investigating this. The Italian man had had an encounter with these four men just after he left home that turned very ugly. They then went to the woman’s house, rang the door and made her answer by taunting her on the doorstep. Sherlock Holmes had crept around the back and rang the bell at the back. The woman had to leave the people at the front and go to the back where she promptly fainted into the arms of Holmes. He quite simply set about the four of her attackers with a hatchet. Three of them he attacked but the fourth one took him by surprise with a pitchfork. He was lucky that he wasn’t badly hurt with the pitchfork but stood his ground and demolished these four guys with his small axe

Break into a stranger’s house and have a huge fight with him and then leave as a kind of pre-emptive strike against something and that really is exactly what I dictated. It’s as if I’ve missed something off the front). But in one particular house I noticed that he had all the ice trays in the freezer of water filling up but they were stacked one on top of another so as they froze they were gradually rising up being pushed out by the frozen water underneath them. I thought “what a good space-saving idea this is”.

The next one is payday. I just received my money and I was dancing about quite happily to some music on the computer. There was mush more to it than this but I can’t remember the rest of it at all.

Then we had 2 iguanas fighting in a hospital. They ended up right by a patient but suddenly a blast of cold air through the air vents on the floor sent them up in the air a little bit and stopped them from fighting. Everyone who was watching them was really amazed at this.

I’d also been away in Canada with a few friends. One of them was Alison. We’d had a much better time than usual because we’d learnt to have better value out of our time than we had done in the past. Then it was time to go back to school. I arrived rather later than I intended but there was still very few people there. I bumped into that girl Liz – not Liz Fox but the other one, her friend who was also called Liz but whose name I can’t now remember after all these years but I can see her vividly. I wanted to have a talk to her but she said “hello” and walked past. I could hear a couple of people gossiping about her from when she was at Primary School. There was some kind of discussion going on about someone. My friend from the Scottish Borders was there involved in this. The guy who was doing most of the talking saw me listening and trying to work out who was the subject. He passed me a Government report of a tribunal. The name wasn’t published but I could see from a lot of the evidence that I had a good idea who it was but I couldn’t put a name to it. I carried on reading it. I could see after a while that he was starting to become impatient. I ended up back in my classroom. A couple of girls came in. They began to talk. We mentioned vaguely the trip that I’d been on. I explained that it was really good but I didn’t go into any detail about it. We began to discuss something else. While we were there someone pulled up in a car. He made a really bad job of parking, left the car and staggered off. We could see that he was totally drunk. I asked who he was. They told me his name. We watched him. Someone said that he had left his 2 kids at home cooking. I’d never seen anyone so drunk as this and still standing on their 2 feet. There was lots more to this too but I can’t remember it now either.

Every now and again a dream comes up that reminds me of my school days and all of the wasted opportunities that I let slip through my fingers while I was there. The first part of that dream was another one that brought back quite a few “if only …” moments and how things really ought to have been so different.

Finally Nerina and I were having one of our big disputes last night. It led to me planning on leaving. I started to prepare my stuff. That meant going home which was a long way so I needed to make sure that I had everything. I couldn’t find the CD that I’d bought so I began to search for it everywhere. After a while Nerina came home. I asked her if she knew where it was. She told me to listen and I could hear a CD playing in the distance. I didn’t recognise it at first but eventually I worked out that it was Steve Winwood singing. That was the one that I wanted. She’d been recording it. She said that it had finished recording so she took it out and gave it back to me. I carried on packing. She was sitting on the sofa. I began to pass her things. There were these 4 oven gloves. I threw them to her and 1 hit her, 2 landed right in front of her and the other landed exactly where I wanted it to be, on the back of the settee behind her. It led to some kind of good-natured discussion after that. I reminded her of the time that she was baking a cake and it all went wrong. She threw it at the wall and I teased her about it and she began to smile. I said that it’s a shame that things changed in our relationship. Again there was much more to it than this that I can’t remember. At one point I was walking down Coleridge Way. There was an argument between 2 lorries, one a cement mixer. It went past the other lorry bu actually driving up on the kerb and scattering the pedestrians. Then it came back and did it again. When I reached where it was there were several pedestrians including a couple of kids lying on the pavement covered in blood as if they’d been struck by this cement mixer. It really was a strange dream.

It’s also another wasted opportunity too but I can really understand that regardless of anything else, she wouldn’t have thought it a wise idea to throw everything up and come off into the great wide-open world with someone like me, married or not.

The rest of the day has been spent finishing off some notes for a radio programme that’s half-completed, and then I made a very brief start on pairing off some music for the next radio programme. I’ll do some more of that tomorrow if I have another short day at the hospital. I know that it won’t be a short day on Thursday because I’ve already been told that the neurologist there is going to put me through my paces on Thursday afternoon.

Tea tonight was a taco roll with rice and veg. And I’m not sure what happened but my rice and veg were cooked to perfection tonight. I wish that it would turn out like that every time.

There’s plenty of my delicious stuffing left so it’ll be an excellent leftover curry tomorrow. There’s plenty of soya yoghurt to add to it instead of the soya cream and I have some naan bread dough in the freezer that I’ll have to take out of the freezer before I go to the hospital.

It sounds as if it might be a really good curry tomorrow and I hope that it is, especially as I seem to have got the hang of this naan bread.

And having found a good menu on the internet for vegan hash browns, I’ll be moving my meals into further uncharted territory in early course.

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Monday 17th April 2023 – MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE …

… hospital, they only kept me there for a couple of hours. I was expecting it to be all day.

When I arrived, I signed in and then went to the Day Ward. The nurse weighed me (and my weight is still slowly sinking down towards my best target weight) and gave me an electrocardiagram. They found that I had a heart which is good news as it proves that I’m not a Conservative.

They fitted a drain into me (which will stay in for the entire week) and then gave me a couple of bottles of intravenous drip.

That is in some respects disappointing. They gave me tons of that stuff while I was in hospital in Belgium and it didn’t seem to do me all that much good. I was expecting that they would be doing something else to help me overcome these issues that I’m having.

Still, I’m not turning down any treatment. I’ll take all that I can get if they think that it’ll do any good. And in any case, if it doesn’t work out I’ll be well-placed to receive more treatment of a different kind. I have to start at the beginning.

The intravenous drip was finished by 11:45 and then I was kicked out on my way home.

In some respects (but not in others) I was glad that it didn’t take all that long because I wanted to get home. I’d had another bad night, just when I thought that I’d got over those. In fact, setting the alarm at 07:00 counted for nothing because I was already up and about by then, having been awake for quite a while.

There was time to grab a shower before hitting the road. After all, I have to make myself look beautiful.

Once they threw me out I headed for home, a coffee and some corn flakes. I was hungry. But before I could come back into the apartment I was ambushed by a couple of neighbours and we had a chat for a while.

Once I’d organised my food, I had a bake-in. After all, I’ll need some food for lunch if I’m going to be back home at this time every day this week. So now I have a fruit and nut loaf along with a big pile of fruit and nut biscuits. And they are all delicious because I sampled them.

Biscuits seem to be quite easy to make really. There’s a base recipe of sugar, butter and flour in a ratio of 4/8/10 and then you add whatever flavouring you like. I found this afternoon that if you add a banana you deduct half the weight of the banana from the weight of the butter.

It’s also got me thinking about cocoa powder. I bet that I could make some nice chocolate biscuits with some of that creamed into the vegan butter.

Once again the air fryer was pressed into play because there were too many biscuits for the shelf in the oven. The air fryer bakes them quite nicely, but I can’t wait to have a bigger oven.

The effort was far too much for me though and once I’d settled down in my comfy chair I crashed out for well over an hour. I was clearly well out of everything after my exertions.

One reason why I was so tired, I reckon, was because of the kind of night that I’d had. Despite not being in bed for all that long, I’d been out on a considerable number of little voyages during the night that had kept me going. There was something to do with being on board a ship and fishing but I can’t really remember what that was. There was a boy who came up to me after I’d been giving a talk, a foreign boy whom I knew. He asked me in broken English “is it wrong to influence a judge?”. I asked “in what way? What do you mean?”. He replied “if I want her to come to bed with me”. I replied ” of course it’s not in that situation. Tell me about it”. He told me a little. I said “the best way to start is that people like to be talked about so you need to compliment her. Say how nice she looks. But don’t go too much overboard. If you do that it all sounds very false”.

And then I had to go off to work one morning. Another boy in the house had had an accident. He was in the Turkish baths steaming it off. Apparently he was far too ill to go anywhere. There was all kinds of discussion about who should do what when and where. Who needs a lift to work etc. I said “I’m quite happy to go and say goodbye to him and walk in to work”. In the end after a lengthy discussion this woman who might have been my mother I dunno said that she would go to clean out the Turkish bath when I’d finished saying goodbye before I went to work. One or two other people were there as well who had to leave. Generally it was total chaos that morning with all of this happening.

There was a family where there were several daughters. Daughter n°1 wanted to marry but her mother was totally opposed to her choice of husband so she even arranged with the preacher not to turn up at the wedding so she wouldn’t be able to marry him. Luckily she managed to find some other kind of itinerant preacher who married them. This was the story of the family gossip when everyone was together to celebrate the 35th anniversary of their marriage that her mother had thought wouldn’t last a week. They wanted her to be like her sister who as far as they were concerned married the perfect husband but the husband was away from home visiting his wife’s family when he received a text message from his wife, daughter n°2, that said “come home darling. I miss you. I have something for you that I want you to have”. It all sounded romantic so he dashed home only to find that he was given his divorce papers because she’d found out that he’d been cheating on her throughout all of her marriage.

I was back running another taxi business later on. I had some black Vauxhall Transcontinentals working for me. They had been in really bad condition when I’d bought them all quite old but I’d welded them up and they were quite good vehicles. I liked them very much. I was going off shift and cleaning my car out. It was absolutely filthy with bottles of pop and everything all over it. It was a real mess and it had taken ages for me to tidy it up. Then someone came over for a chat. I asked “do you want to see something funny?”. I showed him a paper that I’d received from a garage about this vehicle’s MoT along with some things that had failed it. He asked me “what did I do?”. I said “I took it to another garage because I didn’t believe half of what was written on this note”. He asked what they did and I answered that they charged me 30p to fix something and it passed. I shan’t be going to that first garage again.

There was another dream about a vicar in a church. In his parish some horrible crimes had been committed. The police investigation had gone on and on for ever. One day one of the parishioners, a very respectable upright man, came into church to look for the priest, presumably wanting a talk or maybe even wanting confession. The priest was down in the cellar sawing so he started to climb up. Just as he reached the top a couple of policemen pounced on the man, handcuffed him and dragged him off as if it was he, a most respectable family man, had been the one committing all these horrible crimes.

There was also something about a couple of twins whose parents were divorced. At the time they were living with their father. He’d taken them into work on a very quiet day because he had things to do there. While they were there some fellow employee kidnapped one of them. In fact he kidnapped them both but when a chase began he couldn’t carry them both so he dropped one and ran with the other. There was a big chase all the way through the factory. It went on for ages and he made his way out into the open heading for the car park. He was attacked by another employee and knocked unconscious. It was only then that the little girl realised that there was something wrong. There was a big discussion afterwards about this guy. He had previous convictions for all kinds of weird things. They wondered why a company like that had actually employed someone with his kind of history. His wife wasn’t surprised at all about her husband grabbing hold of this little girl and running away with her. That was a surprising thing as well that she treated it as something quite normal I suppose.

That’s not everything either. I was also out with a few people whom I know but you really don’t want to know how that particular story unfolded, especially if it’s tea time where you are.

While we’re on the subject of tea … “well, one of us is” – ed … I forgot to wind the heat back up in the air fryer after I’d baked my biscuits. Consequently the stuffed pepper that I’d baked from frozen hadn’t baked all the way through. The top hadn’t burnt, which was good news, but the bottom could have done with another 20° of heat.

Still, you can’t win a coconut every time and one of the things about making mistakes is that if you are lucky and have a good memory you can learn from them. I’ll have to try my best to do so.

So even though it’s early and I’m not all that tired after my sleep this afternoon, I’m going to bed. A good relax will do me good and we’ll see how things get on tomorrow. I’m hoping for a longer day at the hospital tomorrow with more treatment but I probably won’t get it.

But one thing that I’ve noticed from a map of Avranches is that all of the important shops are within staggering distance of each other. If I get away early on Friday I might do a lap around the shops there on Friday afternoon and see what they have to offer that might be different than what I can find in Granville.

That should be interesting.

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Friday 24th March 2023 – JUST BY WAY …

… of a change, I wasn’t up and walking about at 04:45 this morning.

It was in fact 03:30 instead. And I think that that tells you all that you need to know about another miserable night that I had.

However, I didn’t manage to be up and about this morning before the alarm went off. I was definitely awake at 07:15 but I must have fallen back to sleep at one point because it was something of a rude awakenng at 07:30 and I staggered out of bed looking like a cross between The Death of Nelson and the Wreck of the Hesperus.

After the medication and checking the mails and messages (including one from this guy with whom I spoke the other day about my shower) I contacted the hospital at leuven to sort out these appointments. The result of this is that I’ve arranged for them all to be on the 11th May. That means that I can breathe some kind of sigh of relief about my congested fixture list.

For most of the day I’ve been planning. I’m planning in the future to reorganise my radio programmes to give them more structure, and I’ve been going through my record library making a list of songs that make reference to space exploration. At the moment I have Elton John’s Rocket Man off with Guns and Roses’ Rocket Queen on the Hooters’ Satellite for Bebop Deluxe’s Honeymoon on Mars, to name just a few of the tracks I’ve been sorting out.

The dictaphone contained a few sound files too that needed transcribing. I was at a class for French lessons at one point last night. We were divided into groups of 2. With me and my partner, who was an old guy, we had to wander around the streets looking at nouns and adjectives, finding where they’d been paired either before the noun or after. I was very difficult for me of course because I was on crutches but I did the best that I could. We spotted maybe half a dozen where the adjective was in front of the noun. I couldn’t remember what they were so we had to go to scrounge an old envelope and pencil off someone, go back and start again. On the way around I ended up with a bottle of wine. As I was returning to where our group was standing there were some people with a dog. It wasn’t on a lead and began to run at me, barking. Every time it came close I gave it a kick with my left foot. I was quite accurate too. They were surprised and so was I because the way that my health is for walking I was surprised that I could kick anything at all. This dog certainly knew that it had had half a dozen good kicks from me as it tried to close in. In the end I gave the bottle to one of the people who was there with the rest of the class.

And then I was in a LIDL somewhere. It was half-full of all kinds of end-of-range stuff. Nothing in there of any particular importance. The rest was stuff that they were assembling for the following day. I was having a look around and couldn’t see anything that I liked. There was a film crew in there. A guy was filming something. He was with his son. Something happened and the father bawled out his son and said to the film crew “I hope that you didn’t record that”. I asked “why? Are you ashamed of it? You ought to be! Fancy treating your son like that!”. He followed me down the aisle and started trying to provoke a fight. he was completely out of his mind.

At another moment I was a passenger in a minibus that was doing a school run. We were all dropped off somewhere. The driver wandered off. He came back and got into his bus. Then he came over to me and said “can I ask you something?”. I replied “yes”. He said “next time you fuel the bus up can you fill it right to the brim?”. I replied “yes. Of course I can. I always wondered what happened to this bus after I got off it”. Just them another guy came up. He said “excuse me but someone was telling me that you don’t have a PSV licence, the blue and yellow one”. I pointed to the sign on the door that said “Shearings Bus and Coach”. I replied “of course I do. I worked for Shearings before. I used to work for Shearings. You could see a strange look on the faces of both of these guys.

There was a break in the day’s programme for the physiotherapist, who was very pleased with my progress, and tea tonight was a rather rushed salad and chips with veggie balls.

Rushed because there was football on the internet. Connah’s Quay Nomads v Y Drenewydd. It’s never easy to play football in a howling gale and rainstorm as it proved tonight but Connah’s Quay, playing with the wind in the second half, took full advantage and scored two goals.

However, I would have liked to have been on the touchline to check the positions when Harry Franklin played the ball to Jack Kenny for the second goal. From up on a gantry on the halfway line you have a totally different view of the proceedings and the perspective.

Nevertheless, there were several moments when I was convinced that the referee and the linesmen were officiating a completely different game to the one that I was watching.

Shopping tomorrow, and I don’t need much, although I have said that before with disastrous results. In any case, as I’m out on Tuesday I might nip to Lidl on the way home from the doctor’s then, which means that I’ll need even less today.

But we’ll see. Just because I don’t need much doesn’t mean that I won’t be buying much, does it?

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Thursday 16th March 2023 – DO YOU HAVE …

… any idea just how painful it is to have a needle stuck in your central nervous system in your spinal column?

I do!

And you don’t want to know either. Just sit and hope that it’s something that never ever happens to you.

In fact I must have expected something along these lines because I had another miserable night tossing and turning around in bed not being able to go to sleep. And when the alarm went off at 07:00 this morning I was already up and about.

It didn’t take me long to prepare myself and by 07:30 I was on the road to Avranches. It’s a good job that I was early too because in a daze I missed the by-pass around Sartilly and ended up being stuck in the roadworks in the town centre.

There was plenty of space in the car park at the hospital but there’s quite a long way to walk. It’s uphill too and that’s not ideal for someone on crutches to negotiate.

When I went to check in I found that I had forgotten to bring my wallet with my money and my personal papers with me. However, I’d remembered to bring everything else but surprisingly they didn’t ask me to produce any of it – not even the medication that they had told me to buy for the appointment.

After wandering around the hospital for quite some time trying to find my way I ended up in the Day Hospital where they found me a bed. First thing that they did once I was settled down was to send me off for one of these scans in one of these Stargate time-travelling portals.

It was a Siemens machine so I told them that I’d worked in the past for General Electric but they told me that they had tried those but preferred Siemens.

Back in the ward the nerve specialist came to see me to try to tell me what she was going to do but, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I told her that I wasn’t interested in knowing. I just signed the “consent” forms and told them to get on with it.

They put some kind of numbing plaster on my lower back, brought me a coffee and then left me to it for an hour or so while the numbing liquid did its work. And then they came back for the real business.

They drew off a couple of CCs of clear liquid which they said they would send away for an analysis and then communicate with the specialist in Granville whom I saw a few weeks ago. He’ll be in touch with me and let me know how we’ll proceed.

They wouldn’t let me go home straight away but insisted that I stay for a while to recover. They sent a choice of food to me and I settled for bread and lentils.

Surprisingly, I’m sure that what they did has done me some good because I seem to be moving a little easier and I could climb into Caliburn’s cab a little better. I’m sure that I’m not imagining this.

On the way home I called at Brico Cash in St Pair. I went to look at the showers that were on offer and ended up having a lengthy chat with one of the guys in the warehouse who gave me the phone number of someone he knows who installs showers. I also called somewhere else to look at showers and they gave me a helpful lead too that I shall be following up at the weekend.

By the time that I arrived home I was feeling rather feak and weeble so having fallen asleep on my chair in here, I ended up going to bed where I crashed out for three hours in a really deep sleep. At the hospital they warned me about this.

Once I’d awoken I had a listen to the dictaphone to discover the night’s activities. I was arguing with my family and friends last night. I had a record player that I hadn’t seen for ages because I’d lent it to some member of my family. It turned up at this family party. I noticed the number of LPs that it had played because there was a counter on it that had reached over 2000. I was horrified by this because I’d hardly ever used it. Bt it was borrowed out of my apartment not long after it was new. Then it was food time – burger and chips. Someone pushed my plate into my stomach. I ended up with all these boiling hot chips stuck to my clothes. I was busy trying to sort myself out but everyone just carried on eating and totally ignored it. I picked up the plate again and half the salad fell off the burger. I made some kind of remark about how I was pleased to see how interested my family was in looking after me, taking notice of how things were going on here. Again they all totally ignored me. Someone else passed me a burger but it was an ordinary one not a vegan one so I couldn’t eat it. Generally I was in an absolutely foul mood in this party.

And then there was something else to do with groups and music, about recording 2 extra tracks for some reason but I can’t remember very much about this because I was in the middle of starting to dictate it when I had a bad pain in my right knee again that totaly distracted me.

Finally I’d been away somewhere for a while and was slowly heading home. I called in at a library, a big modern building for a look round and browse through their second-hand books. I ended up with 3 or 4 books. I thought “should I stay or should I go” but was wondering about how long the parking ticket would last on the car. I decided to go anyway but I had to be home as they’d asked me to cover to drive the taxis the following day. When I walked out of the library I found that the car park was probably about 20 feet below where I was standing and it would be quite a jump down to road level. I wasn’t sure whether I could manage it but I couldn’t see any steps anywhere to take me down so I wondered how I was going to manage now to reach the car park with all the stuff that I was carrying and no way down this 20-foot drop.

Tea tonight was a vegan burger with pasta, veg and spicy tomato sauce. And that went down quite nicely too. I was good and ready for that. Rather a banal meal but I have tons of burgers to deal with following the spate of recent offers at LeClerc.

Tomorrow I have nothing much to do so I might have a relaxing day. I can’t have a day off on Sunday because there will be some fruit bread to bake and some carrots to peel dice and freeze because I’m running out.

There’s also the annual Home Renovation Fair in Granville at the weekend and I’m intending to visit because I want to see what else I can do about showers. I’m determined to find a few more quotations for the shower because, much as the work done by that company whose representative came to see me yesterday is of excellent quality, their price is way out of my pocket.

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Thursday 2nd March 2023 – JUST ONE LOOK …

… was all it took for them at the hospital to send me off for a blood transfusion. it was that obvious. They didn’t even wait for a sample of my blood.

No wonder that I’d been feeling like The Wreck Of The Hesperus for the last week or two.

They asked me a few pointed questions about some symptoms and when I answered in the affirmative that was all it took and I was off dragged to the Day Centre.

It was cold in my room last night and what with that and the general change in situation (because I’m having some real difficulty sleeping right now, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall) I hardly had any sleep at all last night and it was most uncomfortable. There was nothing whatsoever on the dictaphone, and that should give you a clue.

Breakfast was included in the price of my room so when the alarm went off I was downstairs quite quickly. Breakfast was actually quite nice although there wasn’t anything special to eat. And then back up here for a nice shower.

At 09:00 I was out of the door and across the road into the bus station and I didn’t have to wait long for a bus. It was quite crowded but I managed to find a seat.

Registering at the hospital was quite quick but then I had to wait an age to be seen because I’d arrived well in advance of my appointment. The doctor had quite a long chat to me and then went to fetch her professor who had an even longer chat with me.

They weren’t too happy that I hadn’t gone for my appointments at the New Year but I explained all of the issues that I was facing – how I couldn’t walk, how I can no longer go through Paris, how there were no buses running when I needed to leave etc etc.

It all resolved itself with them saying that they will arrange a few appointments for me in 3 months time and they would like me to attend.

We shall see.

It was a different Day Centre to the usual one. It was quite a hike as well so they stuck me in a wheelchair and sent for someone to push me. I had to wait about half an hour for someone to come and then we set off on our marathon hike.

At the Day Centre I had another long wait until a comfy chair liberated itself and then an even longer wait for the blood to arrive from the central repository. They found me some food and a few cups of coffee while I was waiting so it wasn’t all despair.

Everything took so long to organise that it was almost 18:30 when I finally left. Too late to go to the chemist to redeem my prescriptions and too late to go to pick up the spices from the Asian warehouse. Instead, I caught a bus back to town.

On the way back to the hotel I popped into the supermarket down the road and bought some bread and tomatoes. It’s going to be another long day tomorrow on the road and I’ll need some supplies.

And then I borrowed a knife from the restaurant and made some sandwiches here for the journey back home.

There’s a fritkot around the corner from here and you can’t come to Belgium and not have your supply of fritjes so I went down there later on and had my fritjes with some vegan loempjes that they had. One thing about being in Leuven is that with so many students here there’s a good range of vegetarian and vegan food.

So an early start tomorrow, probably without breakfast because they don’t start serving it until 07:00 and I’ll be leaving Brussels on the bus at 08:20 so I need to get a move on.

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Tuesday 27th December 2022 – I HAVE BEEN …

… a little more motivated today.

Not by very much, I have to say, but at least I’ve managed to do a couple of things today.

Not that you would have thought so the way the morning unfolded because I spent more of it in bed than I ought to have done. No chance whatever of me leaving the bed when the alarm went off at 07:30. It was much more like 09:00 when I finally broke surface today.

Mind you, that’s not a surprise judging by the amount of travelling that I did during the night. I was running some kind of school but it wasn’t a boarding school, it was a front for something else. However it was such fun having this boarding school teaching the kids English etc that it actually became the principal occupation rather than whatever it was that we were intending to do. We taught the boys and girls poetry. We had a couple of them write out poems. I had to go to print them so I sent one boy down to the printer while I printed them off so he could bring them back. For some unknown reason I couldn’t remember the key combination to print and the screen was too far away for me to read. It took me ages to remember the CTRL+P shortcut to make these things print off

Later on, I stepped back into this dream, took the school up again and these pupils there. One of the pupils had to write out a poem so I let him do it. He was comfortably over the limit of words but it sounded so good that I tried to have him write another. His parents were away with the British Civil Service so he was staying at our boarding school. He sat down to write a second one but was shot in the rigging as he did so and all his possessions that he’d found had all been wiped out and broken

Then later still I was back in there yet again. We were checking photos of these kids at this school. There was one of a boy and girl. They each had a sticker in their ear. One had a green sticker, one had a red sticker in it. The girl’s said “gaffer” or “boss” and I can’t remember the boy’s but it implied that the girl was in charge and he was just her servant or something.

And now for something completely different. When I went into the shed after having been out for a day or two I found this motorbike and sidecar in there. It was an old fore-and-aft V-twin that somehow I had an impression that it was a BMW although it wasn’t. I was trying hard to identify it but but I couldn’t see any maker’s name on it at all. It was black and quite old, probably from the 60s and looked as if Laurent and Xavier had dropped it off on me. It was really the most impressive beast that I’d ever seen. I’d been talking to them about motor bikes a few days ago. I’d no idea how come this had appeared in my shed but it was an unidentified V-twin fore-and-aft. Everything about it said BMW but there was no plate on the engine or on the frame or tank to say what it might be. It was completely blank.

After that I was with a boy and a girl. We ended up at a cottage. There was a huge pile of Mary’s paperwork. While the boy and girl were sitting in front of the fire keeping warm I was going through the paperwork finding all kinds of things. I sorted out as much as I could but there was still a big pile of unsorted stuff. It was 03:00 and I said that I had to go. I said to these two “whatever you do, you mustn’t leave until the fire had gone right down because we don’t want the place burning down”. They agreed to stay. I couldn’t find my guitars. They thought that they had been taken by someone else into the hall so I had to hunt around for them at the very last minute before leaving. It was about 03:15 before I was finally ready to go.

Surprisingly, I stepped back into this dream too. One of the things that we found in these papers was a document dated April 1940, a handbook for farmers issued by the Farmers’ Union. For a start, the back pages were in Dutch so it was intended for an audience of Dutch farmers coming to settle in Nantwich. It included articles like “love your slave” and all kinds of outdated stuff like that which even for the 1940s was extremely near the knuckle. I read it out to these people with me and they were astonished. Then it became time for me to go and do a couple of deliveries and then I’d been told that I could go home after that so I prepared myself to go. But this document was astonishing, 1940 as well and aimed for everyone in the Farmers Union in the Nantwich area.

Once I’d finally managed to drag myself round into the Land of the Living, the first thing that I had to do was to deal with the questionnaire that I had been sent yesterday.

That involved printing it out, completing it, scanning it, scouring around for the supporting documents and then sending off everything. By e-mail of course because I can’t walk down into town and the Post Office.

You’d be surprised how long all of that took to do as well. Nothing is as easy or as straightforward as it might be and I have a variety of good and valid reasons why my information is not as easy or as straightforward as anyone else’s.

Next stop was the bathroom and a shower. And you have no idea how difficult it’s becoming to climb into the bath in order to take a shower. This can’t go on for much longer and something certainly needs to happen in order that I can deal with this, and quite soon too.

There is plenty of rubbish that has accumulated around here and that needed to go to the bins across the road. It was a nice sunny day, if a little windy, so I decided to have a bash. It was a little easier to head that way but I was soon exhausted and the rest of the trip was a nightmare. But I made it in the end.

On the way back I passed by Caliburn and wound him up. He struggled into life so I let him run for a while. While he was ticking over I disconnected all of the ancillary electrical circuits that I wired in when I bought him. I want to see if the battery will charge better with it all disconnected.

We had a few bright sparks while I was doing it, and shame as it is to say it, a job that would usually take me just 2 or 3 minutes with no complications whatever took me half an hour.

The woman who lives upstairs who does cleaning too was in the corridor so I mentioned to her that I’ll be needing her services in due course. She’ll make arrangements to come to see me.

Back in here I sent off that incendiary letter that I’d written a few days ago, mentioning in passing that I’m not going for my appointments next week. Half an hour to the bins is longer than it used to take me to walk to the station. How on earth can I make it as far as Leuven, and on a Bank Holiday too?

The physiotherapist came round later and gave me a little work-out. He thinks that he might have found something and gave me a few instructions about massaging a muscle in my upper thigh.

Tea tonight, power cuts included, was a little different. Stuffed pepper with veg and rice but with no mushrooms I tried a small tin of kidney beans. It certainly made a difference, and a pleasant one too. I’ll try this again.

But I’m running short of onions now and that’s fatal. It looks as if another struggle to the Carrefour is on the agenda at some point.

However that’s for again. Right now I’m going to go to bed for (hopefully) some pleasant dreams. Tomorrow is a day with nothing planned so I might go round to see my neighbour and pay her for the shopping that she did for me last week. I need to pay my debts.

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Wednesday 7th December 2022 – FOR THOSE OF YOU …

… who were keeping score, I made it as far as the railway station before I fell down the stairs there. A couple of kind passers-by and a railway employee helped me to my feet and bandaged the cut on my hand, and then a railway porter was summoned to escort me – well, rather half-carry me to the hotel because my legs had turned to rubber.

Previously though, I couldn’t summon up the strength to climb onto the bus and a passenger had to help me. And then at the station, I couldn’t climb up the kerb so I couldn’t go down the ramp from the bus station. I had to walk all the way up the side of the road and onto the station where I had my encounter with the stairs.

There’s no doubt about it. This is serious.

At least I had a good sleep last night. It took ages to actually drop off but once I’d gone I’d gone for good. The alarm awoke me and I even managed to go to the bathroom but I had to be shaken awake for them to give me a blood test and I really didn’t notice breakfast coming in. It was already on the windoowsill when I looked for it.

Later on the nurses came to visit me and they went through their usual questionnaire
Senior nurse – “have you been to the toilet this morning?”
Our Hero emerging from the toilet – “errrr …. “

They gave me all of the medication that I needed to take over the next few days and also some of the paperwork. We had to wait for the rest.

The priest finally came to see me too but he had nothing to add to our discussion of Monday and it really was a waste of time.

After lunch the doctor came round and handed me the rest of the paperwork and wished me well, with that crooked smile on her face. The nurses came along after and took out the catheter from the back of my hand which was a great relief to me, that’s for sure. The pain was starting to get on my nerves.

From there I bravely staggered off to the showers for a good wash and brush up before I set sail. And then I changed into my own clothes.

Some of the stuff I’d packed before leaving and the rest I quickly gathered up and then said “goodbye” to the nurse who came to see me off.

There’ a sign on the wall from the rest area by the top of the steps near the entrance that “it’s 4 minutes” to the lift up to the ward where I had been living. The walk took me 25 minutes and I really did have to stop for a rest.

While I was there I took a gamble and went to book a room at the Ibis Budget Hotel at the back of the railway station. The bad news was that they only had rooms for tonight and not tomorrow.

Not to be outdone, I noticed that tomorrow night there was still a room at the hotel by the Gare du Midi in Brussels where I stayed when I arrived and where I had left some stuff. Consequently I booked the room there and with a bit of luck I can recover my things, if they still have them.

My journey down to the bus stop was slow, steady and painful and I’ve described my journey from there down to the hotel. And how I was glad to fall onto my bed.

in the evening I went across the road to the fritkot for some food. It was slightly easier without anything to carry so i have made an executive decision – and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, an executive decision is a decision where if it goes wrong, the person making it is executed.

And the decision? I’m going to jettison absolutely everything that is not essential – everything – and just make a crawl for it with just the laptop and a little paperwork. No medication, no washing equipment, no food, nothing. Alison will come past at some point at her convenience and pick up what I’ve left and keep it for whenever.

If that doesn’t work then nothing will. Of my 700km journey I’ve gone about 5 kms so far and already had one accident. How many more am I going to have before I make it home? If I ever do.

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Tuesday 6th December 2022 – I WAS RIGHT …

… about the plasma transfusion. I was knocked out for a couple of hours afterwards. It took that much out of me.

What else I was right about concerning this plasma was that it did come up by messenger, it was a nurse who coupled it up and I didn’t see a soul at all from the Oncology department.

Instead, I listened to the dictaphone. I was getting married but because I was now a priest I could perform the marriage myself, which I did. There was also another couple behind me who was wanting to marry too so I took the ceremony involving me. Of course being my first ceremony it ran on and on. These people behind were extremely impatient. I made something of a mess of my ceremony as a result of which it over-ran. Then I had to marry these two people. It was difficult because I could hardly remember the words. There was a question of writing out the marriage certificate. My brother was in the middle of writing one out for someone but had left it. I had to take out the carbon paper and put carbon paper in for my marriage certificate because everything had to be done in order. The people behind were urging me to get on with my certificate. I started but it was a nightmare. I had everything wrong, I couldn’t remember where the phone box was where I’d first met my wife. It turned out that it was right outside my brother’s house and that would cause some embarrassment to someone, just generally speaking I was making a total mess of it. It was taking hours and these people were extremely impatient. They said something to me that they needed this certificate urgently. I could see that whatever reason they were giving was now completely ebbing away. I felt embarrassed but I had to do mine first even though it was a total mess. I hadn’t even begun to think about witnesses for the certificates and my wedding party had broken up a long time ago. This was all going to be an extreme embarrassment.

Later on I was holding a football training session last night. There were several kids there and several senior players from clubs like Manchester City, Liverpool and Birmingham City etc. We’d been playing there for most of the morning and it became lunch. I gathered everyone around me and said that I’d treat them all to lunch so I needed to collect their order. People were giving me orders for fish and chips and cans of drink. I was writing it down ready to go off with Caliburn to buy everything. One of the Liverpool players said that he would use the lunch break to practise his techniques about this and that and also try to commentate to see how a commentator would be. Of course all the ears of the young kids pricked up. They all decided that they’d stay too so that they’d have some experience with this Liverpool guy. Another senior professional said that he’d stop. The 2 Manchester City guys said that they’d go home and come back later but almost everyone there decided that they’d stop to see what this Liverpool guy could do for themselves in their lunch break. I had a feeling that this lunch break was going to run into a fortune but nevertheless I’d promised so I took everyone’s order for fish and chips or whatever and canned drink and made arrangements to go off to buy them

Who else I didn’t see was the priest who told me that he would be back to see me today, and although the doctor from yesterday came by to gloat earlier in the day, she didn’t “come back to see you later” as she said she would either.

Not of course that I’m worried. As I told Liz when we were chatting on the internet and as regular readers of this rubbish will recall, I’ve met their sort before and they don’t worry me in the slightest. It’s just one more raccoon skin on the wall, as the delightful saying goes, and the world will still turn round regardless of their best efforts to throw a spanner into my works.

What was much nicer – so much nicer in fact – was that the Iranian refugee who is nursing here and the student nurse who has featured regularly in these pages, both came to see me to say “goodbye”. We had quite a chat, much to the chagrin of the other patients on this side of the ward who were presumably waiting for attention, but they will just have to wait.

And so tomorrow I shall wake up slowly, go for a shower, change into my own clothes, throw my possessions into a red and white spotted handkerchief, attach it to a stick, throw it over my shoulder and set off to meet my fate.

One thing that I did say to the doctor was that as it’s 600 metres or so through the hospital to the bus stop, I’ll be organising a sweepstake among my friends around the world on the internet to see how far I get before I fall over.

And that reminds me. The physiotherapist from yesterday came to see me today to take me for a stagger down the corridor and a crawl back.

She was insisting that I have one of these two-wheeled, two legged perambulator things but I flatly refused. I walked in here and I’ll be walking out. I can’t see why my condition in this respect should have deteriorated so much while I’ve been in the care of the hospital and if it has, then that’s their problem rather than mine.

This led to quite an argument but I stood firm. I’m not walking in normally and going out like a handicapped person. It defies all logic.

She then asked me whether I would like to do some kind of cycling exercise. I replied “how would I know? I’m not the physiotherapist – you are” and that led to another argument.

Anyway, she brought in a kind-of bicycle thing that you can use while sitting on a chair. She set it up for 15 minutes in 1st gear and left me “to care for another patient”.

As she hadn’t come back by the time it stopped, I worked out how to configure it and set it off for another 15 minutes but in 8th gear. As if 1st gear is going to do me any good.

When she came back she took away the machine and disappeared without even checking the data on the computer screen. All of this therefore sounds pretty pointless to me.

What wasn’t pointless was the amount of sleep that I had last night. I must have fallen asleep quite quickly because I awoke with a start round about 23:15, presumably because of something on the Old-Time Radio.

So having switched off the computer I tried my best to go back to sleep and must have gone back to sleep because I awoke once more with a start at 06:00. And again at 06:30 when the alarm went off.

For some reason I was absolutely wasted and couldn’t move from my bed. But what surprised me was the silence. It was as if everyone had been beamed up by aliens and I was the only person left on the ward. However, eventually a clattering of bedpans from down the corridor brought me to my senses, such as they are.

But anyway I was unable to leave my bed before breakfast and consequently I was rather late making a start today.

Perhaps I ought to mention that there was a Welsh lesson today with it being Tuesday. I was dipping in and out as different people came to visit me but I made it through to the end although it could have passed off rather better.

We’ve discussed all the excitement today and that really is that I suppose. Things need to calm down now because tomorrow I’m on the road again, as I said earlier.

A good sleep will probably do me some good but it will all pale into insignificance if I can’t get out of the door.

What a state to be in, hey?

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Monday 5th December 2022 – SO THAT’S THAT THEN.

On Wednesday I shall be out on my ear. Complete, presumably, with the dressing on my left shoulder but without the virus, without my mobility and without an answer to the dozens of questions that I have asked.

And without the possibility of going for this physiotherapy thing either. Apparently there are strict criteria about who is and isn’t permitted to go and I don’t fit.

So what are the possibilities of going home?

  • having an ambulance (actually a Voiture Sanitaire Legère) to take me to my door – at a cost of €3600
  • having an ambulance of the hospital deposit me anywhere I like within the borders of Belgium
  • being shown the door here and left to fend for myself

Quite obviously, the first option is out of the question. It’s an absurdity.

The second option is out of the question too. Being deposited at Quévy or Doornik where I don’t know anyone or anything, don’t know where the railway stations or the hotels are – those kinds of options are out of the question too.

And so n°3 it is. I’ll stagger to the bus stop if I can, take the bus to the railway station and then head for the Ibis Budget at the back of the station and plan my next move.

Of course, going home and arriving as quickly as possible is my goal and I can’t wait to to be in the comfort and safety of my own four walls. But if I have a fall I’ll find myself in the Casualty department. The hospital isn’t the only thing that can play at going round and round in circles and eventually disappearing up its own catheter.

The doctor took quite a delight in telling me this. You could see her trying to suppress a smile as she spoke. She actually said “although we know that you’re not in any fit state” to make my own way home, or something like that. You can imagine the guffaw that that brought forth.

The Social Services woman just sat in a corner trying to pretend that she wasn’t here so I took a great deal of delight trying to drag her into the chat, much to her dismay.

Of course you can imagine how this developed. I told her that if this had happened 40 years ago no-one would have believed it. But what would have been satire 40 years ago is now very much the norm these days and no-one bats an eyelid any more.

Half an hour after they had left, bang on cue, the priest turned up – the one who saw me a while ago. He asked how I was so I told him the situation. He was appalled as you probably are by the whole situation.

So seeing as I had his attention I rather bent his ear with my problems. I concluded my rant by saying that the Byzantine administration is totally divorced from reality. He described it as an administration disjoncté (we were talking in French) and that’s a phrase that I’ll remember for future use.

In the end he wandered away. Somehow I’d managed to beat him down. I don’t think that anything will actually come of this but as I have said before, “throw a lot of whatsit onto a wherever and some of it might stick”.

Actually, I’m rather lucky. Their plan was to heave me out tomorrow morning and then I’d have to come back in the afternoon for my appointment with the Oncology department. But they agreed to let me stay until Wednesday and the Oncology department will come to me on Tuesday.

In actual fact, what I bet will happen is that instead of coming to me, the oncology department will send a messenger with the plasma and a nurse will couple me up. No-one from the Oncology department will set foot in here.

That would be in accordance with usual practice from the departments involved in my (lack of) care.

On the good side though, once more my friends have rallied to the flag. I was chatting to Rosemary later on the ‘phone and she said “why don’t you come and stay with me? Get the train down here”.

This is on a par with Rachel’s offer to fly over from Canada to look after me. As I’ve said before, I don’t have many friends but those I have are the best in the world.

Unfortunately I had to decline Rosemary’s offer. If I’m going anywhere, I’m going home. I need to have my things around me, regroup my forces, and make plans for the future. if I’m going to stay at home and let nature take its course, I won’t be able to negotiate the long journey home from Rosemary’s whenever it becomes necessary,

Last night I needed to regroup my forces because I had something of a rough night. I went to sleep late but awoke at about 03:00 with the computer and the Old-Time Radio going and my headphones on. I switched everything off and tried my best to go back to sleep. But that wasn’t easy.

It was a very tired and exhausted me who dragged himself out of bed when the alarm went off at 06:30. I was playing about on the laptop when the student came to see me. She told me that my breakfast would be delayed as they needed a blood sample.

When she came back with all of the equipment she told me that she’d heard that there was a lot of trouble trying to find one of my veins and that they moved about quite a lot.

Nevertheless she crawled all over me inspecting my arms until she found something that she thought would do. “Be brave” I urged, so she dived in with her needle. It was the most painless that I have ever had and she cried “look, it works!” and I was so pleased for her.

When she’d finished I asked her how she’d managed to do it so well if it was so difficult and my veins moved around so much.

“Before I come to work” she said “I practise skipping with a rope to keep myself fit.”

She also tells me that she has a deep-sea diver’s licence and has been scuba-diving around the odd wreck or two. Here’s a girl who has a lot to say for herself.

Before she left she took my blood pressure etc. And after all of her mountaineering it’s hardly a surprise that half an hour later a qualified nurse came by to take my blood pressure again.

“Your blood pressure was rather high just now” she explained.

“Ohh really?” I asked. “I wonder why”

The rest of the day has passed between falling asleep and being shaken awake for something or other.

There was a new physiotherapist who took me down to the door at the end of the corridor. It was the usual stagger down there and a rather undignified stumble back here. It’s clear to almost everyone that never mind the 600 metres to the bus stop – I can’t even make 60 metres right now.

She had me doing a couple of exercises afterwards and I managed to tear a muscle in the side of my thigh. This bodes well for Wednesday, doesn’t it?

The doctor passed by during the morning too, presumably to soften me up for the meeting this afternoon. There are very strange things happening in this place, to be sure.

At some point I transcribed the dictaphone notes. I dreamt that all the nurses were trying to do something to me, pulling me about some on one side of the bed, some on the other so I couldn’t actually roll over into a comfortable way for them. I suddenly awoke and found that it was 02:15 and I still had the headphones on and the radio on the computer was still going. It was a programme about doctors and nurses coming to the bedside. I had something of an imaginary fight trying to deal with the skeleton of this situation before I realised what was going on and decided to go to sleep.

I’m not sure if I recorded this but somewhere during the night I dreamt that there was probably 20 people sleeping with me last night, all officers in different army regiments who had somehow come down to see where I was and what I was doing, and who I was doing it with, and ended up sleeping all around me. What I’d done was that I’d awoken early and switched everyone’s alarm clock around so that they would all be awoken at the wrong time, or each person would be awoken at the wrong time so that I could have a lie-in that particular morning

While I was asleep in the morning I was dreaming that I was Ali Baba. I was actually at an office and we were having a Christmas party. It was a fancy-dress parade and I’d bought everything for the people who worked for me, some little presents. When they’d all left after this party in this room that the office was throwing I changed into someone who was half-naked and climbed into some kind of silver sack kind of thing, a mesh sack, and went into the room where the party was taking place as Ali Baba in his laundry basket. I went to have a look and there were all kinds of stalls over at one end of the room with flowers and Christmas wreaths etc. There was some kind of stall selling DiY tools, all old kinds of stock that you’d typically find in a market stall including liquid easing oil at £2:99 a tin, like a reasonably-sized spam tin size. It was all quite interesting, this old stall selling these tools that were there. The strange thing was that no-one too any notice of me. I thought that my costume of Ali Baba was extremely ingenious but no-one made any kind of comment about it whatever. I was quite disappointed about that.

So right now I’m off to bed I’ve had enough for today and with the Oncology department becoming involved it’s going to be a tiring day.

And then there’s Wednesday and leaving here too. I’m not looking forward to that but even so, I need to be on form.

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Sunday 4th December 2022 – I WAS RIGHT …

… yesterday when I said that Sunday would be pretty much the same as Saturday. But then, it was no surprise, was it.

One of the minor differences though was that when the doctor came to see me, I was in bed. I hadn’t had my morning wash yet.

She didn’t have anything new to tell me and I didn’t have anything new to tell her. However I did have a lot to say for myself (as you might expect) which was cut short by her saying “Mr Hall, we’re just going round in circles”.

As indeed we are but until she (or anyone else for that matter) answers the questions that I raise, what did she expect?

Anyway she cleared off mid-discussion and I’m sure that you never expected anything else.

They are still intent on expelling me, even though my blood count, that rose from 6.6 to 8.8 after the blood transfusion the other day, had fallen to 8.5 by Friday.

For the benefit of new readers, the accepted blood count for a healthy individual is between 13.0 and 15.0. The lower the blood count, the faster my heart must beat to convey the necessary oxygen to the various parts of the body. The critical limit is 8.0 by the way.

And as is pretty evident, my heart can’t keep on beating at this rate for ever. Vous avez le coeur du champion – “you have a champion’s heart” said a doctor at the beginning of all this back in 2015 and it’s only that which has kept me going. If it begins to fail, then I will have real problems.

And so now you know why I’m so concerned when my heart and my breathing start to show signs of breaking down, and why I’m on the warpath when they seem to be ignoring my concerns.

There were a few concerns about the events of the night.

The computer and Old-Time radio was still running at 23:15 so I switched it off and tried to go to sleep. I was still awake at 02:00, having spent some of the time surfing the internet on the mobile phone because I couldn’t go off to sleep. It’s really hard to sleep, light sleeper or not, when nurses and patrolling doctors have meetings right outside your open door.

Something else was that I allowed my imagination to run off on its own for a while and that will be important later.

I was having a really bad night. I was awoken at about 05:15 by a nurse who asked something like “where did I get something or other?”. I really can’t remember anything about it but I remembered what it was that she wanted to know but I’d forgotten now but I can remember when she said it what it was.

I was also at one time thinking or talking to a girl whom I knew from school and asking her next time why doesn’t she wear a skirt instead of jeans or trousers?. But where that came in I don’t know. I’d actually been thinking a lot about her before I’d gone to sleep while I was tossing and turning, as I mentioned earlier, so that was possibly something to do with it too

There was also something more than this too but if you’re eating your tea right now you don’t want to know about it.

After all of that I didn’t go back to sleep. When the alarm went off I made it to the bathroom, weighed myself on my return (I’m still below my upper target weight) and settled down with my laptop.

“You’re starting early” said the doctor who came in at that point. And I don’t think that she was prepared for the torrent that that comment unleashed.

Breakfast was late again and from then on the day just drifted. Much of it was spent either being asleep or shaken awake, which is no surprise after the catastrophe of last night.

Later in the afternoon Rosemary rang me for a nice chat and I had a lovely internet chat with Liz, although I think that I took her by surprise.

What must have been an even bigger surprise was my niece Rachel. She’s appalled, really appalled, by what’s happening and she asked me whether she should come over from Canada to look after me. And that’s the nicest thing that anyone has said to me for quite a while.

Of course I declined. I can’t drag someone a quarter of the way around the world. I’m pretty sure that as long as I manage to make it home I can manage to look after myself with a bit of help from the neighbours.

But right now I’m going to look after myself in bed. There’s a meeting about me tomorrow, to which I’m not invited of course, when they will discuss my future. I bet that they’ll vote to expel me on Tuesday morning.

And seeing as I have an appointment at the Haematology Department on Tuesday afternoon, will I have to come back for the appointment or will they simply cancel it?

We are living in interesting times.

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Saturday 3rd December 2022 – IT’S THE WEEKEND …

… and so it’s been quite quiet in here yet again.

There was a brief visit from a cardiologist though but she didn’t even give me time to sit down. She did come into my room and bellow my name while I was shaving and as a result I have a cut upper lip.

When I did come out, she pounced on me before I’d even had time to sit on the edge of the bed. She gave me the usual platitudes so I sent her packing with a flea in her ear by giving her my usual spiel about what I reckon is going to happen on Tuesday next week.

As Hawkwind once said, YOUR ONLY REAL PROTECTION IS FLIGHT and she adhered to Michael Moorcock’s counsels.

That’s really about all of the excitement today, although one of the nurses – and not a student nurse either – seems to be starting to become a little over-familiar. As if I don’t have enough on my plate.

Last night though was another strange night. I went to bed late as you might expect, and couldn’t go to sleep for quite a while. I’d turned off the computer (and the Old-Time Radio) at some point but still didn’t go off to sleep. I was left hanging on for quite a while.

At some point I must have fallen asleep because the alarm awoke me at 06:30. And so I had a listen to the dictaphone. I awoke 3 or 4 times and saw someone’s father kicking an animal. It might have been a beaver or something each time that I awoke. It was so real that I almost called someone to make a note of it because it really seemed as if that was what he was doing each time I awoke around 01:45.

After breakfast (which was rather late today) a nurse turfed me out of bed so that she could change my bedding. I cleared off for a wash and that was when I had my encounter with the doctor from Cardiology.

On several occasions I fell asleep – and deep sleeps too – only to be awoken by various nurses for various treatments and on one occasion for lunch.

And we’re back on the old soya burgers that I don’t like again. That was a shame after the nice burgers that we had had yesterday.

Apart from a chat with Liz today, nothing else has happened, except this over-familiar nurse. It’s been as boring this afternoon as boring can be.

Tomorrow will be the same too, I reckon, so I need to have a good sleep to prepare me for the effort that I’ll need to make o keep awake.

It’s all go, isn’t it?

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Friday 2nd December 2022 – THE SOCIAL SERVICES …

… 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.

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Thursday 1st December 2022 – I’M JUST BEGINNING …

… my sixth week in hospital, following an infection that laid most Canadians low for just three or four days.

I’ve had half a litre of fluid drained from my heart, I’ve had pneumonia of the lungs, I’m riddled with infection, I can’t use my left arm since the operation in my chest and since they put a catheter in the back of my hand and I need re-education on my lower limbs because I’ve lost the ability to walk and my balance is all over the place.

Every few hours I have antibiotics pumped into me and ointment smeared into my eyes. That latter, incidentally, explains all of the typos.

All I can say is that it’s a good job I didn’t catch Covid in Canada, isn’t it? I’d have been pushing up the daisies a long time before this.

Today should have been the day when the Social Services person should have been to see me to tell me how they are going to deal with my expulsion. All that I can say is that she’ll have to get a move on because it’s quite late.

In fact the only “official” whom I’ve seen today has been the record-breaking house doctor whom I saw yesterday. And if her visit was record-breaking yesterday, today’s smashed it into pieces. I don’t know how long it was because I forgot to switch off the stopwatch. And she wasn’t dragged away by a ‘phone call either.

She did however tell me that they were planning to carry out some kind of echography examination on my heart on due course. Knowing her record-keeping, this was probably the one that I had the other day when that schoolgirl helped out.

Last night I was awake at 00:45. I’ve no idea what disturbed me but it was probably some of the usual clatter. I was having a really interesting dream too and I managed to dictate it. We were making a film in Germany last night. It involved a little girl riding a bike. I was somehow involved in this scene waiting at a road junction. The girl kept on interrupting the editing by wanting less and less of me and more and more of her. In the end we decided that we’d just photograph again from a different perspective with me 90° on to the action and just simply watch her go past on her bicycle. This was what we began to do. She set off on her bicycle, heading straight on up this hill. I was parked at a side road where the traffic lights were against me knowing full well that I’d never be in this shot. There was an agricultural tractor pulling a huge trailer, the kind in which they put green silage and there was something else with it, coming up to this road junction. I thought that this is never ever going to stop. Just as it reached the road junction 2 gunshots fired out, presumably aimed at this tractor. We had an absolutely perfect film of this girl being hit twice in the open mouth with the bullets that had gone across almost as if they had been fired from my shoulder but must have been fired from behind me at some point, really high velocity, and she’d cycled past with her mouth open taking breath and they had gone through the open mouth and out through the cheek wall. There were these two bullet holes. She staggered into the room where we all were with the camera equipment etc. You could clearly see the gunshot in her mouth and one of them actually embedded in the wall behind her (we were actually doing some green-screening with all of this) but a bullet had gone and embedded itself in the wall behind her. She’d been hit twice in the mouth. I was absolutely bent on putting this scene in the film because you would never ever in your whole life have an incident like that unfold in front of you – one of your actors doing something banal like that and end up being shot twice. The fact that she was still on her feet walking was a miracle in itself. One part of me felt absolutely horrible that I’d been left out of a scene in a film but another part of me felt that this was a magnificent moment for something in this film to develop. You can imagine how my emotions were being torn. I knew full well that they would have her and this gunshot into this film somehow even if it meant that I’d be edited out. I’d just put it down to a fact of life.

Later on I was commentating on a Wales football game, an International. Wales were losing. I was busy talking about an injury that was taking place down on the left-hand touchline but making a few references to the game as a whole.

Come 03:00 and I was still awake, what with all of the noise going on, but I must have gone off back to sleep at some point because the alarm awoke me at 06:30.

Round about 09:15 the physiotherapist came round. He awoke me and I didn’t need telling what the score was. I was up and half-way down the corridor before I was even properly awake. He’s certainly had a rocket judging by how keep he was to get me going.

As usual, it was an agonising walk down to the end of the corridor and then coming back was the usual hell. I’m not sure how I managed it but I did.

He also had me doing a few more exercises before he cleared off at the end of his half-hour or so.

There has been bad news too. My little first-year student told me that this is her last week on the ward. She’s back in Nursing School next week. I told her that she will be sorely missed – especially by me if not by anyone else. As a little “goodbye” I let her couple me up to the liquid antibiotics and uncouple me afterwards.

One thing that I told her that the injection of the cleaner into the catheter is done depending on how well you like the patient. If you don’t like him or her you give the shot all at once with a violent shove to sent a freezing cold wave of liquid swarming through the body. If you like them, you do it gently, smoothly and slowly.

And as a result, she was gentleness itself. I’m glad that I’ve been able to help her and talk to her about her work from a patient’s point of view to give her a better understanding of what her job involves. That’s something that is often overlooked

That’s really everything. I’ve had a little chat with Liz too and that, exciting in itself, is just about as exciting as it was today. Nothing else of any importance happened.

Tomorrow is the last day of the week so I’m interested to see how things unfold. If they really are kicking me out on Tuesday they only have 2 working days and there’s a lot to fit in.

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