… to mention yesterday that the 20th November was the tenth anniversary of being rushed to hospital when a blood test revealed that, instead of a red cells blood count of between 14 and 16, mine was 3.8 – a figure that is officially too low to support life.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d begun to feel ill a few weeks earlier while I was in Canada and the position had slowly deteriorated since then. Eventually, I’d reached a point where I could no longer keep going.
When I was transferred to the University Hospital at Leuven in April 2016, they told me quite bluntly that no-one had ever lived longer than eleven years with this illness, so either I’ll be setting some kind of World Record or these notes will shudder to a sudden halt at some point in the not-too-distant future. We shall have to see how things pan out.
Meanwhile, back at the ran … errr … apartment, just for once, I finished with indecent haste everything that I needed to do. The notes were on line before 22:00 and I was in bed, would you believe, by 22:20. If only it could be like that every evening.
As I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it’s a waste of time going to bed early, because all it seems to mean is that I awaken correspondingly early the following morning. I was all set to write those words again this morning when I awoke at 03:27 and was still awake at 04:10. I was giving some serious thought to leaving the bed at that moment but the next thing that I recall was the alarm going off at 06:29 as usual.
The foregoing notwithstanding, it was still quite a struggle to raise myself from the Dead and toddle off into the bathroom. Next stop was the kitchen where I made my hot ginger, honey and hot lemon drink with which to take my medication.
Back in here, there were the dictaphone notes to transcribe. I’d been down in the Auvergne with a friend of mine. There was this big party taking place, so they doped me up with cough mixture etc so that I sounded healthy, and they dropped me off at this party. It went on for quite some time, and then it was time to head north. It was early in the morning, and I was thinking that if I have to drive through the towns and across country to join the motorway that brings me up here, I’d be running the risk of being found drink-driving, because I’m not used to drinking beer. I thought that if I nipped across to Combronde, which is ten kilometres away or something, I’d be on the other motorway. That way, I would be much better off in driving and heading north. So I began to set off, but for some reason, I found myself travelling with my friend again and his son. They had been somewhere and picked me up again. We were heading north. As we were going further north, suddenly the car shuddered to a halt and this boy, the son of my friend, suddenly screamed. It turned out that he had stubbed his toe somehow on the street outside and he’d hit a rock or something as we were going past. That had caused the car to shudder and stop, and that had caused him a most damaging pain to his foot.
Whatever was going on here, I really have no idea. Apart from one bottle of beer halfway down a mountain in Bulgaria in 1994 (it was the only refreshment available), I’ve not drunk any alcohol for decades. The rest of it is totally meaningless.
This started off being on a Native American reservation, guarding the tribes that had tried to break out to seek their freedom. However, I came across an old schoolfriend of mine while I was there and we began to chat about old times. I asked him what he was doing these days, and he replied that he was working for a radio station. So, of course, was I. We had a chat about what we were doing. He worked the late show, which was called something like “Good Evening”. He didn’t say exactly what he did, but he said that he had an album of music from the 1960s that had over sixty songs on it. That was what he played through his programme. I told him that I had a library of over fifteen thousand songs. He said that he remembered it from the olden days, but I replied that it had grown much bigger these days as I had been collecting discs and albums unashamedly over the last ever-so-many years. We carried on chatting like that for a while.
Native American reservations have been the subject of conversation for several weeks. The Navajo Reservation that I visited in Arizona in 2002 was the saddest, poorest place on Earth and I don’t blame anyone for wanting to break out. The natives were struggling to raise crops in an arid semi-desert environment while the luscious, irrigated green fields halfway up the hill at the back were part of an irrigated golf course. I once read a report that when a group of Native Americans surrendered their best hunting grounds in return for an annuity, the annuity consisted of two yards of calico per person and one blanket between six.
The friend was someone whom I knew at school and with whom I shared an apartment in Crewe for a while. The record mentioned in the dream would indeed probably represent his entire record collection, whereas mine is probably much more than fifteen thousand songs these days … "it’s actually twelve thousand six hundred that he has digitalised so far" – ed ….
It was finally my last couple of days at work and retirement was actually going ahead. I left the bed early and then spent about half an hour trying to decide what clothes to wear. In the end, I settled on a grey suit, a grey shirt and a kind-of orange-red tie, but it took so long to do it that I was running horribly late, and my sister told me that my niece had been banging on the bathroom door for ages, trying to make me hurry up. However, I hadn’t found half of what I needed. There were some things lying around that I’m sure my sister was going to take home with her when she leaves so I discreetly hid one or two of them so that there would at least be something behind. I then grabbed my bass speaker cabinet and ran off for the final train. I burst into work just on time, where they were busy laying out some food for my retirement party. I thought that it was tomorrow that I retired, not today. But they were laying out this food, and I took them by surprise. I found that my brother was sitting at the desk next to me. He was playing around with the electronic equipment that the usual woman who sat there had left behind, and making some remarks about how far behind in her work she was, and how much chaos it all was. I dumped my bass speaker down and then dashed off somewhere else to do something, but I can’t remember what it was.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that being on the point of retirement has been a reoccurring theme in these dreams for quite some considerable time, but last night I finally made it … "well, almost" – ed … My brother has appeared in a few dreams here and there but one of my sisters? Where did she come from?
The nurse was quite early again, which suits me. No blood pressure to take, so he was in and out in five minutes, which suited me even better. I could push on and make breakfast.
While I was eating, I was reading some more of MY ARMY LIFE by Frances Carrington, or Mrs Grummond as she was at the time.
While she was travelling towards Fort Phil Kearny, she tells us that she "had an experience with cactus that, in the expressive term of a later day, was the limit.". Now who amongst us would not have liked to have been present to witness that? What with women having had experiences with cacti and Native Americans having intercourse with their ponies, there must never have been a dull moment on the frontier, to say the least.
But leaving that aside, when discussing mental health issues (which is an extremely rare thing for a layman to do in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century), she notes that "such a condition as insanity is unknown amongst squaws, and if insanity is sometimes attributed to the red man, it is due to the white man’s firewater. ".
Despite the interesting nature of much of her writing, it has to be taken with a pinch of salt in some places. She notes that "It was well known that there was gold to be found in all the creeks near us, and a few pannings in the nearest branch abundantly proved it; but not a soldier deserted the post, or shirked his duty in its pursuit." and continues with her eulogy in honour of the troops.
However, Margaret Carrington notes at least four soldiers who deserted the fort, and according to a report that I read elsewhere, there were about twenty-five in total. There was also a military prison at the fort that was quite full on a regular basis.
After breakfast, I had a few things to do, and then I finished the selection of the music for the next radio programme, edited, re-mixed, paired and segued it.
The taxi turned up for me somewhat later than programmed, so it was something of a rush to go to the Centre de Ré-education. And it was walking from the taxi to the building that I realised how much the chemotherapy had affected me. I really was ill.
Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I’d telephoned the Centre de Ré-education to complain about them over-taxing what remains of my strength. But as I have said before … "and on many occasions too" – ed …. it seems as if I have been talking to the walls. Today, I had three sessions, next Wednesday and Friday four, the following Wednesday four and the Friday after, FIVE.
That is taking the mickey and no mistake.
The first session with my physiotherapist was all about working on my ankle muscles. These are, of course, non-existent so we aren’t going to go far with all of this.
The second session was sitting in this pseudo-rowing machine, pushing weights with my feet.
There was a pause of half an hour here so I took the initiative, went onto the attack and stormed up to the offices of my doctor there and berated the secretary. She assured me that she had spoken to the doctor, but she would speak to the doctor again.
We shall see.
The third session was standing upright in this machine for half an hour, looking out of the window. And then it was home-time. And what a struggle that was. I was totally exhausted.
Back in here, I was helped into the apartment – my lovely, shining, clean apartment – by my faithful cleaner who had been hard at work in my absence. And I needed help too because I would never have managed it on my own.
Once inside, I crashed into a chair in the kitchen, and it took me an hour to summon up the energy to move into my office.
Once in the office, I crashed out completely and there I sat for about an hour and a half, totally out of it. When I awoke at 19:30, I was feeling so dreadful that I crawled into bed, fully-clothed, and called it a night.
But seeing as we have been talking about our author and her “experience with a cactus” … "well, one of us has" – ed … I was told that there was a saloon at Fort Phil Kearny. One day, she went inside and asked the saloon keeper for a double-entendre.
"What happened?" I asked naively
"The saloon keeper gave her one."
. Consequently, I have to make notes of what goes on so that I can recall them later. Nothing is more satisfying when contacting “authority” to be able to say things like "but in our conversation of 9th April 2016 you said …" and to be able to put the contemporary quote before their eyes.