Tag Archives: blood test

Monday 14th December 2015 – WELL …

… that didn’t work out quite as planned, did it?

I told you that I was going back home this afternoon to have a tidy-up, but it didn’t really work out quite like that. I did make it home with no problems but the first job was to unload Caliburn. There was all of the tiles in the back, as well as three big sacks of tile cement and grouting, a pane of glass, some floorboarding and a pile of other stuff too.

But although I moved all of the heavy stuff out of Caliburn, and one or two other bits too, but that was my lot, I’m afraid. It rather finished me off. I did manage a little later to make a door handle of sorts for the front door though, so my afternoon wasn’t completely wasted.

I blame a lot of it myself on what was going on through the night. I’d had an early night and started to watch a film, and that’s almost always guaranteed to send me off to sleep, just like it did last night.

And then I was on my travels again. With a fitful night, I don’t remember too much about it. But what I do remember was exciting enough. It concerns something like a vampire on the prowl over London and some kind of surgeon being implicated as the perpetrator. Doctor Watson was leaning out of the living room window at 221B Baker Street whilst musing to Holmes and recounting the 31 departments (are there 31? There were last night anyway!) in a modern Victorian hospital to which a surgeon might be attached. But I was exploring another avenue, a thread that led past a group of teenagers. I somehow managed to filter a message down to them with just enough information to provoke them, so as to see if it might smoke someone out of their cover. And sure enough, some girl rang me to thank me for the information which had helped them greatly. I tried to engage her in conversation, as part of my plan, but the line went dead – either we had been cut off, or (more probably) she had hung up. But I do remember being in my bedroom (wherever this might have been) which was a total tip (as usual) in a bed on wheels so that I could paddle it about the room. And I’d woken up at the usual time despite having had a late night but it was now in mid-afternoon and I was still in bed, not sure how I was going to manage to go back to sleep and also thinking that in five minutes I could have this room looking really tidy, so why wasn’t I doing it?

But that’s enough of that. I crawled myself out of my stinking pit at just before 08:00 and it wasn’t long before the nurse came. I had my injection and also my blood sample (and he burst out laughing when I told them how many goes they had had at the hospital to find my blood) and then I spent the rest of the morning working on the notes for my trip to Canada.

Coming back from home this evening I bumped (well, not literally) into Nicolette. She was taking their new dog Snowy (a younger version of Siroy who is unfortunately no longer with us). We had quite a chat and then I came back here, with Caliburn storming up the Font Nanaud, clearly enjoying being a quarter of a tonne lighter.

So tonight I’m watching Leicester against Chelsea and then I’m off to bed. I have the hospital in Montlucon tomorrow.

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Thursday 10th December 2015 – IT WASN’T ANYTHING LIKE …

… as good last night as it had been for the previous two nights. It was another night of tossing and turning in bed for a couple of hours in the middle of the night and while I did manage to wander off on my travels, I don’t remember a thing about it.

The nurse came round early enough for my morning injection and also to take a blood sample. I have to go through this routine twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays, as well as my twice-daily injections of anti-coagulant.

Later in in the morning, Terry had to sweep the chimney. It’s blocked up a little and the boiler here isn’t drawing to well. At least that’s his excuse. The real reason is that there will be a couple of Little People here over Christmas and Father Christmas will need to have a free passage into the house.

I think that I have it tough with having to stand on a step-stool and reach out of my attic windows with a very long brush to sweep the snow off my solar panels. To clean his chimney, Terry has to dismantle one of his attic windows, climb out onto the roof and then climb up onto the chimney stack. Then he can brush the chimney downwards from the top. He’s built a soot trap into the wall on the ground floor and all of the soot falls down into there where it can be shovelled out and vacuumed up.

After that, I cracked on alternating between having a doze and doing my revision. That kept me going until 18:30 when I had a most unwelcome phone call. It seems that my blood count is down again and I have to go into the day-hospital tomorrow for a blood transfusion.

An early start, a drive to Montlucon, an injection and then a blood transfusion. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow at all.

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Monday 7th December 2015 – HOW ABOUT THIS …

… for being brought back down to earth with a bump?

I can’t remember now what we were discussing but Liz came out with a “well, if you are still with us on Thursday …”, something that I thought was a delightful statement of pessimism. It turns out that what she means is that if I’m not detained in the hospital on Wednesday when I go for my check-up, but that was not how it sounded to me.

My late night last night meant that I was right out of it all through the night, and despite the odd trip here and there to go riding the porcelain horse, I don’t remember a thing. I do remember though waking up with cramp in my good arm, and that was pretty inconvenient. But at least it makes a change from having it in my legs.

The nurse was late too, and seeing as how I was having a blood test today I had to sit around starving until he arrived, and that didn’t improve my humour very much. That showed when I was doing my course work for my Hadrian’s Wall studies. Going back over what I’d written and submitted during the day, I can see that I’m becoming quite petulant in my old age.

I really need to cheer myself up a little, although I’m not quite sure how I can do that, especially given the present circumstances and my current state of health. New Zealand sounds quite enticing right now, sitting on a beach in the sun while everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is freezing to death, but seeing how I need injections twice a day, blood tests twice a week and the occasional control from the hospital, it’s clearly out of the question.

But this leads me on the a fantastic business idea which, I’m sure, would make millions. I’m certain that I’m not the only person to feel like this – there must be thousands like me – so instead of having a hospital, we had a floating hospital and all the sick, miserable and unhappy people like me just steamed off on a cruise somewhere on our floating hospital. Looking out of our “hospital” window one day and seeing Venice – the next day seeing the Acropolis (well, you know what I mean) and maybe even going to visit them – I’m sure that this would cheer up almost everybody. It certainly would cheer me up. There must be some mileage in this idea and I shall have to make further enquiries.

But I’ve effectively finished my course now. All that remains is the revision and then the exam, and then we shall see how I’ve done. But the issue then is “what am I going to do next?”. My animation course doesn’t start until mid-January and I need something to keep me out of mischief until then.

Perhaps I ought to write a book or something similar?

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Friday 20th November 2015 – AHH WELL!

So here I am.

It’s 08:00 in the morning and I crawl (and I do mean crawl) out of bed. I can safely say that I’ve never felt as bad as all of this. Getting down to Caliburn was something of a struggle and I’m sure that I couldn’t see straight as I drove down to Pionsat for my blood test. A surprise awaited me at the reception of the medical centre – on duty was one of the girls who runs the pie hut at FCPSH.

So having dealt with the blood test, I staggered back here and had my breakfast (luckily I’d prepared it before I went off) and then crashed out on the sofa.

I managed a coffee at about midday and then crashed out again, to be awoken by the telephone at 14:30. It was the doctor. “You have a very bad case of anaemia and you need to go to the hospital at once. I’ve prepared a file for you and there’s an ambulance voucher here at the office”

An ambulance voucher is one thing, but finding an ambulance is something else. In the end I ring up Terry and Liz, but they are out, but Rosemary is in and so she comes to the rescue. I have just about enough strength to throw a few things into a bag and then we are off.

At the hospital I check in, but I don’t even have enough time to find a seat before I’m whisked off into an emergency room and stuck on a bed. They couple me up to a vitamin tube and give me a good interrogation – and after about an hour, the blood arrived.

I had one “pochette” of blood in the emergency room and then they took me up to a room where they gave me two others.
“We have to check your blood pressure every 15 minutes during the transfusion process” explained the nurse.
“I’m a very light sleeper” I replied
“Well you are going to be in for a very long night” she answered.
And she was right.

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Thursday 19th November 2015 – I DIDN’T …

… do anything today.

Well, that’s not quite true. I was up reasonably early (well, reasonably for these days) and after breakfast I cracked on with the rock music programmes for Radio Anglais. By lunchtime, I’d completed the “Miscellaneous” programme and written all of the notes. Tomorrow, I’ll be doing the live programme, although I’ve no idea yet what concert I’m going to choose.

Another thing that I did do was to telephone the local doctor’s to see about a medical appointment, as I can’t go on much longer like this.

And this is the beauty of living in France, and not in the UK.
Our Hero – “I need to make an appointment to see the doctor sometime soon”.
Receptionist – “is it urgent?”
Our Hero – “not really”
Receptionist – “well, if it’s not urgent can it wait until 15:30?”
Our Hero – “today?”
Receptionist – “yes, today”
As one of my friends in the UK commented, “had you been in the UK, you would have been offered an appointment at 2020, and that wouldn’t have been 8/20 in the evening either”.

And so I duly struggled into Pionsat and the doctor’s surgery, and the first thing that the doctor said to me when she saw me was “are you usually this colour?” Apparently I’m totally white – there’s not a patch of pink or anything in my skin or my fingernails and toenails. I had my blood pressure checked – which is within the norms – and she listened to my heart, which also seemed to be normal – and that’s good news – it means that I’m not a Tory, thank heavens.

But she’s worried about something because tomorrow I have to have a blood test at 09:00 – and so I suppose that I’ll have to spend all night studying. It has to be à jeune – namely “in famine”, so no breakfast tomorrow. How can I survive without a coffee – because that’s forbidden too. But she’s taken my ‘phone number and she’ll ring me as soon as she has the results – and I found that rather ominous too.

I also have to go into Montlucon for an ecographie – a heart examination – but I’ll wait and see what the blood test reveals before I ring up for an appointment. Wednesday afternoon would be a good day for me because it would mean that I could have a lift with Liz.

By the time I returned home I wasn’t in much of a state to do anything and crashed out here for an hour or so. Now I’m going for an early night because of my blood test.

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