However, being disappointed in the outcome when I’ve done my best to help people is also par for the course. As Ambrose Bierce once famously said, "A year is a period of 365 disappointments"<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n There was time to do some more work on the outstanding radio programme before everyone else awoke, and then, having realised that I’d spent the night sleeping in my day clothes, I grabbed some clean clothes and went into the bathroom for a good wash.<\/p>\n The washing was piling up in the bathroom, seeing as there are more people than me living here at the moment, so I filled up the washing machine and set that going while I went in to try to drink some coffee. I found that I can’t drink strong coffee, so I had to thin it out with some boiling water. And, even worse, I can’t drink much of it before it begins to upset my stomach.<\/p>\n My faithful cleaner stuck her head in the door to see how I was doing, which was nice of her, followed by Isabelle the Nurse who was back to her cheery old self after yesterday’s emotion, and The Hound of the Baskervilles dragged its master off for walkies.<\/p>\n When the latter two came back, I tried some breakfast. A small amount of porridge, very thin, and so it overflowed the dish and flooded the microwave. I was half-expecting my slice of toast to set the kitchen on fire, the way things were going.<\/p>\n By now the washing was ready so we figured out a way to put the clothes airer up in the bedroom window on the windowsill. That’s the first time that the window has been opened since I lost the mobility in my legs. I can no longer go a-mountaineering over the chest of drawers in the bedroom.<\/p>\n Later on, we went for a drive northwards along the coast, visiting a few of the tidal islands (luckily it was low tide), finding a place to stop where my visitor could at long last have some fish and chips (they were delicious, apparently), a beach where the Hound of the Baskervilles could go for a roll in the sand, and ending up at the mouth of the River Sienne.<\/p>\n A turning tide prevented us from going much further so we turned and headed for home, having been out for a total of six and a half hours.<\/p>\n Tea tonight was, as usual, a pizza and blast me if the oven finally decided to cook something correctly in the correct time, after I’d set the oven to overcook by ten minutes as usual. A pizza with a scorched base is not as nice as it should be.<\/p>\n The football season has started in earnest with the first of the televised matches, and I had Stranraer FC against Larne from Northern Ireland in a friendly. Stranraer, who are probably one of the worst teams in the Scottish pyramid, only had a scratch side out with several trialists, and if the best that Larne (who are competing in European Club Football in three weeks time) could do is to beat them 1-0, then their European season is going to be a remarkably short one. They were not very convincing at all. <\/p>\n So right now I’m off to bed to try to recapture my usual routine – as in And with the pain in my foot having subsided during the day, it’s started to come back this evening. I’m thoroughly sick of this.<\/p>\n But seeing as we have been talking about a dietician … "well, one of us has" – ed<\/em> … the last time I saw her, she asked me how things were.
\n1) A doctor’s appointment at 08:40
\n2) Dialysis between 14:00 and 18:00
\n3) An appointment with a dietician at 15:15 (and how they are going to fit that in when I’ll be coupled up to a dialysis machine I really don’t know)<\/p>\n
\n"Actually"<\/em><\/strong> I said "I haven’t eaten anything for three days"<\/em><\/strong>
\n"Good grief"<\/em><\/strong> she gushed. "You REALLY must tell me your secret of how you do it."<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
