Knees Up Mother Brown!

sticks,          

 

Well, I suppose it is something to be told that the x-rays of your knees are “the worst that I have seen” by your doctor, as the opening gambit in a conversation that stopped before the Pandemic made seeing actually speaking face to face with your doctor a thing of the past.  Welcome to the new future.

      

 

My knees have never really been my strong point and a few tumbles while dismounting from my bike, have made them a damn sight worse.

     I can walk unaided, but it is so much better with a stick – and my walking is strictly limited to that which is strictly necessary.  Which sometimes means that I don’t even reach the unambitious target (set by my smartwatch) of 3,000 steps a day.

     The process of my future care is now slotted into The System and that will grind its inexorable way forward, although given the pandemic, the number of untreated cases of wonky knees is probably in the tens of thousands, and the medical mills grind slow.

     My prescriptions have changed, but only to give me better pain killers, which the doctor has suggested I use with caution – which makes you wonder just what drug they are derived from!  I have done without pain killers up until now and I can stumble my way onwards without them.  Hopefully.

     A blood test has been set up for me and another appointment with the doctor to see exactly what is happening and then, who knows?

     There was a horror story of a guy in the UK who needed to have a back tooth taken out and who searched for an NHS dentist to do the job.  He couldn’t find one locally, and after some fifty phone calls to increasingly distant practitioners, he eventually found one who suggested that the earliest appointment he could have would be THREE YEARS DISTANT! 

     Perhaps this is one of those instant urban myths that flourish in straitened times, but I am sure that I read about it in the Guardian, and since I put all of my faith into the probity of that newspaper, it gives you a mighty pause for thought.

     I have to say that the medical treatment that I have had in Catalonia has been exemplary and my doctor has been essential to my well-being.  But there is only so much that a local health centre can do.  Operations on the knee are well outside their remit.

     It is at this point that I remember my father.  He too had problems with his knees, but his problems came after a career as a PE teacher and playing professional Rugby League.  I really have to hunt around to find reasons for my knee problems, and I don’t think that a few nasty tumbles from the bike explains everything.

     Dad was told that he would have to have an operation but, even in those days, there were waiting lists and he would have to go on being in pain, waiting for a bed to become available.

     In spite of his socialist beliefs, he eventually listened to his surgeon who told him, “If you have a private consultation with me, I will be able to recommend you to one of ‘my’ beds in the hospital and then the operation will be done on the National Health.”  My father paid the fifteen guineas for the consultation, with the surgeon, which was obviously just a form of words, he was given a bed and was operated on, basically by jumping the queue.  Dad was in pain, and he couldn’t walk.  The NHS should have been able to deal with his condition but, we do not live in an ideal world, and the fifteen guineas was money well spent.

     When I find out exactly what is wrong with my ‘disaster area’ knees and what the specialist suggests needs to be done about them, then I will have to look at the possibilities and what is going to work for me.

     So far, the Catalan health service has been brilliant and has fully justified my faith in it.  My knees might pose a problem that will need a little more than faith to sort them out.    We will see.

Oh shut up!

 

 

 

 

 

The sound of full-blast Heavy Metal music from my neighbour would thump its way through the walls of my semi-detached house once every couple of years.  How I wish that such a biannual interruption to my placid way of life could replace the almost pathological need for noise in this part of the world.

 

 

     Dogs are the bane of a quiet life.  As many of the places around us are flats, people have adapted their canine needs and usually plumped for those grotesque rat-dogs with bulbous eyes and spindly legs that they have reasoned by virtue of their shrunken size are more adapted to life within the confines of a flat.

     I am sure that they take up less room. But their moronic, high-pitched yaps belie their bonsai appearance with a ‘bark’ volume seemingly designed to cut through concrete.

     Here in Catalonia, as I am sure was true in other places that had a severe lockdown, we have the left-over ‘walking’ dogs.   

     At the time of the restrictions, we were not allowed to leave our homes unless it was to get essential provisions or to take a dog for short walk.  The rules were that the dog was not allowed to be walked more than a couple of hundred years from its home, but some people (don’t they always) bent the rules and used the dog as a passport to roam freely.  And a number of dogs were bought during the height of the pandemic (how?) specifically to allow access to a reasonable walk.

     Now, the dogs are not strictly needed, and their walks have become, not a freedom to be enjoyed, but a chore to be resentfully endured.  And they all bark.  Probably including some of the owners, too!

     But dogs are not the half of it.

     We are on a sometime main flight path for aircraft landing in the airport in Barcelona – although it is only when the wind is in certain directions that planes are directed to fly over the residential parts of Castelldefels and Gavà.  And if you believe that then you will believe anything.

     The pandemic gave us an unnatural piece of peace, with the number of flights severely restricted.  To be fair, while the noise from the aircraft is loud, you sort-of get used to it as just one of those things and, after a few seconds, the sound is gone.  As opposed to the bloody dog next door that has been left alone at home and has been barking for the whole of the bloody afternoon and who will not, in spite of screamed instructions to shut up, shut up.

     But the true horror has been house improvements, or complete makeovers.

     The house we live in is rented and, as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing has been done structurally, aesthetically, horticulturally, electrically or any other damned word ending in -ly since they were built.  To give you some idea of the hands-off approach of the owners, basic things that you would expect the landlords to take care of like fixtures and fittings, including damage to sinks, toilets, etc, or for an even more glaring example the gas boiler for the heating and water – they wash their hands of entirely.  The ‘nothing to do with us guv’ approach reached its apotheosis in Catalan landlords!

     This also means that when one of our houses ceases to be for rent and is sold, as a couple have over the last couple of years, then the new owners look askance at the age of the decoration (avocado bathroom suite, anybody?) and realize that they will have to do some major refitting.  The electric system and wiring are not fit for purpose and woe betide anyone foolish enough to put the kettle and the microwave on at the same time!

     You get the idea.  Everything needs to be changed.  And for the last two years we have lived through two refits.

     One thing you should know about our houses is that we live in what is in British terms a terraced house, one of five three floor structures.  They are solidly built of concrete throughout, but it also means that if you hit a hammer on the wall in one of the ‘houses’ every single other house can hear it.

     Perhaps at this point I should add that all the floors are tiled, as well as the stairs, and there are lots of stairs – so taking up tiles from all the floors of all the rooms, all the stairs and from the walls of the kitchen and two bathrooms means a lot of work, a lot of very noisy work with jack hammers that make life one long nightmare.

     Changing the electricity means cutting into the walls to get out old wiring and put in new.  With hammers.

     Changing the kitchen is a whole symphony of noise in itself.  And then there is the cutting of the new tiles to fit.

     In a place that is being newly built, you expect noise, and it doesn’t really matter because the eventual residents are not there.  When you have a densely populated residential area with two households treating their houses as building sites, the result is total dissatisfaction and a resentment that is going to continue for as long as the neighbours live there!

    

 

Enough!

     Tomorrow the visit, the first visit for a couple of years, to the doctor to see if he can recommend something (anything) to make my knees more cooperative.

     The more I think about the visit, the less I expect from it.  I suppose to be realistic, the most I can hope for is a referral to a specialist to see if anything can be done inside the knee in a rather more professional way than my rather desperate application of oodles of fisiocrem™ to the outside!  I sincerely hope so, as I am getting tired of limping along using a growing collection of walking sticks, well, three – and I can justify the purchase of each of them as they fulfil different needs in the assisted walking arena.  So there!

Bike trials!

I think that I have the wrong type of bum for my bike.  Either that, or I am jinxed.  [One should never give the opportunity to use a work like ‘jinxed’ is looks so exotic]  And yet, ironically, the pronunciation is excruciatingly difficult for an ‘exotic’ person to say!  Try saying it out loud and then think about a foreigner trying to come to terms with the way that you have said the ‘ed’ part of the word!  Take it from me, that sort of pronunciation (together with ‘phrasal verbs’) are part of the reason for the strained expressions on faces of non-natives trying to get to grips with the language!

Before this bike, my Mate – and that is its trade name, I am not so desperate that I have to claim friendship with inanimate objects, though, come to think of it, I have had on-going, very personal animosities with other things: cars, printers, computers, programs, tools, pencils – and I had better stop there as the list is becoming somewhat disturbing!  Anyway, in all of my previous bike-oid experience, I have never (repeat, NEVER!) had a wheel spoke break [and I rather like the rhythm of those three words, “wheel spoke break” it sounds almost like a chorus if you go on saying them] but now it happens every couple of weeks.

My bike repair person, with whom I am now on terms of incredulous intimacy due to my repeated returns with exactly the same problem, is mystified by the fractures and he has tried various remedies (one of which was quite costly) to no real avail.  I now take the breakages are part and parcel of having a bike and it will have to do until I get a new one.  Which should be in a couple of months time.  Or not. 

This is because I have ordered it from Kickstarter and the proposed schedules are always rather flexible when it comes to reality.  The new bike is going to small wheels, but the tyres are ‘fat’ and I am trusting this to lessen the forces that create the problems with the present bike.

I have ordered, you will be totally unsurprised to hear, all available upgrades from a full-colour bike computer screen to posh hydraulic brakes.  And it is of course electric.

Which brings me back to the present bike.  As the spokes break, I fold up the bike (it is collapsible as well) and put it in the back of the car.  The bike is solid and it takes a certain amount of manipulation to get it in place and the ‘cantilevered’ stage of putting it in the boot is a taxing one, and the frame sometimes lands on the floor of the boot with a bit of a bump.

I freely admit that what happened is (partly) my fault.  To cut a short story even more shortly, I have broken the ‘ignition’ key in the battery.  The battery is enclosed in the frame of the bike, and in the ‘on’ position it is locked inside the frame.  And, therefore, I cannot get the battery out.  To be recharged for example.  True, it is possible to recharge the battery while it is still in the bike, and true again, we do have power downstairs outside – but the idea of putting a charger on in the open is not one I relish or think safe – for all sorts of reasons.

Looking on the bright side, at least the thing is locked ‘on’ so that it can be charged on the bike and used in the normal way.  Unfortunately, the battery in the bike at the moment is slowly losing its ability to recharge; it is coming to the end of its useful life and soon I am going to be using a heavier than usual bike without the delight of easy power to get up those hills.  Well, hill.  Well, road bridge over the motorway.

I have no idea where to take the bike to see if anything can be done, as the manufacturer is in China (surprise!) and the company that produces the bikes is in Denmark.  I live in hope that something good will happen, though too much has to occur for that to be reasonable!

Meanwhile my second Catalan lesson of the week is looming and we have been expected to learn the numbers up to 100 – at the moment just being able to say them, not actually write them down.  Our accents are abysmal and, frankly, we all sound exactly like our nationalities when we speak in ‘Catalan’ – I’ve put in in inverted commas because it doesn’t (yet) bear any resemblance to the language that we hear around us everyday.

Not only is there the stress of having to articulate words with combinations of letters that are simply too foreign to allow ease of acceptance, but also, I have to go, immediately the class finishes, to a doctor’s appointment in Viladecans.  It’s all go!

Later.

Well, I suppose I should count myself lucky.  Not about the broken key, I have done nothing about that except worry, no, my luck held in the car park.  I found a space and was able to (almost) cover the time that I would be in class with the money that I put in the machine to get my ticket.  I reasoned that an extra 10 minutes or so would not be unreasonable to chance.  And so it proved, as my windscreen was little-plastic-bag-less when I returned from my lesson and set off for my next appointment in the hospital in the next town but one along the motorway.

As with everywhere else at the present time, construction work is going on in the hospital car park and a first glance showed it to be worryingly full.  I eventually found a space with very little wriggle room which made shimmying out of the car a painful experience.

I was half an hour or so early for my appointment, but the hospital has a system that uses your health card to log yourself in via some optical readers dotted around the corridors.

I settled down to wait with my mobile phone, but was actually seen in a few minutes and dealt with expeditiously in the company of bevy of medical students one of whom was picked on to explain what was going to happen to me in English.  She did not look particularly happy with this task, but started gamefully enough with an attempt at that condescending bedside manner that doctors sometimes adopt, you know the sort of thing, “ . . .we will have a little look at your leg . .” except she said “to your leg” and when I corrected here there was raucous laughter from all concerned.

After one particularly long monologue from the doctor, who then turned to the girl to continue her translation, I did take pity on her and say, “I understood that” and she smiled her relief.

The end result is that he wants me to restart wearing the bloody pressure stocking again and he has booked me in for another ultra sound investigation to see if the thrombosis is still there.

But the really important fact was that I was squeezing myself back into the car, five minutes before my scheduled appointment was to take place.  Now that, I call a real result.

To celebrate I called into the shops to do a little light shopping for Toni’s knees (his present job is somewhat physical and calls for me to be on said joints for long periods of time) with the result that I have now bought a sort of square padded prayer mat that can only be of help.

Oddly, talking of new possessions, books have come for the two of us!  Toni’s volumes for the next part of his course and a ‘Teach Yourself’ book of Catalan for me.  Unusually for me, I have sampled this book on the internet and found it congenial and, since my taught course is being delivered in Catalan and Spanish is it somewhat comforting for me to have a book where the language of instruction is English.   

The new book itself urges its use as an adjunct to to other forms of and from a cursory look through it appears to be a good buy.  It is a sign of the times that the usual CD accompanying such sorts of books is missing from this volume because the audio files are all available free on line and I have already (I think) downloaded them to my phone.  I progress in this course in a much more realistic way than I ever did in Spanish!  But these are early days and I will have to see how far my patience and dedication go!

-oOo-

The robot cleaner has been hoovering around the house and I wait for the silences that tell me that something has happened before I go and investigate.  Sometimes the machine has been trying and failing to devour something that will not go into its innards; sometimes it decides that it has cleaned enough, and sometimes it simply gets stuck.  I have to pick the thing up, get it back in to working order and set it down somewhere else, rather like a very elderly relative being wheeled into a new space and left to his own devices!

Its last location was in the kitchen where there are various worrying things that it can discover and fail to get around.

Its most worrying predilection is for the gently curved bases of floor mounted fans: these the little machine mounts with relentless orgiastic energy!  But enough of domestic chores.

-oOo-

Today is Toni’s half day at his new job and we are going to celebrate by going to the shopping centre over the other side of the road from his works to try another menu del dia in the restaurant we used on the when we checked out to to get there, and where exactly ‘there’ was before he started.

-oOo-

Now I have to find the spare key to the battery of my bike and attempt the grisly job of trying to extract the remains of the broken key from the ‘ignition’.  I am looking forward to neither of these tasks, but they have to be done.  The trouble is that I do have a ‘key box’ in which, unsurprisingly, I have put most of the keys that I have accumulated.  For many of these objects, I have little idea what they might unlock, but I know that, given time, I am going to be frantic in trying all of them when I find a locked thing that I want to use.  It is the fear of going to the box and not finding the key there that is making me carry on typing rather than taking action.  But, no, enough, have the courage of your ‘key box’ being comprehensive and get going on part one of the restoration of the bike to full working order.

To be continued . . .