Well, the one good thing is that
I have only missed one meeting or appointment - and I thought that I might have
missed three. But no, blood test and
concert are still in the safe future, it is only the student representative
meeting that has slipped me by, and the teacher concerned seemed far more
concerned about my new pressure stocking than the meeting. The lack of my attendance at the meeting apparently
could be solved, or at least mitigated, by a short chat with one of the
teachers.
My pressure stockings are another
factor. These are stylish (for pressure
stockings anyway) free gifts from China.
I only had to pay the postage (and that wasn’t very much) and I got
three pairs! It reminded me of the trip
that Toni and I made to stay in Catalonia where the flight cost us nothing –
except for the landing charges. I do not
understand the economic logic of giving away a flight for nothing, but I
gratefully received the largess. God
knows we have paid back that free gift many times over given the amount of
travel that we have run up over the years since. But I do remain grateful for the inexplicable
gift!
The pressure stockings are
perhaps easier to explain as a sprat to catch a mackerel and the assumption must
surely have been that I find out that the link with the supplier is real and
you stand a chance of getting what you hoped for, and you buy much more stuff -
and god knows, China is the home of stuff nowadays. Was it enough for the Chinese supplier merely
to get hold of my email and start sending me information, to get me on a
mailing list, that they could write off the merchandise.
And again, I insist that the
postage was so small that I could afford to speculate and give it a go not really
worrying about losing the pittance that they had asked to get the stuff to
me. They have since asked me to comment
on my purchase, but I assume this is merely a device to ensure that I am still
a live customer and that any giving of stars will unleash a whole catalogue of
offers too good to miss!
Give my predilection to submit
myself to the blandishments of the capitalist system and buy stuff for the mere
sake of it, I have steeled myself to be rude enough not to reply – even though
I am wearing one of the said stockings even as I type this.
The net two months should prove
to be revealing, with the possibility that I will not need to wear the bloody
stockings any more. The function of them
is to increase the blood flow in my right calf so that the thrombosis will be
dissolved away. To that end, my diet (low
salt, low fat, no alcohol, decaffeinated tea and coffee) added to the half a
tablet of rat poison that I take daily should all be working together to get
rid of the thrombosis in a gradual way.
Over the next couple of months, I am scheduled to have various tests and
appointments that should enable my doctors to determine the extent or otherwise
of the offending clot and adjust my treatment accordingly.
I had thought that I would be
taking the rat poison for life, but one doctor seemed surprised by this
assumption on my part and assured me that there was a possibility that it would
be discontinued in a few months’ time.
I continue to be impressed with
my treatment and the thorough way in which I have made a Grand Tour of most of
the hospitals in the area for consultations and tests. The important ultra-sound scan will be in
January, so I won’t have a Christmas present of my treatment being ended, but I
will settle for a late gift! At least by
the New Year I should be in a better position to know how my appointments
calendar will look for the rest of the year!
Meanwhile, my book “Stephen’s Health”
continues to grow as each new sheet of information, results and appointments is
added to the plastic pockets. I take it
with me whenever I go to see a doctor as a sort of visible token of my active
participation in my treatment. I can
also refer to any of the information about my case (downloaded from the secure
Internet link) to encourage those doctors battling with their ageing
computers. In one or two instances it
has been very useful to point to relevant information to help the consultation
along!
I feel fine, though I am not able
to walk as far or as fast as I used to.
My shooting stick has been invaluable and I am now back to my normal
swim and bike ride quota for each day.
My replacement watch for my
Pebble, the Amazfit takes a dictatorial view of my activity and gives me reams of
information that I totally ignore. It
tells me where I have cycled and how – though I am not sure that it realizes
that my bike is electric; it analyses my swim, using acronyms that I do not
know; it noted my ‘run’ that I did not do – and I am still wondering about
that; it measures my sleep and its depth; it takes my heartbeat; it tells me
(and nags me) about sitting down for too long.
And it also tells the time. Its
battery life is nothing near the longevity of the Pebble, but it is at least
four or five days between charges and I can live with that. The text it uses is too small for me to read
without my reading glasses, but I am used to making sense of the out of focus –
I have been doing in for as long as I can remember – so that is not something
that worries me.
I now use my Matrix watch (the
one that runs by making electricity out of the difference between your body
heat and the ambient temperature of the watch case!) as a backup when the Amazfit
is charging. I good, if expensive,
compromise about their use!
The major problem I have is
making sure that the alarms on any and all of my pieces of wearable electronics
do not go off as inopportune times. I
take my half of rat poison at 8.00 pm.
That is the time of the start of the operas to which I go. The trouble is that merely switching off the
phone (which I do when I go to performances) does not always stop the bloody alarm
and once or twice I have fumbled with the phone during the applause for the
conductor in a frantic effort to silence the thing before the music starts. My watch merely trembles and that can easily
be turned off by jabbing at the screen.
The anticipation that an audience feels at the start of the performance
is given an added layer of fear by the threat of my electronic alarm orchestra
playing an unwelcome additional melodic line.
And I am looking forward to this
performance: Janacek, Katya Kabanova.
Let’s see just how well my ‘education’ in the works of Janacek by WNO
and Richard Armstrong with the voice of, among others, Elizabeth Söderström,
will be in my appreciation of the performance tonight. I am all anticipation.
And now to get ready. As a point of principle, I wear casual
clothes to the Opera, in spite or rather because of the fact that I will be
surrounded by those who ostentatiously dress up. I am still wearing shorts and sandals (for me
Summer Never Dies) but I might wear jeans tonight. Not because of the cold, you understand, but
rather because getting out of the Liceu and walking up the Ramblas late at
night can be a dispiriting experience, and if you look ostentatiously like a
tourist then you might well be the target for one or more sex workers to come
up to you with blatant offers of gratification!
Better to be taken for, if not a native, then at least a resident, and
hobble (in my case) my stick-assisted way towards my expensively parked car!
