The Doctor Calls

My daily cup of Earl Grey and my morning injection over, I have the rest of the day to consider and plan.

I have found that, much like my time in hospital, meals now occupy much of my thought and structure my day.  Toni is discovering new skills as he produces the low fat and salt-free meals that I am supposed to eat, and I have to say that he is showing surprising aptitude in producing tasty food that I wolf down with alacrity.

Although I am eating healthily, my enforced lack of exercise does not allow my body to take full advantage of the calorie denial that it is going through.  I am hoping that, after another week, my ability to go for short walks will add at least some exercise to my sedentary existence at the moment and encourage my weight loss.

Perhaps the most significant event today will be A Visit By The Doctor.  The capitalisation is essential in this day and age when such a thing is not exactly the norm.  I seem to remember when a child and going through the usual round of illnesses that a doctor’s visit was a sort of physical affirmation of the medical rites of passage as measles and mumps and the like were ticked off the list!

I have made a list of questions for the doctor.  This approach is a direct result of my mother’s experience when she was ill.  She found that the Bedside Manner that some doctors had precluded significant questions and at the end of her time with them, she was able to recollect later that important points had not been covered.  Not one to suffer fools gladly (especially when she had been hoodwinked by technique) my mother wrote out what she wanted to know before hand and doggedly stuck to her points (rather than the doctor’s waffle) and sometimes cut through pleasantries to ask the next question!

One head teacher in my experience had the ‘deflection through mutual intellectual conversation’ down to a T, and I recall leaving his office with a smile of satisfaction on my face, but no extra money in the Faculty.  It’s a good trick if you can master it.

Anyway, thrombosis, embolism and dickey heart are not elements that are made better by ‘a smile of satisfaction’ but rather by concrete changes in attitude and life style.  I need to know exactly what I need to do to get back to where I was.  And indeed if it is possible to get there.  I need hard facts or clear details about what has happened to me and how I can change or work with what is going on with my body.

It is easy to feel positive because mine is a no obvious pain condition, but that in itself, is something that can be a false positive.  After the horror stories related to me by the doctor in the hospital of the fatal results of not following the guidelines for recuperation, I am satisfactorily unsettled.  I now need to know how to put that unease to good use so that I can progress to . . . to wherever I am reasonably able to go!  With Toni’s eagle eye watching for any tea-related backsliding, I have the incentive to extend this period of abstinence from my usual caffeine and fat related diet and make a steady improvement.  We shall see.

My poetry progresses slowly and haltingly.  Perhaps one of the reason for this is that, since I have returned from hospital, I have not been writing in my notebook each day.  My notebook is for ‘ideas’ that can be worked on later.  Usually I write in this after my swim and while I am having my cup of tea in the leisure centre café.  The ‘notes’ that I make are usually of a truly banal nature concerning the weather or some trivial details of my daily life, but the point of always keeping a notebook is that sometimes these quotidian remarks develop into something more significant, or, almost in spite of myself, I find a phrase or a sentence that prompts some other writing.

Another element, just at important as the creative, in my notebook is as a jolt or reminder of action that needs to be taken.  Sometimes I have gone as far as to write a signed and dated note to myself, agreeing (with myself) to get something done by a particular date!  Having written it down in a book, it is a constant reminder of those things that, in my case I have not done (and there is no health in me!) – ah, the cadences of the Book of Common Prayer are never too far from my way of expression!  And generally speaking they work, my little aide memoires.  Because when you really want to do what you have not done, all it takes is the slightest hint to actually get it started!

The doctor has called and my conversation with him was both better and worse than I expected.

He said that I can re-join the normal life of my fellow humans at the end of this week, when short walks and drives will be acceptable and I will be able to get out of the house for the first time.  Well, that’s not strictly true as the doctor arrived when Toni was scouring pharmacies to find more of the Clexana injections that I take.  Apparently these are in short supply, though god knows why as they seem to be the bog standard treatment for thinning the blood to treat thrombosis and embolism.

Anyway, the doctor said that they don’t really know why the thrombosis in my right leg formed and they were still studying the blood tests to see if there is anything that might give a clue.  They will also be checking my heart after the extra work that it had to do to cope with the thrombosis as that might be damaged as well.  The course of injections I am taking will last for six or twelve months, maybe longer.  Although there is a chance that I will fully recover, that chance is qualified by what may be found out further.  It may be that the damage to heart and lungs is permanent, but that is taking the most pessimistic view.  Which I, resoundingly, refuse to accept.  At least until further evidence to the contrary is shown.

I also asked about tea.  When I asked the doctor looked at me quizzically and said that I could drink tea.  I then pressed him by asking how many cups of tea I could drink.  To which his response was, “What sort of question is that?” to which I replied, “Yours is one only a foreigner would ask!”  At least he laughed and said, “I’m not going to worry about a cup of dirty water!”  Dirty water!  Only a lesser breed without the law would refer to Earl Grey as dirty water!

So, although I am going to be able to do the simple things in life a little earlier than I expected, the long-term problems are still to be discovered.  For example, when I asked about my present low far/no salt diet and how long it would last, the reply was, “For ever!”  Ah well!

My next doctor’s appointment is in three weeks time and then in March I have two tests back in the hospital to see what progress, if any, has been made.

At least I will be able to drive myself there!  I hope!

Oh, for the great outdoors!

I am beginning to forget what it is like to have the unmediated sun on my skin and feel the wind where my hair used to be!

I am not yet at the stir-crazy point of my enforced house holiday, but I am getting near.

I do realise that thrombosis in the leg and embolisms in the lungs with an effected heart demands certain restrictions if there is to be a realistic hope of recuperation, so I am trying to keep to the outline of what I should be doing and, more particularly, not doing.

Ideally, I should spend my days sitting in my armchair and being waited on hand and foot.  Not bad, you might think – but even slavish attention to one’s needs pales after a while.  Or a week in my case.  Not that I am not entirely grateful to Toni for butlering about in a most professional manner and providing me with sugar, fat and salt free dishes for my delectation.  I truly am grateful.  But I cannot walk very far (I mean, I can, but I mustn’t) and I can’t drive and I can’t swim and I can’t ride my bike and I can’t go to the opera.  Whoops, that last bit of self-denial makes me appear more bourgeois than I care to appear, however accurate it may be in reality. 

The point is, although I am working well in my enforced sedentary period of acclimatising myself to a New Way of Life, I am constantly frustrated by having to ask somebody else (aka Toni) to do the most trivial things for me if they require any physical effort.

At least this initial period of ‘rest’ should only take up the first two weeks, and already I have sat my way staunchly through one half of the time.  One week to go and I will be ale to go for a short walk.  Outside!

As someone who has been driving since he was able to drive – that, I now realize,  is half a century – it is much more difficult to adapt to not being able to get up and go whenever I like.  When you can’t, you realise just how much you use the car (or bike) for all those little things that are just out of reach, but no problem when you can slip into the car and get it done in no time at all.

I am sure that this experience will be a valuable life experience for me: I can’t really afford for it to be anything else!  And I am sure that not being able to do so much (if only for a strictly limited period) will (must) make me appreciate what I will be able to do soon enough.

As my existence has been circumscribed to contain only the living room and bedroom (with excursions to the bathroom) I have had time to read the Guardian in depth.  With a short period where I deviated towards the Independent, I have been a staunch Guardianista (and indeed in the style of that newspaper I actually reversed the ‘a’ and ‘r’ in the word!) and feel comfortable with the way that the news is reported and the articles that sum up the quirkiness and essential intelligence of the paper.

But it is also depressing as you surely feel yourself part of the minority/majority (who knows?) that thinks Brexit is an act of national self-harm unparalleled in our life times.  But this feeling of being on the right but losing side means that every opportunity to read about Brexit is compulsive – and the Guardian provides many opportunities to do exactly that.  It is the same with 45 in America where we (the Guardianistas) loathe and despise the man, but cannot stop ourselves from reading about him as if we were all suffering from some sort of addiction.

The only respite from my misery is that the coverage of Catalonia is hardly as exhaustive as the other two and therefore I do not sigh so much in that respect – but television here more than makes up for that lack as the Spanish government would rather talk about Catalonia than any of the corruption and disasters that comprises their contemptible administration.

Meanwhile, I am getting on with the poems drawn from the notes I made while in hospital.  I have to admit that my hospital diary stretches only over eight days.  And did I suffer!  Well, the only pain that I felt over that period was from the injections that I was given; the obtrusive inflation of an automatic blood pressure cuff – this actually caused sores; discomfort from an unyielding bed and a vigorously flesh pressing radiography nurse.  Hardly the stuff of great drama.  I didn’t feel truly ill when I went into hospital and I felt much the same when I came out.  There is no harrowing story of suffering and no real learning or change of situation or comprehension at the end of it.

There is, of course, the realization of just how lucky I have been: if this condition had not been discovered at the time it was then it probably wouldn’t have been discovered until it was too late!  That is something worth thinking about.  But my poetry has ever been the stuff of unexceptional observation and so my observations throughout the week should play to my strength.

At least that is my story and I’m sticking to it.

Now you listen here!

Unsettling violence and raw sexuality mark Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”, it certainly resonated with the contemporary audience, as it was a popular and critical success.  After two years and hundreds of performances the fame of the piece reached the attention of the most powerful man in the country and he decided to go to a performance.  He was appalled by what he saw and heard and left before the end of the piece.  The next day, what had been an overwhelming success was denounced in the newspaper, and the authorities began monitoring Shostakovich’s activities.

The man who had come to see the opera was Josef Stalin, and his dislikes had a way of being fatal.  Shostakovich had to do something, so he started writing his 5^th Symphony and when it was completed he subtitled it, “A Soviet Artist’s Response to Justified Criticism.”

Whatever the moral and artistic justifications for the subtitling, you have to admit that the 5^th is a fantastic piece of music.  What was it?  Cowardice?  Self-preservation?  Subtle defiance?  Capitulation?  Irony?  Who knows – but it kept Shostakovich alive and he continued writing.  He was, after all, dealing with one of the greatest mass murderers in the sad history of mankind’s inhumanity.

I thought of this piece of history from the 1930s when I was watching the television news and they played a part of Felipe VI of Spain’s speech at Davos, that comfortable gathering of the rich and privileged in a little Swiss ski resort.

The part of the king’s speech that grabbed me was:

“With all this in mind, I don’t wish to conclude this part of my speech without addressing the recent crisis in a truly fundamental part of Spain’s soul and diverse identity: Catalonia; where we have seen an attempt to undermine the basic rules of our democratic system.” [My emphasis]

Let us forget about the location of this speech for a moment, though the people there certainly forget about democracy on a regular basis, but concentrate firstly on the person speaking.

Filipe VI is the son of Juan Carlos I, the man personally selected and groomed for kingship by the Spanish Dictator Franco.  Juan Carlos eventually abdicated after a number of scandals including going on an all expenses paid hunting trip after a television performance where he sympathized with the economic lot of the struggling mass of the population; his various paternity cases; Royal spending and the usual corruption of the very rich.  His abdication to become “King Emeritus” and the coronation of his son Filipe was a political solution via a stitched-together deal between PP and PSOE.

So this hereditary monarch, Bourbon de Bourbon, whose house was reinstated by a Fascist dictator, has the temerity to talk about democracy!  There was a referendum in Catalonia about Independence; there was an election in Catalonia to form a new Parliament – I can’t remember any referendum or election regarding the slipping on an eldest son onto the throne of Spain!

Bourbon de Bourbon talking about Democracy is like Rees-Mogg campaigning for a statue of Marie Stopes to be erected in Parliament Square.

After what Bourbon de Bourbon’s family has taken from and done to Spain over the years, it is difficult to take his mouthing of platitudes as anything more than calculated insult.

Meanwhile the “undermining of the rules of our basic democratic system” continues apace with the farcical scattering of the police around any entry point, though not all, to Spain just in case the dangerously elected politician, and our President, Puigdemont might make it to Parliament where he is the only candidate slated for the investiture of the office.  The ever-absurd Zoido (sic.) the burly cartoon character who has been inflated to be Minister of the Interior bustles about the place trying (and signally failing) to look ministerial, or at least competent, or even credible. 

We have had television pictures at the border crossings with France where the police are searching cars for our exiled President and also searching handbags!  I don’t know whether these boys in blue (or whatever) think that canny Catalan scientists have mastered the techniques shown in The Incredible Shrinking Man and that Puigdemont is truly being smuggled in via a pencil case so that he can be dramatically returned to full size inside the Parliament.  Or perhaps they are just stupid.  To be fair, I think it is more reasonable to suppose that, given a stupid job they are trying to make it appear at least halfway sensible, by searching properly.  Making the best of futility!

Meanwhile my enforced exile inside my house continues.  I am counting the days to when I might actually be allowed to take a short walk!

This morning I actually managed to re-arrange the flowers that I have been given.  Toni brought them to my chair and I snipped and pruned and arranged.  This is something that I have always enjoyed doing.  Flowers add life to a room and well arranged blooms become more than their individual plants.  I cannot pretend that I have my mother’s skill, but I try my best and I am constantly amazed by just how much pleasure flowers can give – especially if you are spending hour after hour in the same chair!

I have also received a get-well card that also has flowers on it with the stamens touched with gold!  It all works for me!

Toni is cleaning the kitchen.  Although a comparison with the Augean Stables would be unfair (though Toni reports far too many surfaces are too sticky for comfort!) in terms of sheer clutter rather than filth it is an accurate image.  

We suffer from the Impenetrable Cupboard Syndrome, where a wall of kitchen thingerie meets the baffled gaze when a door is opened.  We know that somewhere there lurk Useful Things, but to find them everything has to be taken out and then put back again.  When that is the modus operandi it is amazing how much and how often one can ‘make do’ with what one can see.

For example, I know that I possess a melon baller, as who doesn’t?  I have used it, and I know that it works.  It does make a fairly mundane fruit look interesting, but how far is one prepared to exert oneself in the effort of looking?  I think there is a time limit of a couple of minutes and a quick glance in The Drawer Where Things Are – you know, that drawer that contains things that you could not work out where else to put: The Drawer of Last Resort.

What truly frightens me is that Toni is now making executive decisions based on the fact that I am supposed to sit down quietly and rest.  And I am resting in the living room and not the kitchen – where I can hear things being moved around and placed, who knows where, maybe even in the bin!  And breathe, and relax!

This is now Day 6 (by my reckoning) and I have to get to Day 14 before I can do anything as exciting as, for example, going for a walk.  On Day 32 I might be able to go for a short, slow swim.  Something to work towards.

Meanwhile, there is editing, writing and reading.  And I enjoy all three.

To work!