Traditionally, Ed, as you’d know  if you knew anything at all, rates of pay for those living and working in London were higher than outside London, to compensate for the higher costs of living there than, say, in Manchester. This was called the “London Weighting”. It might still be for all I know.

It follows logically, then – are you paying attention Ed? – that the benefits cap should be £26k outside London, and higher in London – a London Weighting.

How hard is that for an alleged Labour politician to understand? I don’t expect Cameron to, or to even give a shit, or most of his millionaire cabinet buddies, but you have no excuse.

And while we’re about it, you need to remember that you are not Cameron’s butt-buddy – hell, the Bullingdon wouldn’t even let you sweep up – you’re supposed to be the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition. Act like it.

Opposition, Ed. Do you have any idea what that means? Would you like to look it up?

I’ll give you a clue – it does not mean embracing the policies of the worst, most oppressive and divisive, Tory government this country has ever seen almost entirely uncritically.

Remember your place Ed – you’re not supposed to be a fucking Tory, you’re the leader of the Labour Party. If you can’t get your pointy head around that fact, get the hell out, go join your shiny role model, and make way for someone who can.

Then, today, for reasons which still elude me, I bought more of the bloody flabby, wet, stuff.

Among all the info on the label, there is no mention of a smokery or even smoking. It does, though, contain the colouring agents curcumin (gives turmeric its yellow colour), and paprika, neither are traditionally used in smoking, where the normal dye is annatto. Makes me wonder, though, if it’s soaked in a solution containing smoked paprika – it would explain the wetness.

So I ran a small experiment in the kitchen. A strong solution of blood-red smoked paprika and water, left to stand for 5 minutes then filtered, yielded an intensely smoky liquid that was yellow-brown in colour – a sheet of kitchen paper dipped into it was dyed a nice, if pale, yellow. Mix the smoked paprika solution with a solution of yellow curcumin, dunk your haddock fillets for as long as it takes to colour up – there’s your wet “smoked” fish.

One last point. I bought skinless fillets. When conventionally dyed and smoked haddock fillets are skinned, the fish beneath the skin is normal fish colour, fish skin being impermeable. Sainsbury’s fish, where the skin has been, is bright yellow, meaning that it was subjected to whatever process they used after it was skinned.

I don’t think the bloody stuff is smoked at all.

Got anything to say, Sainsbury’s? Can you show me I’m wrong? And if I am wrong, kindly explain what other process makes your smoked haddock unfeasibly wet – I’d love to know.

Sorry, I’m not buying that for one moment. Well, of course,  he is a snob, but he’s also an evil, scurrilous, lying, shitweasel of an apology for a human being, completely detached from normal life, and insulated from the consequences of his actions by money.

I’m afraid I can’t look at Cameron’s insane hatred and persecution of the chronically sick and disabled and conclude, as the article does, that it’s not his fault. If not his, whose?

The death of Cameron’s son (and father), were excluded from discussion as that would have been tasteless. No, that was short-sighted.

I’m convinced, as are others (hat tip to Rhydian Fôn James), that Cameron is using his late son as a benchmark against whom all chronically sick and disabled people, including me, are being judged – and mostly found wanting, as anyone with the will to do so can see. It’s quite possible, too, that Cameron also resents those of us who are sick and disabled, yet still alive, and fully intends to make us suffer for it. And please, don’t tell me that’s tasteless – it’s our totally unnecessary persecution that’s truly tasteless. Not to mention obscene, disgusting, and  despicable.

Add to that the lie factory engineered by Cameron, IDS and his SpAds, and Grayling, and you have an anti-disabled propaganda machine, dribbling poison into the ever-willing ears of the right-wing press, that would have had Goebbels creaming his jackboots with envy.

None of that happened because Cameron is a snob – it is pure, unadulterated, vindictiveness.

Thanks mainly to Cameron, but also in no small way to IDS, the sick and disabled people of this country now occupy the position of the Jews in mid-thirties Nazi German – state approved hate figures, allegedly responsible for all the ills of the country. That’s not snobbery either.

Will it be snobbery when the workhouses go up to house the many thousands of people reduced to penury and made homeless by Cameron’s policies?

Will it be snobbery when the sick and disabled find themselves excluded from the NHS as the beds have gone to private patients? And anyway, we’re too expensive . . .

Will it be snobbery when the camps appear, to accommodate the sick and disabled, as the state is no longer willing to support them via benefits, as befits our status as human beings, with all the rights that attach thereto?

Will it be snobbery, when all this comes to pass, and more, if Cameron is returned with a majority in 2015?

How long – whisper it quietly – before a snobbishly final solution occurs to him

I spent a large part of yesterday, online, looking at chairs that (a) fit my budget (under 2 grand) and (b) had a decent claimed range and batteries to match – too many manufacturers blithely claim absurd ranges from relatively small batteries – look for batteries of at least 70Ah for outdoor use. Early in the search I came across this chair, the Shoprider Lugano, with a 25 mile claimed range and 75Ah batteries, and a whisker over £1,800.

NB: The pic was clipped from their brochure. As this post amounts to a plug for the machine, only a churl would complain and, anyway, I’m sure it comes under the definition of “fair use”.

Shoprider, it has to be said, make some seriously horrible chairs, but this is a nice piece of kit in the same six-wheel, mid-wheel drive, manner as the Pride Jazzy and Quantum series – but at a fraction of the price. (I was pleased to see  that the illegal-in-the-UK Pride Quantum 6000 has now been discontinued, though some dealers are still selling old stock – see my I bought a lemon… series of blog posts on the subject.)

Mid-wheel drive chairs are superbly manoeuvrable, and will spin about their own vertical axis, making them a dream indoors where space is limited, while still being a capable outdoor chair.

It’s a year since I got out of hospital with what turned out to be a death sentence, albeit a slow one, as it’s turned out (not that I’m complaining). In the event, I made it to Christmas, which I seriously didn’t expect to do, and I’m still here, so fingers crossed there might be another year (50-50 chance – the 2-year survival rate is 50% and this is my second year – presumably, beyond this year, the odds shorten), now I’ve got a decent cardiologist – only took 50 weeks! Mainly because my GP is a cretin, though to be fair I missed a September appointment because I was too ill to go – perhaps that worked out for the best?

Which is why I’m making some investments (new 64-bit PC, and now a new powerchair), predicated on the fact that I might actually have some sort of future (though to be honest, things are still very iffy).

However, things will be less iffy, psychologically, at least, if I’m able to get out of here more – or, even, at all – being housebound is very destructive mentally.

On getting out of hospital (and I still don’t understand how, the day before I was hauled away, I was better than I’ve been in years, yet when I emerged 4 days later, I was a basket case – something happened during that period that no bugger is telling me about – I’m increasingly sure of that), I bought a very basic powerchair. Too basic as it turned out, but money, while not tight, wasn’t unlimited, so it had to do.

It’s OK for trundling round the building, and taking rubbish out to the bins, but anything more ambitious is beyond its puny motors and small batteries. The Lugano, on the other hand, should have power to spare.

It’s a Class 2 chair (4mph), but I had a  Class 3 (8mph), and it was remarkably uncomfortable, even painful, at that speed. It does mean that the Lugano is a pavement machine (yeah, right!), but on a nice summer morning, I can be at Sainsbury’s or Tesco in an hour, or to the woods in a bit less, or put it in a taxi, or even on the train, to go further afield – things I can’t do with a scooter.

It’ll also make hospital trips easier, too.

The only downside is the frustrating wait for my rebate check to clear!

If you’re shopping for a powerchair, bear in mind that range claims are absurd, the method of testing having no connection at all with reality, as you can see from this post.

Powerchairs use the battery not just for forward motion, but for steering, too, and on a road with even a moderate camber (same with many pavements), you’re constantly, and subconsciously, steering up the camber to avoid rolling down it, as well as any changes of direction, so look to get around 60% of the clamed figure and you won’t be disappointed, unless you’re very heavy, then all bets are off.

I’ve complained before, here, about the wetness of Sainsbury’s meat, but the squishiness of it does make it very easy to run through the mincer. Steadman’s meat, in contrast, once some superficial bloodiness had been washed off, was excellent – firm muscle, without a trace of wetness. In fact, cutting it up I started by slicing it into steaks, and they were so beautifully marbled with fat it seemed a shame to make sausage meat with them, but that’s what they were for. Next time, though, it’s destined for steaks.

The first job, though, is checking the bone socket for fragments. In my experience, when meat is boned commercially, there are always some, and this was no exception. Then the shoulder has to be skinned, while retaining as much fat as possible, and for that you need an extremely sharp chefs’ knife – do not piddle about with a small paring knife if you want to finish with the same number of fingers as you started with.

After that, it’s just a matter of slicing and dicing, removing as much sinew and connective tissue as you can, the mincer will catch the rest – when I’ve finished mincing pork there is always a large amount of sinew spooled on the worm shaft, just behind the knife. I have no idea by what mechanism this happens, but it always does.

Note: boned shoulder comes in two parts, which are easily separated. One is thin and only fit for dicing and stewing or sausage meat (tip: don’t freeze for future use in sausages, if the sausages will also be frozen), the other is thick and will slice into maybe half a dozen thick steaks with – Sainsbury’s please note – the grain sliced neatly across – you don’t cut steak with the grain, numpties.

So, there I was, with this perfect meat fighting back as I was cranking the mincer handle – it was remarkably hard work, partly because I’m getting weaker, but mainly, I’m quite sure, because the meat is just so much better than Sainsbury’s, from well-muscled free-range pigs, with no added water.

The belly strips needed to be skinned – no great hardship – and was thick bands of meat separated by thin bands of fat, and like the shoulder, firm and muscular – I must try to get some of this in the piece, and make my own bacon (Sainsbury’s is thick bands of fat separated by thin bands of meat – sorry to keep banging on about this but the contrast between this meat and the crap I’ve been saddled with until now is staggering).

In terms of weight I started with 0.516kg of belly and 1.126kg of shoulder, for a total of 1.642kg. I wound up with 1.343kg of prepped pork, a loss of just 299g, mostly skin. So while starting with less meat than when I used Sainsbury’s, I actually finished with about the same amount of prepped meat. Go figure. Actually, a lot of the loss with Sainsbury’s was a great deal of wet and fibrous fatty tissue, which I really didn’t want in my sausages. There was very little in Steadman’s pork – the difference between free-range and intensively reared, I guess.

Anyway, since I had such good meat, I decided to mince it coarsely, as it seemed sacrilege to reduce it to mush as the fine plate would have done, and for the first time, I had to add water to the mix – just a wine-glass full** (not the buckets that go into commercial sausages and even some domestic recipes) – to bind the breadcrumbs and moisten the meat a little, before adding white pepper, fine sea salt and a little sage (a little sage goes a long way).

**It might need a little more on Sunday – time will tell, but see below.

If you soak the mincer and all its parts in warm, soapy water immediately you’ve finished, it’ll be much easier to scrub clean, with a bottle-brush for the interior, and a washing-up bush for the rest. By far the easiest way, I’ve found. Rinse well to remove any detergent residue and leave to drain. My mincer is stainless steel, so pretty fuss-free, but if you have an iron one, sit it on a radiator to dry thoroughly.

Today,** then, I’ll be making the sausages – making the sausage meat took most of the day, with lots of rest breaks – making the sausages is the easy bit.

**Much to my surprise, despite the pain yesterday after the mincing, my shoulders haven’t seized up. Result!

The first task is to fry a blob of the meat, to test for seasoning (traditional pork sausages are peppery, but not excessively so), or see if it otherwise needs tweaking (the mix could so with a bit more fat – I have some home-rendered pork lard, but no easy way to add it to that it’s evenly distributed, so best not to). This is the recipe as of right now (note that seasonings and other dry flavourings are added before mincing, the mincing process distributing it through the finished meat:-

Pork Sausage Recipe

1.343kg prepared pork,  as above.

3 teaspoons fine sea salt

3 teaspoons white pepper

2 teaspoons sage

10% crumbs (from my own bread, using the last of the Swedish Spring Wheat flour**)

Small wine glass of cold water, plus a little more if required***

**A mystery there – there should be two bags of crumbs in the fridge – there was only one, 141g, so it all went in, an extra 6 grams or so being neither here nor there, as some is always lost to the mincer. There’s about half a kilo of the stuff missing, though.

***Had a quick look at the meat, and it will benefit from rather more moisture, which it’ll get in the form of Aspall Organic Suffolk Cyder, which is extremely good stuff. I’ll add that now (11.10), and give it a few hours to be absorbed.

Oh, and all that pork skin that could have been roasted to golden crispness, yielding a little lard in the process? I had a brainstorm and threw it away!

Pics will follow in due course.

There was an amazingly annoying, and initially elusive, problem though.

When typing, in Word, Twitter, or anywhere else, online or off, every few words the cursor would go skating up the page, and the insertion point would go too, leaving me typing blanks.

Simultaneously, my broadband connection would disconnect.

Failing to find a cause, or a fix – the problem would go away if I typed very slowly, but next day it’d be back – I wired the router to the Ethernet socket, disconnected wi-fi, and all was well. But was the cause the adapter or its software?

Anyway, what my life needed was fewer wires, not more, so the hunt for a fix went on. Then I noticed, when the wi-fi adapter’s software fired up (I turned it on to click through to the website) – back came the problem. So I deleted it, turned off the Ethernet connection, turned wi-fi back on, and all was well – I could type perfectly normally.

The wi-fi connection functions perfectly well without the software; better, in fact, as it now, as I said, connects automatically, whereas before I had to type in the damn network key every morning. Not a massive inconvenience, I’ll concede, but irritating when it shouldn’t have been necessary at all.

My wi-fi adapter is the TP-Link 300Mbps Wireless N PCI Express Adapter, No. TL-WN881ND. Other than for inputting the network key on first use, the software offers no other useful functions and can then be safely deleted, especially if you experience the same typing fubar.

However, resisting the temptation to take a swipe at whiny students, just consider how much poorer we’d be if people like Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Shakespeare, Dean Swift, Pepys, to name half a dozen at random, had thrown down their pens, and cried, “Aaargh! My hand hurts! Bugger this for a lark, I’m off down the pub!” and never picked up a pen again?

Luckily they were made of sterner stuff than 21^st century pussies!

Personally, as one of those people who has gone through life with horrible handwriting (at school, I was always treated as if I was doing it deliberately, for some weird reason), I welcomed the arrival of the PC and its word processor as a more versatile replacement for my typewriter (once I left school and started earning, one of my first purchases was a Remington portable, followed, over the years, by a succession of office models blagged from employers), and these days I write almost nothing by hand, not even a shopping list, because ME has actually destroyed my muscle memory, and my hands can’t form the letters, not without major effort on my part. Though, at least, I do have the ability to do so, after a fashion, if all else fails.

Mind you, if that did happen I’d buy another typewriter.

For the young, however, now as always, actually learning how to write, by hand, and for possibly extended periods, is no bad thing. It is, in fact, a valuable skill that should be encouraged lest it be lost, and very few people should be 100% dependent on technology for written communication because, one fine day, it might well to go tits up if, for example, silicon-eating nanobots escape into the wild, or the petrochemical industry goes down the pan – then where would we be if people hadn’t learned to write? Or just sat around sucking their fingers and whingeing?

This is the letter (sorry folks but it is, of necessity, a bit long):-

January 24 2012

Dear Dr. Nxxxxx,

I’m pretty sure that the last thing you want from me is a long letter but I feel, in my own interests, I should make you aware of at least the pertinent part of my medical history as, from what I’ve seen of my hospital records, they’re pretty abysmal and, as you’ll see, I have no reason to suppose those of my various Wirral GPs, over the years, are any better.

* * * * *

Before I do so, though, there is something I want to be upfront about. I do regret this, but I’m afraid I have to decline the proposed double-cath angiogram as I feel that the risks, especially if you are going into the left ventricle from the aorta, are too great. (1) Even if not, the procedure is not without risk, and there remains the fact that I have a pathological fear of needles – it takes all my self-control to give a blood sample – and the prospect of another angiogram fills me with horror, as did the last one. I feel very strongly that the stress would result in the procedure doing me far more harm than good.

There is also the problem that I’m in far too much pain to be able to lie still – I haven’t even been able to lie down at all for a year, as it causes a great deal of chest  pain and impairs my breathing – even in APH last year, I had to sleep sitting upright in a chair, and a year on things have improved only marginally. I’m sorry, too, that this isn’t negotiable. If my life depended upon it it’s possible I would feel differently, but I have my doubts.

* * * * *

I have no idea if my medical records will reflect it – I sincerely doubt it – but I have had heart problems as a matter of record since at least 1986, and quite possibly, though unrecorded, a decade longer.

In 1986 I was hauled off the hills of the Peak District and taken to Stockport Infirmary with a suspected coronary. After an ECG, several blood tests and a long wait – I was there much of the day – I was told that what I had experienced was oxygen-deficiency angina. (2)

I had experienced similar but less severe events perhaps half a dozen times over the previous decade,** but had put it down to my respiratory problems (I’ve had bronchiectasis and asthma since age two, when almost simultaneous measles and whooping cough trashed my lungs), my knowledge of heart disease in the seventies being effectively zero, I never even suspected angina. I have since remedied that deficiency.

**Always triggered by the same hill (I would go to considerable lengths to avoid hills, but sometimes you simply can’t), Hollins Cross, the pass between Edale and Castleton, in the Peak District – a footpath as close to vertical as it’s possible to be and not actually require climbing skills – a serious, 800-foot, challenge for me, with a 45lb pack. It was a very rare event to reach the top without either getting chest pain, or severe shortness of breath and vomiting, or all three.

In 1978, camped in Edale village after another crossing of Hollins Cross, I woke the next day with severe, radiating, left-centre chest pain. In my 30s at the time, heart problems never even occurred to me but, instead of continuing the trip, we opted for a lazy day and just mooched around on the local train, doing nothing very much and, slowly, the pain faded away. With that wonderful thing, 20-20 hindsight, I strongly suspect, and have done for some time, that this was the first bout of angina that I can be sure of.

Anyway, back to Stockport Infirmary, where I was given a letter for my GP (Dr. Brace, at Devaney Medical Centre, at the time), told to see her as a matter of urgency, and sent home.

.

I did as I was told, only for Dr. Brace to dismiss the whole episode as rubbish, even though, as you can see from the footnote, oxygen-deficiency angina was known as long ago as 1956. Grudgingly, she did agree to an ECG after surgery but, while I was still wired up to the machine, she put her coat on and went home, leaving it to a passing nurse, who hadn’t even known I was there, to unhitch me. As far as I know the ECG went in the bin – it was never referred to again.

As things panned out, the condition that was ultimately diagnosed as ME put an end to my outdoors activities by Autumn 1986, but angina continued to recur, especially when I was stressed (which was a lot – I had not only my own rapidly-worsening health to contend with, my wife had extremely severe mental health problems – I spent the 5 years we were married effectively on 24/7 suicide watch – a real risk as she’d been thwarted in two previous attempts, and I lost count of the number of times I talked her down from a suicidal peak), but Dr. Brace and her colleagues refused to listen to me (one doctor did, the senior partner, Dr. Jones, who prescribed a GTN spray, supplies of which dried up when he retired).

At that time, Drs. Campling, Brace, and Onion, all at Devaney, began a 10-year campaign to convince me and anyone who would listen that I was not ill, was, in fact, a malingerer, lying to claim benefits (though Campling signed me off as permanently unfit for work without being asked), or I was mentally ill (in late 1986, the DSS doctor had no hesitation in sanctioning my DLA claim (actually, Mobility Allowance then), after a rigorous examination that put me in bed for days). I did, eventually, succumb to mental illness – they drove me into a breakdown and directly caused the end of my marriage. But, of course, I wasn’t having a breakdown. according to those three doctors, I was just upset because my wife had left me! “Upset” doesn’t cause visual and auditory hallucinations, potentially suicidal depression, and massive weight loss.

I still suffer from bouts of severe, but mostly mercifully brief, depression, which goes untreated – I won’t take tricyclics, as they shut my brain down, and that’s one of the few things I have left in full working order, and SSRIs make me cough so violently my lungs bleed.

Eventually, Dr. Onion moved on, and in 1995 I quickly saw his successor, Dr. Bates (or he might have been Dr. Jones’ successor, I’m not sure), before the others could taint his perception of me. He referred me to the ME clinic at the RLUH, where I was speedily diagnosed with ME,  enrolled in their research programme, and told that had I been taken seriously a decade earlier, I might have been cured. As it was, after 10 years neglect, there wasn’t a hope in hell.

In 1996 I was admitted to APH with a suspected coronary.

I was there for 2 weeks, watching all the other suspected coronaries being taken off for echocardiograms – all except me. After two weeks, the consultant told me I’d had angina, and I was discharged (it wasn’t angina, it was far worse, but if it had been, why was I kept there for 2 weeks?). It took me over six months to recover from that alleged angina, which strongly suggests it was actually a coronary (enzyme tests can, and do, throw up false negatives), and in January last year an ECG while I was in APH with pneumonia and empyema, and of which I have a copy, revealed damage to my heart that can only have come from the 1996 event.

Also while I was in APH at that time, I was diagnosed with severe heart failure. It wasn’t recorded. I also had a long talk with a pharmacist who tried to persuade me to try a beta-blocker that “might be safe”, after I’d pointed out that with my asthma, they were contra-indicated. Later I was told Digitalis had been prescribed. It never reached me and none of that was recorded either – I have my complete and unredacted records for that period, obtained under an FoI request. They are mostly a work of fiction and, other than the significant ECG contain nothing useful at all.

Another event which you won’t find on my records took place on my second day, that could conceivably have killed me. My lungs were so full of fluid I could hardly breathe, and, faced with blank looks from some very young doctors, I suggested Furosemide, expecting, given my condition, an i-v. I got tablets – better than nothing but only just. However, while I was half asleep that night, some lunatic plugged me into 2 litres of i-v saline. I woke up with my breathing even more severely impaired from the 300ml that had already gone in, and made them disconnect it immediately. Had I stayed asleep, and received the full 2 litres, I have little doubt that I might well have died, and I sincerely doubt that gross stupidity would have gone on my death certificate.

On discharge, being unable to get to the surgery, I wrote to Dr. Nuttal asking him to pursue the question of heart failure. After two months and two more increasingly angry letters, Dr. Nuttall arrived at my home unannounced, examined me, admitted that I had what sounded as if it could be heart failure (at that time my legs were massively swollen from my toes to above the knee, something which has begun to diminish only recently as I made a unilateral decision – Dr. Nuttall, after that one visit, hasn’t returned, though he’s in the building several times a week (I live in a supported flat), and I still can’t get to the surgery – and increased my Furosemide by adding to the 80mg in the morning another 40mg in the afternoon.

Some weeks after Dr. Nuttall’s visit I got an appointment at St. Cath’s with Dr. Abdelmouti (and I’m sorry, but a GP with a “special interest in cardiology” is no substitute for the consultant cardiologist I needed). Dr. Abdelmouti, before even examining me, subjected me a 15-minute harangue on all the reasons why, in her view, I couldn’t possibly have  heart failure, yet within seconds of eventually deigning to listen to my heart she was frantically rummaging for a form to arrange an urgent echocardiogram.

After the echo, which took place a week later, she again went into her “you can’t have heart failure because I say so” routine, while admitting that she hadn’t the slightest idea why, were that the case, I had all the symptoms of heart failure, nor could she explain why I deteriorated if I stopped my heart failure meds – yet if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it’s a damn duck. You don’t jump through hoops, as Dr. Abdelmouti did, trying to prove it’s a hamster! Oh, and Dr. Abdelmouti let slip that she’d been told I had self-diagnosed heart failure – that can only have come from one source, and I know who, and it’s a lie. It is, though, par for the course for every referral to come out of Devaney since the mid eighties, every one of which has gone belly up.

Of course, what the echo showed was aortic valve calcification, and the literature is quite clear that, asymptomatic, it’s a minor problem, but with the symptom’s which I had, and still have, my life expectancy is rather less than wonderful – the 2 year survival rate being 50%.

There are still a few things that baffle me. Before I was admitted to APH last January, I was, in fact, very well (for me, anyway), and felt better than I had in years – yet I came out of there a virtual basket case, barely able to walk round my flat most days, with zero energy and hugely swollen legs, since when little or nothing has changed.

Oh, and for the record, Dr. Newall, other than at the chest clinics, you are the only consultant at APH who has taken me even remotely seriously in 27 years. Since I moved here from Bootle in 1984, my health care has been somewhere between indifferent and positively dangerous. Even Dr. Silas, after my “angina attack” refused to accept I had COPD, even though the early stages of emphysema had been identified at least a year or two earlier, and that record should have been in my file.

So concerned was I by the fact that nobody took me seriously**, on one occasion, I paid my £10 to get access to my records, as I was convinced that I’d been labelled a hypochondriac at some point. I found nothing, of course, which meant nothing either as anything that might “upset” the patient was allowed to be removed, rendering the whole process futile. And yes, I do realise how paranoid this sounds to someone who doesn’t actually know me.

**A few years ago, I was referred to ophthalmology at APH. There I was told that the vitreous fluid in my eyes was hardening and fissuring, tearing my retinas as it did so. When I asked the consultant what could be done, he said – and bear in mind I was in a wheelchair – “Avoid bungee jumping!”

That episode sums up perfectly the disgraceful standard of care I’ve received at APH to date.

Yours sincerely,

Ronald W. Graves.

PS. On the day I saw you at APH, I was sent off to the Path Lab to collect the bottle for my urine sample. I explained that this was further than I could safely walk (I was already exhausted simply from going to the adjacent room for my ECG and spirometry, the latter contributing largely to my exhaustion). I might as well have saved my breath, and I was left with no alternative but to walk to the Lab (that or forego the test).

Since then I have suffered a serious relapse, my breathing is worse than ever (I suffered acute left side chest pain during spirometry, after a bout of coughing violent even by my standards; it took several days to abate), I feel profoundly weak, and I have no idea at all when I shall be able to return the bottle of urine (currently in my fridge where, as the temperature is 2C, it should be safe), as the walk even to my front door, for a taxi, is beyond me right now – walking from the entrance of APH to the Path Lab, and back, of course, would be quite impossible, as is using my chair (it takes less effort, but I still need to breath better than I currently can).

Sorry to moan, but I needed to explain why I still haven’t returned the urine bottle. And why It’s possible I might have the same problem with the 24-hour heart monitor – my life is utterly unpredictable in terms of how much (or, in reality, how little), I’ll be able to do on any given day.

RWG

(1) American Heart Journal

Volume 148, Issue 1 , Pages 41-42, July 2004 Should we cross the valve: the risk of retrograde catheterization of the left ventricle in patients with aortic stenosis     Trip J Meine, MD,  J.Kevin Harrison, MD

(2)  This is just a reference point to indicate that the condition, by 1986, should have been sufficiently  well known to have reached my GP. Dia Med. 1956 Sep 20;28(68):2074-9.

[Oxygen deficiency as the cause of pain in angina pectoris and myocardial infarct; technic and determination of oxygen therapy].

[Article in Spanish]

BELMES PG.

PMID: 13375393    [PubMed - OLDMEDLINE]

***

And that’s where things are for now.

The consultant, currently on holiday, has some tests planned, though

I’m not convinced they will accomplish anything much.

His theory that there might be a hole in my heart, albeit a small one, does hold water, as my breathing has always been far worse than spirometry suggests it should be, the more so as I’ve got older – a hole would explain that (though if it’s big enough to affect me, I’d have expected it to show on the echocardiogram – maybe it did and no-one told me – after all, the same doctor who reviewed that argued that I didn’t have heart failure! At my age, I’m not interested in major surgery to repair it, if it is there – I wouldn’t live any longer as a result. In fact, given the state of my health, I doubt surgery would be offered.

They could replace the damaged aortic valve, I suppose, and that can be done via keyhole surgery, but that’s expensive, and major surgery – getting both hands in and rummaging around – is cheaper. Recovery, of course, is very much more expensive, but accountants are notoriously short-sighted. Both are high-risk, and there’s a question of whether I’d survive either version in my weakened state. All things considered, I’d rather have one crappy year – or longer maybe – than a few short and futilely pain-filled weeks. Or nothing, if it all goes pear-shaped.

I’ll go along with whatever tests he has in mind – as long as they’re not invasive, and as long as I’m able to. At the moment, there’s  half a gallon of pee in my fridge (24 hours worth, for a cancer test). I have no idea when, or even if, I can take it back to the hospital. I think if he wants to do it again, he’ll have to admit me to the day ward for 24 hours.

So far he’s arranged for a 24-hour heart monitor in 3 weeks – not much sense of urgency and I could do without the £30+ taxi fare. But the same problems obtain as with the bottle of pee – I can’t be sure of getting it back the following day, always assuming I can get there in the first place. It’s one thing getting a taxi to the pub – quite another to be faced with a quarter-mile walk at the hospital, which is the reason I’m a basket-case now.

He wants a CT scan at some point, too, which will show almost as much detail of my heart as an angiogram. An MRI scan, of course, is the gold standard, but treated here as if the machine actually is solid gold and they’re frightened of wearing it out.

But, whatever happens, there’s no getting away from the fact that the 2-year survival rate for my heart problems is 50%. I’m in my second year (as far as I know – nobody has yet explained why I went into hospital, last January, perfectly fit by my standards, yet came out a complete wreck), so there’s an even chance there won’t be a third.

We’ll have to wait and see.

“I am delighted to welcome McDonald’s announcement of new jobs.

“McDonald’s has a great record in investing in the UK and providing excellent training, apprenticeships and opportunities for its staff.”

Ironically, and, I would like to hope, not entirely accidentally, below that article is a link to a July 13 2009 page, which says:-

McDonald’s to move European head office to Switzerland. US fast-food chain is latest company to quit the UK for a more favourable tax regime overseas.

How’s that for investment, Cameron, you hypocritical prick?

Yesterday evening something blew the main circuit-breaker here, and it took me ages to figure out that it was my just-out-of-warranty fridge-freezer. I changed the fuse, which was clearly burnt, plugged it back in, but it still kept tripping the breaker – until suddenly, it didn’t. It was however, as silent as the grave, and clearly not working.

It’s a giant, American-style model, with enough food for at least two months and, desperate to try and rescue at least some of it, I emptied my other fridge-freeze, the one I keep my bread flour in – I removed about 50lb of the stuff, boxed it and moved it out of the way – then felt so appallingly ill I thought I was heading for a coronary, or a stroke, hence my tweet last night.

I still feel pretty awful but, hey, I’m still here, and feeling so bad last night gave me the impetus to write this blog post, the subject matter of which I’ve been flirting with for almost 2 years (don’t know why, but I seem to write better the worse I feel).

Anyway, back to the fridge-freezer, and at some point last night I realised it was actually working, but very quietly. It’s always been a noisy bugger, which was annoying as it lives in the living room, there being no room in the kitchen, but now it’s nice and quiet.

I can only assume that when I thought it wasn’t working, it was at the coldest part of its cycle, and had turned itself off for a while, before restarting uncharacteristically quietly.

Looking at the burned fuse, I did wonder if there’s been a power surge (in the middle of the night, last week, something tripped the circuit breaker for the lights – never figured out what). All my electrical stuff is connected via surge protectors, except the fridge-freezer – I really must do something about that.

And this post is my 1,500th…