Germany’s Cucumber Problem
I typed “german cucumber joke” into Google and found this site. It’s actually part of a serious German web site called Toy Town Germany, for Germans and others who live in the country who speak English.
How The Turks Deal With Pollution
This horrific story is in The Times today, although I’m pointing to a green web site, so evryone can read it.
Turkey may well have nine percent economic growth, but at what cost?
So is it right, that we increase unemployment, because of imports from Turkey?
In my view it isn’t!
C and I once had a holiday in Turkey and in some ways we weren’t impressed. Luckily we could afford to go somewhere better.
As a coeliac, I starved in Turkey, as they just couldn’t get the idea of what gluten-free was! Despite the fact I had an excellent translation.
Is Measles Making A Comeback?
I had measles as an adult at twenty-eight, at the same time as I had chickenpox. I would not wish that on anybody, and hopefully it didn’t leave me with any long-term health problems. My sister had it very badly as a child and it might have explained her poor eyesight. I also know of people slightly older than myself, who have suffered seriously from the disease.
So when I read that there has been a large increase in measles, I get worried.
It would appear that most are related to young people who have travelled abroad.
It says the latest cases are mainly among unvaccinated people under 25 years old and are centred on “small clusters in universities, schools or families or associated with travel abroad”.
I feel that we should encourage more vaccination. I would not recommend my experience of the disease to anyone! But I was lucky! Others may not be so!
A Hay-Fever Diary
Last year I put together a Pain Diary to see if I could find a better strategy to feeling better.
So now, as I’m suffering badly from hay fever or something like that, I’ll see if I can find any link. Note the two factors after the date are the pollen level according to the BBC and how I have felt on the day out of ten.
Monday, May 23rd – Moderate – 3/10
It started as a good day.
But after washing my hair at about three, it went swiftly downhill. It was almost as if I’d got soap in my eyes.
I had dinner at Arbutus and felt a bit better as I was very cruel to a rabbit. But I suspect the restaurant was air-conditioned.
Tuesday, 24th May – Moderate – 3/10
I got up and after breakfast went back to bed only getting up at about 10:00. I didn’t eat much all day, as I was so tired. I think it was just a Beanz thing for lunch and strawberries for supper.
Wednesday, 25th May – 4/10
Again I got up late and went to IKEA in Croydon. Lunch was a plate of IKEA gravadlax and a bottle of ginger beer. Did the air-conditioning help?
Thursday 26th May – Moderate – 6/10
Lunch was an egg dish in Carluccio’s and then getting wet in the rain.
Supper was a Marks and Spencer beef stroganoff after a drink down the pub.
Friday 27th May – Low – 5/10
I had a lot of pain this morning, in my face, left arm and left leg. I was sneezing a lot as I walked around the city.
After lunch of a salad nicoise, I slept for two hours.
Supper was another Marks and Spencer salmon after a drink down the pub.
Saturday 28th May – Low – 5/10
Less pain than yesterday, but like yesterday I did have a two hour sleep after lunch.
Sunday 29th May – Low – 6/10
The pain has been back in my arm today. And I had a good two hours sleep in the afternoon.
I didn’t have much lunch, but supper was Moroccan Chicken from the freezer with rice and strawberries to follow.
Monday 30th May – Low – 6/10
The pain was still in my arm today. And again I had a good two hours sleep in the afternoon.
I cooked the Beef and Bean Casserole, but supper was very much a snack.
Tuesday 31st May – Low – 7/10
The arm pain wasn’t so bad today and I didn’t have the sleep in the afternoon.
Lunch was eggs in Carluccio’s and supper was a couple grilled pork chops with some beans.
Wednesday 1st June – Moderate – 5/10
I didn’t have much pain, but I did need a couple of hours sleep in the afternoon.
I was also lazy and had supper in the Northgate Arms
Thurday 2nd June – High- 6/10
I went to the physio this morning and after some asparagus for lunch, I slept for a couple of hours.
Supper was fish and beans.
Friday 3rd June – High – 7/10
Perhaps the physio helped, but my arm was much better today.
Lunch was in Carluccio’s in Hampstead and supper was a Waitrose Indian meal for one after my long walk in Bow.
It was the first day in a long time, when I didn’t have a long sleep in the daytime.
Saturday 4th June – High – 7/10
As the blog shows, I went to the Derby, where it was very hot. I came back tired and went to bed at 21:30, which is early for me. I slept until 07:20, which is a long sleep for me.
Sunday 5th June – Moderate – 6/10
Not too bad a day and the pain hasn’t been too bad. It’s now 22:00 and I’ll be going to bed soon.
Volcanic Ash and Pollen Clouds
I don’t care a fig about the volcanic ash from Iceland, but I do find all of this pollen horrendous. And speaking to others, it would appear that I’m not the only one in London, who is suffering badly.
Looking at the pollen forecast, it would appear that I should emigrate to somewhere like Manchester! I think I’ll stay here and fight it out!
INR Test – 23rd May 2011
Result: 2.3
Dosing Recommendation: 4.8 mg/day
Next INR Test interval: 56 days
Repeat INR Test on 18th July 2011 at 11:00.
Oven Gloves for the Microwave
A friend brought these back from Hawaii.
Oven Gloves for the Microwave
They do actually help, and as there are two and they are small, they could fit anywhere on my work surface to move things that are either hot or in my case cold. Cold things like a pie from the freezer are just as painful.
Here’s one on my left hand.
A Glove on My Left Hand
Hopefully, they will help me use my left hand better, as often I use the right, as that works well with any normal temperature.
The fingers work as you can see, but the temperature sensors aren’t that reliable. Luckily, I haven’t burned the hand yet!
Botched Plastic Surgery Made Business Fail!
According to this story on the BBC, botched plastic surgery made a woman’s business fail! She even got £6 million damages for it.
Lucky her!
I can’t help feeling that she was more than a little lucky here, as it is in my view not the most sensible of things to have vanity plastic surgery. Why would anybody chose to go through pain for no proper reason? On the other hand read any tabloid and there are loads of stories where people have suffered pain in the name of pleasure!
I have pain from my stroke and to inflict it for a vanity reason just seems so bizarre.
As the courts have said that the plastic surgeon made a mistake, which he admitted, it seems that there were a both parties weren’t as sensible and thoughtful as they might have been! In all things to do with doctors, you should choose them with care!
One of the reasons, I would never have vanity plastic surgery is that there are so many court cases when it goes wrong. There has even been more than a few deaths, although thankfully most of the latter have been abroad or caused by plastic surgery performed in less-than-safe surroundings or countries.
So yet again, it is rich seam for the lawyers, to trouser a decent wage.
One of C’s legal colleagues once asked me if C had had her bust enhanced, as he thought it looked different. He was very surprised when I said it was exercise and a bra that fitted well. She never let him forget it!
A Year On
It is now over a year since I had the stroke in Hong Kong and as you know I’ve now moved to London, just round the corner from where my grandmother was born in the Balls Pond Road. In fact, I drink in the pub, where my great-grandfather might have wetted her head.
So how am I feeling?
Bodily, I have few issues.
My nails used to be firm and hard, but now they are soft and brittle. My toenails are actually worse than my fingers. My nails were always soft before I went gluten-free and I used to bite them badly and my skin too. I’m not biting them now at all.
Q 1. Could it be that as my body is repairing itself from the stroke, it’s using up what I need for healthy nails?
I have an almost cramp-like pain in my left lower leg, which is very like the pain I got, when I trod on a razor shell on the beach in Norfolk in the summer of 2009. It tends to get worse at night.
My left humerus is also painful a lot of the time at the same place where it was broken by a bully at school. I think as the nerves for my arm and hand pass close to the bone, it affects them at times.
I did have pain at the end of my spine, but now that has virtually gone unless I sit on the wrong sort of chair. This again was an old injury, which was very much aggravated by the hospital bed in Hong Kong. I should say that I always sleep face down because of the end of my spine, which curls outwards and I get less cramp in my lower leg, which I’ve always had since a child. I can still feel the cold lino, which I used to put my foot on to cure it.
It’s almost as if my old physical problems have come back!
Q. 2 Does your brain develop new pathways to get round the pain from injuries?
Q.3 When you have a stroke are these pathways knocked out? So if so, it would seem you need to develop them again. One psychologist at Cambridge, who worked with stroke patients thought this could be the case.
Facially, I haven’t too much pain, but my scalp and left hand side are rather tender. My skin actually feels like it did at times before I went on a gluten-free diet before I was diagnosed as a coeliac. One of my main symptoms of coeliac disease was chronic dandruff. It went immediately, I changed to a totally gluten-free diet.
In fact, at some times, I feel like I’ve been glutened. Not seriously, but my motions are rather loose nearly all the time. Full tests at Addenbrooke’s have shown that there is nothing serious there, although I haven’t had another endoscopy to see what my gut is like.
Q.4 Is this connected with any of the drugs I’m taking?
On advice from my previous GP, I do take calcium tablets with added vitamin D, as it was slightly low. But a Dexascan showed everything was fine.
I have just re-read a post on this blog, which was a pain diary, describing how I was trying to control the terrible pain I was having last summer, with codeine and paracetamol. It wasn’t that successful and a few days later or so, I collapsed and ended up in Addenbrooke’s. Nothing was done and I just struggled on. And then a few weeks later, I ended up having a fit like symptom, when I was putting on my coat. I can remember feeling a bolt of pain in my humerus and then I went into oscillation. It’s funny, but I may remember something similar happening, just after I broke the bone, as I walked home from school. Addenbrooke’s put me on Keppra to stop it happening again. It hasn’t.
Q.5 Should I keep taking the Keppra?
I incidentally take it with vitamin B6 to avoid any side effects, but also as I’ve been advised by a Dutch doctor to take B6 anyway, as he feels that coeliacs should take it to reduce the risk of strokes.
Because of the pain and because it felt like someone was pouring awful muck down my throat, I went to see an ENT specialist to see if my sinuses were bad.
He found everything clear, but thought that I was suffering from a serious pollen allergy. Now as a child, I was very sickly and was always off school. In my first year at Grammar School I virtually missed all the second term. Gradually it got better and it really improved when first we went to live on the 11th floor in the Barbican and later when I started flying aircraft for pleasure.
I’ve also had some bad winters and springs before, but not as bad as this one, when for much of the time, I just couldn’t breathe. Although in the last twenty years or so, I’ve lived on top of a hill with a strong westerly wind and my late wife and I could afford to take holidays in the sun in January. Funnily, my cardiologist,said that everybody should take two weeks in the sun every winter. I did try to do this in April by going to Greece and backpacking around the islands, but was irritated by everyone smoking all the time.
I know from travelling around the UK in the last year, that when I get out of the pollen I feel better. For instance, I went to Barnsley in March on a breezy day to see the football and felt a lot better that day. On the other hand, I walked past a tree-shredding machine at Euston a couple of weeks ago and it set me off coughing for half-an-hour.
Q.6 So why should all of this reaction to allergens get so much worse after the stroke?
On the other hand, in 2009, I was travelling to Holland a lot in the spring and suffered worse than I had done for years. I put it down to different pollens at different times. It was almost as if I got used to the English ones and then when I went to Holland, a load of different ones set me off.
Some days it’s so bad that all I can do is lie down indoors and listen to the radio. On the other hand, when I went down the London sewers, it helped my breathing immensely.
So how am I managing otherwise.
I have no problem getting around on buses and trains and of course by walking. I did fall over on a bad pavement in Upper Street in March, but haven’t hardly stumbled since, especially since I was fitted properly for a pair of trainers. I have no problems using the top decks of buses and climbing up and down ladders.
I like cooking and do quite a bit, although, as there are now so many Carluccio’s with a gluten-free menu, I am lazy quite a bit of the time.
I do eat a lot of soft comfort food, like bananas and ginger cake between meals. But my weight is still the same as it was five or six years ago.
My only problem with cooking is that my left hand diesn’t seem to like hot or cold, although the finger movement is now almost back to normal. I notice this most with my typing, where although I type mainly one-handed, I now use the left properly for the shift. Incidentally, I’ve always typed with my right hand, because of my bad left arm.
My eyesight to the left isn’t good, but in the last month or so, I’ve been able to play table tennis again, something that I couldn’t do a year ago. On the other hand, it does seem to be worst, when my eyes are streaming from the allergies.
On a mental state, what more is there to say, other than that I’m here. I made a good fist of a lecture at Liverpool University, so my brain can’t be that awry. Although, I do forget things on a short-term basis. But then I always have to a certain extent. But the long term memory is intact!
GP Prescribes Jesus
If my GP did that to me, I’d report it immediately and move elsewhere as soon as possible.
But according to The Sunday Times today, a GP, Richard Scott, has been suspended for doing just that.
The Anonymous Widower 