The Anonymous Widower

Blood Testing At The Royal London Hospital

The Royal London Hospital is still trying to get to the bottom of my health incident, that I wrote about in The Hour Change Has Completely Knocked Me Out.

On Monday, I had a serious liver scan by ultrasound at Barts Hospital and today, I was phoned up by the Royal London to invite me to take a blood test to check against those that they took a couple of weeks ago.

They said to turn up any day before five and they would do it there and then.

As I was going past the hospital this afternoon, I turned up about two-thirty, without a prior appointment.

I logged myself into a queuing system, which was more McDonalds or Leon, than NHS and sat for about fifteen minutes, whilst the patients in front of me were tested.

As I sat there, I was approached by a doctor doing research. He asked if I would give a couple of extra vials of blood for his research.

As I knew that this would only delay me for a few more seconds, I said yes and filled in his form, which asked no important ethical questions.

Is the system in use at the Royal London Hospital research-friendly?

Suppose, a researcher is looking into the frequency of a particular gene in a population. They could just ask patients for a sample.

November 24, 2022 Posted by | Health | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Oysters Get New Home At Eneco Luchterduinen Offshore Wind Farm

The title of this post, is the same as that of this article on offshoreWIND.biz.

I have never tasted oysters, but what put me off them, was I took a client; Bob, who was the Chief Management Accountant at Lloyds Bank to Dirty Dicks. Bob had a lot of oysters and spent a weekend in Bart’s Hospital.

It turned out to be the first of many drunken meals with Bob and I learned a lot from him, about how to deal with bankers and accountants. He was one of the uncredited designers of Artemis. Thank you Bob!

I do think though that using offshore wind farms to grow food in their shelter will be something we’ll be seeing more and more.

November 3, 2022 Posted by | Computing, Energy, Finance, Food | , , , , , | 1 Comment

My Cardiac Echo Stress Test

I had a cardiac echo stress test today at Barts Hospital.

It has been almost fifty years since, I’ve been to that part of the hospital. And it was heart problems then. Not mine but my mother-in-law’s.

She had a very dodgy ticker and had two heart valve replacements. Her valve was  noisy and once she emptied a bus, as someone thought it was a bomb.

Doctors have thought one of my heart valves was leaking badly, but after the first part of the test, the doctor felt that it wasn’t that bad, so cut the test short.

  • One of my valves does leak, but not badly and it just needs to be watched.
  • The doctor also said, that it won’t need open heart surgery, as methods have improved.
  • So instead of a two hour examination, I had left after forty-five minutes.

That’s the sort of health care I like.

November 6, 2021 Posted by | Health | , , | 3 Comments