Monthly Archives: May 2025

And Back to Hospital . . .

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Breakfast – a meal to set you up for a difficult day, or even a heart attack. This one lacks bubble and squeak and black pudding because I’m trying to become more health conscious.

Julia has been struggling. She is much better now but it took more upheaval to accomplish anything., and I ahd to enlist the help of my sister.

Basically, since she had to return to A&E last week, she has shown little improvement, has bled several times in the night and from Monday onwards, has been starting to look old and tired. I haven’t known whether to worry or not, and have stuck to my approach of changing dressings when necessary and being generally upbeat. It was, to be honest, getting more difficult. Finally, by Wednesday, she was ahving trouble talking and staying awake.

However, this is a woman who had to leave school at 16 to support her family but eventually ended up with two degrees, a postgraduate diploma, worked in fields, kept us going in the Quercus days by working a Sunday shift that started at 5am, brought £miliions in grants in to Nottingham and had a couple of babies. She hates being seen as weak and would rather die than admit she needs help.

By 6pm on Wednesday it looked like she was going to achieve her ambition. Fortunately, my sister had popped round with cake and a water pistol (that squirrel is in trouble now)  and joined me in bullying Julia into going back to A&E. I will spare you the boring details, particularly as they left me at home (I tried a token protest, but didn’t try too hard). It included included a lot of time waiting for results, having a camera inserted into her throat via her nose, blood tests, drugs, more blood tests, a scan and some other messing about.

Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough

The conclusion is that she needs to go to an ENT clinic. The doctor said that the wait is about three weeks but he will ensure she is called within a week. She was told this two weeks ago. They will probably have to open up the wound again to clear it out, as there is a large haematoma in there which is causing problems (again, we were told that two weeks ago). The wound also needs restitching as it is untidy and has not healed. Two weeks ago she was given antibiotics to prevent infection. Last week, she was given different antibiotics because she was feeling rough. This week she was taken off antibiotics because the gasping for breath (after checking heart and lungs) seems to be a side effect of the antibiotics.

Correct, it would be hard to make this stuff up.

And, when she goes in for work on the wound, they will probably glue the tear in the vein. The ENT specialist on week one said it should have been done. They said so today too. It’s a typical sign of a service under pressure – they never have time to do it properly, but they do have time to do it again. She’s been in A&E three times when once should have been plenty.

And finally – the thing they stick down your nose to photograph your throat (her vocal chords are looking good she says, though I’m not sure what she’s comparing them to) costs £350 and is single use only. They throw them away. I said she could have brought it home so I could attach it to the computer for examining coins. Yes, of course I’d stick it up my nose too, wouldn’t you? I can’t see why they couldn’t just wipe it down with an anti-bacterial wipe. It’s not like you need to be very sterile with something you’re shoving up a nose, is it? Obviously you’d have to make sure they were a distinctive colour so they didn’t get mixed up with the colonoscopy kit, but apart from that, it would be quite simple and save a fortune.

My sister, incidentally, was surprised to be asked to press some buttons during the process. While the doctor was guiding the camera my sister had to press buttons to set the photography up. I’m sorry I missed that.

Just one last thing and I will let you go. Julia has a fan club. She was explaining her problem to a junior doctor when they interrupted her, saying  “I know who you are, I’ve heard all about you.” Apparently in medical circles she is  spoken of in awed tones as the only person known to have cut their throat with a plant pot.

We had salad tonight – pear, blue cheese, leaves, walnuts,  spring onion, cucumber, chive flowers, tomatoes. We could have had more, but Julia didn’t feel hungry and I hate salad.

 

 

A Hard Week for Me, a Harder Week for Julia

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Julia – looking sophisticated in Bakewell

It’s not been a productive week. I’m finding it surprisingly hard to concentrate while Julia is recovering. It’s not a quick or easy process. Each morning I have to check the wound in her neck. It’s sore and swollen and tends to weep a bit, so it’s always difficult to tell if there’s a problem. On Tuesday shr had to go back to hospital and have it looked at.

The fresh bleeding that had started overnight was judged to be harmless after they had cleaned her up and prodded her about. She emerged from hospital after six hours, with clean dressings, another course of antibiotics and the promise of seeing a specialist to do more checking on the wound. It clearly isn’t healing. She is in pain, can’t sleep and is very tired all the time. She is also worried. So am I. It would be a lot easier if it was something I could bind or push or pitch, but it isn’t and all I can do is wait and worry about my inability to help.

Julia with Peter rabbit

I am doing my best to be upbeat, encouraging and to feed her lots of spinach. That’s all I can think of. Fortunately we have a bag of frozen spinach which I bought by accident. I thought it was fresh and would last us a week. It turned out to be frozen and has lasted us a month as I’ve gradually worked it into stews and curries.

We had Cajun inspired rice tonight. Rice is good because people with a three inch gash across their neck don’t enjoy too much chewing. Actually, due to a lack of spices it ended up as Cajun uninspired rice. It had sausages and prawns, peppers, peas, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes with garlic, cumin and chilli. It’ll do. I’ve ordered some Cajun seasoning with the grocery delivery and will see what happens next week.

Julia – not looking sophisticated in Bakewell – Coconut macaroons and hilarity in Bakewell

 

Rest and Recovery

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Well, Julia is back. She was released around lunchtime on Friday and my sister came to pick her up with me. It all went well – she was standing by the pick-up spot and we almost got a space. The lack of space didn’t matter as there was a taxi in front of me picking someone up and I slotted in behind him and combined with him to stop traffic. They must have hated us, but that’s how it goes. She had to walk 50 yards whilst bleeding from a neck wound when we arrived, but I fail to see why she should walk a foot further than necessary on the way back.

She has slept a lot since arriving home. Considering that her time in hospital consisted mainly of sleep deprivation and blood tests I can’t say I blame her. Not only did she not get a bed until 5am on the first night, not only was it noisy with someone listening to TV all night, but tey woke her up several times on the second night to check her and to extract blood. They seem very keen on blood tests, which seemed a bit strange as the reason she was in hospital was to try and stop her bleeding.

Anyway, you need to sleep while you are healing, so I have been making her go for a lie down now and again, plus making cups of tea, home made soup and easily chewable foodstuffs. She went out to the country park with my sister this afternoon and they toured the food stalls that are there this weekend, returning home with snack food for tea.

She enlisted my help in removing the dressing before she went out. It’s about the size of a small pillow, and not very convenient if you want to walk around.  The idea is that it applies pressure, and also reveals any new traces of bleeding.. However, despite our efforts yesterday with micropore, it kept coming loose and flapping about so today it had to go.

Imagine a dressing secured by four bits of sticky tape. Three of them won’t stick and the fourth is bonded to the skin by some mysterious chemical process and won’t come off. I tried several ways, including sneaking up on her and trying to surprise it, but it stayed stuck. It’s stuck to her throat and, as you may recall, her throat is badly cut, wounded, stitched, bruised and generally tender. The bruise resulting from all this is about 9″ x 4″. Fort hose of you who use metric that’s about the size of a paperback book. I’ve never quite managed to go metric for size.  For some reason I can do furlongs, chains, yards, ells, cubits and hands but never quite grasped centimetres.  Metres are easy, because they are about a yard, but the rest is a mystery.

 

We got three bits off and detached the dressing from the fourth so she is able to go out with just a light scarf for camouflage. Eventually, I’m sure, the other piece will detach itself, but for now it can stay.  If it doesn’t fall off naturally, I will just have to paint it the same colour as her neck and hope nobody notices.

The Perils of Plant Pots Part 2

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Entrance to Cromer Pier

I had a phone call just after nine this morning. It was Julia, using a borrowed phone. The good news is that she has been allowed to eat and it was a success. The bad news was that it was only porridge, which is not much of a test of swallowing ability. In my experience you put porridge in your mouth and gravity does the rest.

The even worse news is that she is not being allowed out. She escaped the camera up the nose exam but had a CT scan which revealed a small hole in her jugular vein. It hasn’t closed and is still seeping. They are monitoring progress but if it doesn’t close soon they may have to operate.

Julia as Lifeguard – Britannia Pier, Great Yarmouth

In the end, she slept part of the night in a chair in A&E before being found a bed at 5am. It is in a corner of a crowded ward which features a lot of deaf old people, all with TVs up at full blast. They also all seem to have telephones with annoying ringtones and have to shout their conversations down the phone as the TVs are so loud. I spent about seven hours there today and at times thought my head was going to burst.

At least she now has a phone, a change of clothes and a puzzle book – the necessities of modern hospital life.

The medical staff have all been lovely. Can you sense a “but” coming on? The systems are badly designed and  would benefit from somebody posing as a mystery patient and checking the experience from that point of view.

Felixstowe Pier

Today, for instance, I looked on the map at reception and tried to find Ward A15. There is no Ward A15, they stop at A10. The next ward is B11. The Bs end at B14. I don’t know how much they spent on those maps, but it seems not to have been spent wisely. There is, I was told on asking, a Ward A15. I was given directions to it and found it. This was fortunate, because at one point the A15 sign on the wall is covered by a discarded cage trolley. When I left, the sign was still covered, and the same abandoned trolley was still parked in front of it.

Then there is the matter of the visitor toilets . . .

I needed the toilet. I’m not allowed to use the one on the ward so I had to ask the way to the nearest toilets for the public. I had to ask twice because they were not well signed, and they were 150 paces away from the ward round several corners and through several sets of doors. That’s a long way for a man with two sticks and bad knees.

The good news is that although it isn’t perfect, we can still get good quality care without having to run up huge debts. If only it was quieter . . .

Bangor Pier – that woman seems to be following me

 

The Perils of Plant Pots

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Haddock Special at the Fishpan, Scarborough

On the second Wednesday of every month Julia has a quiet evening watching TV and I go to the museum to sit in a room of middle-aged men (I’m being kind here, we might be, on average, elderly rather than middle-aged) and listen to a talk on a military subject.

Last month I was unable to attend because I had a bad arthritis day. This month, although everything went so well in the beginning, I missed it because I had to take Julia to A&E after her attempt to move a plant pot went horribly wrong.

Don’t worry, she is fine, though they have kept her in for observation.

It all started with a broken plant pot. It was a big one, blue-glazed and big enough to build a water feature in. That’s why I originally bought it, but we never got round to using it. We moved it down from Nottingham yesterday and, when we arrived home, she sent me inside and started to unload the car. She does not allow me to unload the car as she regards me a s an unstable safety hazard. Dismissed, I went in to make a cup of tea.  She unloaded.

Minutes later I heard the call “Simon!” and got up to find her in the bathroom pressing a blood-stained face cloth to her throat. On examining the wound I found a large hole in her throat and a worryingly heavy flow of blood. It wasn’t squirting, but it was bleeding at a rate that suggested proper medical attention was needed, and that it needed to be quick because blood shouldn’t leave the body as quickly as that.

Fish and Chips from the Dolphin

The question was, did I panic, call an ambulance, wait, and let her bleed all over the house, or did I wrap her in towels, run her to hospital and hand her over to a highly trained team of medics, all with a burning desire to tend to the consequences of a flower pot injury?

Oh yes, the injury. Imagine a small woman built on the lines of a teddy bear. Now imagine that woman with her arms wrapped round a large garden flower pot of blue-glazed earthenware. Don’t bother asking why she was doing it in the first place when she had a perfectly good husband available for heavy lifting, she will just mutter and make little sense.

So, with both arms wrapped round the pot, which is something close to three feet across. she stumbled, feel and used the pot to break her fall. It broke into a dozen large pieces and as she fell, one of the pieces jabbed her in the throat, penetrating into the muscle. Seven hours and eight stitches later she was still oozing blood, so they added a few extra stitches and took her away for a CT scan (the original X-Ray may have missed some damage) and a night in hospital. They want to make sure it doesn’t bleed again and cause more problems. They also want to see if she can swallow. Tomorrow they are going to check the damage with a camera, which will be inserted via her nose.  Then I will be allowed to bring her home.

My alternative title for this was “A Night to Remember” but it has already been used. However, we are definitely going to remember it. I also thought of “The Curse of the Second Wednesday”, but it was a bit melodramatic.

I thought about using pictures of Julia, but that seemed a bit too much like an obituary, so I went for fish and chips.

Haddock Special at the Dolphin Fish Bar, Sutton on Sea

 

 

 

 

Eating Like a King

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It’s Monday, it’s 13.50 and I am feeling peckish. So far I have got up, typed, had breakfast, read three auction catalogues, sent in two bids for later in the week, had coffee, chatted to Julia, read two contributions I made to newsletter/Facebook pages, considered the end of the world, done my data entries for the Garden Birdwatch and Blackbird survey (we have a sad lack of blackbirds) and wondered where all the time has gone.

In a moment I am going to make a salad for lunch and moan to Julia that my time just seems to melt away.

And an hour later, I am back. I ended up with a cheese and pickle sandwich and some coleslaw. Not as healthy as it might have been, but in nutritional terms, I’ve had worse. I genuinely have had so much salad recently that I couldn’t face more than a moderate portion of coleslaw.

Last night we had mushroom biriyani. I managed to get mushrooms, tomatoes, peppers, peas and onions into it and served it with a side salad of cucumber salad. For lunch we had leek and potato and cauliflower soup (it evolved rather than was cooked – as I added surplus roasted cauliflower to the remains of a previously made leek and potato soup) and for breakfast we had banana and blueberries with our virtuous Weetabix style biscuits. I think that’s ten fruit and veg, which explains why I am full of vitamins and fibre, smug, and overweight.

I’m thinking of adopting the dietary regime of King Charles who, he tells us, has two meat-free days a week, one dairy-free day and banned pate de foie gras from all palace menus. I’m way ahead of him on at least one of those and probably up with him on the meat free days. I don’t really take note of meat free days anymore, just plan to include a number of meat-free evening meals into the week. I probably should plan better.

As for the non-dairy, we’ve discussed it and we are going to try oat milk, though we aren’t allowed to call it that – it’s a drink, because it is of non-animal origin. In the USA it can be called milk because the courts decided that Americans are far too intelligent to confuse the different products.

You know that old Hemingway quote about 7/8 of an iceberg being below the surface? Ring any bells?

Poetry and Robins

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Robin - singing

Robin – singing

a robin
sings to its mate
when was the last time
I sang
for you?

That is my latest publication. It was a surprise, because I hadn’t ben told it was accepted. Fortunately I always check before sending things again, as editors don’t like simultaneous submissions. It’s in a German publication called Chrysanthemum. After waiting a while, I went to check on the website, assuming I’d been rejected but wanting to double check, and found the magazine had already been published and I am on pages 226 and 227.. It was a pleasant surprise. They also translated it into German. I knew this was going to happen, but hadn’t anticipated the different look (using capital letters) or the different dynamic that would come from what seemed to be a reordering of words.

Here’s the German translation.

ein Rotkehlchen
singt für seine Gefährtin
wann habe ich
das letzte Mal
für dich gesungen?

Robin, Arnot Hill Park

I just fed it into an internet translator and it put it into English in almost exactly my words. This was a surprise, and a superb effort by the human translator. I have to admit I was expecting it to come back seriously scrambled due to the changes in word order I could see and because of previous experience with internet translations.

I also had a haibun published.

Lesson not learned
Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once
a Roman town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then
rose again. So many empires, so many layers of dust telling one and the same story

dreams of
a second chance
— one more grey dawn

I’m not quite sure what happened in the edit as the title and last line have been altered in the published version. Altered but possibly not improved. What do you think? The original version is shown below.

Lessons we have not learned

Only a few miles from where I sit, a mammoth died. Grass grows on what was once a Romans town. Stone spires show where a great religious house rose and fell, then rose again. So many layers, so many stories they could tell. So many men forget all empires turn to dust.

dreams of
a second chance
—one more grey dawn

Robin at Rufford Abbey

That means that in the first four months of the year I have made 30 submissions and 22 have resulted in acceptance. However, before congratulating myself, I have to remember that the 30 submissions contained 151 poems. Normally a submission contains three haibun or tanka prose and the submissions of shorter poems at often 10-15 poems. So when I say I made 30 submissions and had 22 acceptances this 77% success record could also be calculated as also only 15%. It all depends on how you look at it.

Robin

 

 

 

 

Mysterious Ways

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Ely – Stained Glass Museum

It’s nearly two weeks since I last posted. I didn’t set off with the idea of leaving it that long, but it just crept up on me. I have actually written a couple of long posts about world events, but they depress me, and if they depress me they aren’t going to cheer anybody else up. We know the world is changing, and, to paraphrase Emperor Hirohito in 1945, not necessarily to our advantage. We don’t need to keep telling ourselves this, and if we do, we have plenty of people to do it.

The world, as it stands at the moment . . .

Tch! There I go again.

 

Actually, the most interesting thing to happen recently has been the election of the Pope. There was talk of an Asian Pope or even a black Pope, but they went for a white American Pope. It wasn’t a surprise, particularly as the American Catholics had been promising a billion dollar donation if the “right Pope” was selected. However, in the manner of these things, God, working through his devious and scheming Cardinals (I’ve never trusted a Cardinal – they are always bad news when they appear in history, or the Three Musketeers) has come up trumps with this choice. I doubt that the million dollar donation will be made now. (Yes, I did wonder about my choice of idiom there, but it seemed appropriate).

May I draw your attention to the Papal Bull of 1570 – Regnans in Excelsis. It caused quite a stir in its time and, as far as I know, could be repeated. Papal Bull, by the way, is what the Vatican calls them, it is not, despite modern usage of the word bull, a derogatory term.

I tend to leave the Catholic Church alone, as long as it leaves me alone, but I will point out one thing. While the discussion was going on about whether the next Pope might be black or Asian, there was one guarantee – he wasn’t going to be a woman.

I will now trust in Hemingway’s iceberg theory and stop writing.

Stained Glass Museum – Ely