Tag Archives: INR

Blood Tests, Reading Ease and Vegetables

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The day started with a blood test.  The nurse took part of a tube before it stopped, never to start again. As she moved the needle to restart the flow I had a sudden, sharp pain in the wrist. I mentioned this, thinking she may have hit a nerve, but was told the needle wasn’t deep enough to hit a nerve. Well, it was deep enough to hit something, which stopped when the needle was withdrawn.

We had trouble after taking the needle out as I suddenly bled profusely, and wouldn’t stop. That’s the nature of Warfarin – you bleed easily, except when a nurse is trying to take a sample.

With the original; hole no longer flowing, she tried again. This time we got 3/4 of a tube before it stopped. A certain amount of tube swapping took place and we ended up with enough blood to allow it to be poured from tube to tube to make a full one. If it isn’t full they call you back for another test, which is always irksome.

Anyway, it is done. The results are on target, which is good. Now I just need to wait for the letter to tell me when my next test is due. They send the results and dosing instructions out by email to mke sure they get to me quickly, but they only send the new appointment date by letter, when they also confirm everything else. This is slightly different from the Nottingham system where they rang if anything needed changing, and made the appointment at the same time. I can’t say which is a better system, as they each have advantages, but it takes a little getting used to.

Last week I helped someone with editing a book. One of the suggestions I made was that he should cut down sentence length and complexity. I’m not perfect at this, but I do know a lot more about the basics of good writing than my work might show. I cannot be bothered to use simple words all the time, remove all adverbs or cut out all the verbal tics. I write for pleasure and don’t want to spend half my time sorting out the faults. This is me, this is my writing and these are my thoughts. I’m faulty and I’m happy with that.

Anyway, I fed the first section of this post through a couple of  online readability calculators. They calculate mysterious figures with strange names. However, they seem to agree that I am writing reasonably comprehensible words and am very slightly above the ideal scores. However, this still leaves me writing at about t5he level of a Harry Potter book, so I’m happy with that. It’s easy enough for adults to understand but not too basic.

Foodwise, we had our standard breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, so didn’t add anything to the food numbers. The evening meal was a Chinese-style rice dish with green beans, sweetcorn, mushrooms, spring onions, pineapple and broccoli.  It also had ginger, garlic and mango chutney, though probably not enough to count. It didn’t have peppers because, in the last couple of days, they have become inedible. This is embarrassing and I hate when I let it happen. They were too bad even for soup.

I was on 23 yesterday, and am now on 27. I have three days to find three more. I’m thinking of vegetable hash tomorrow – sweet potato, swede and cabbage will carry me across the line, which will be good for the first week.

I have mixed feelings about it as a system, but if it starts me thinking about food again, it will be worthwhile. We became a bit casual about nutrition over the summer. We had plenty of salad but teamed it up with too much processed meat and pork pies.

 

Would Larkin call it Quiche?

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Swings and Roundabouts, what goes around comes around, as one door closes another door opens . . .

Hot on the heels of my last rejection comes an acceptance. Not only an acceptance, but an acceptance for two tanka prose. Any double acceptance is a red letter day, as I said recently. This one was particularly good, as I had only sent two.

This is when I noticed something strange. The three that had been rejected a couple of days ago, looked poor when they were returned. The two that were accepted looked good when I re-read them. When I sent them off, they all seemed to be much the same level. It looks like I evaluate my work in relation to what happens when it is judged by an editor.

I must guard against this effect when viewing my work.

Here is a haibun that was rejected many times (four, I think) but accepted within hours by the final editor. It changed a few times over its life but the final version was not, as I recall, changed from the version that had been rejected by the previous editor.

Hidden Worlds

He wears a grey gaberdine and rides a bicycle from church to church. In his head he composes poems about sex and tombs. On YouTube he flickers in black and white, like a newsreel from the 1950s. Smiles are clearly still on ration.

Larkin used more bad language than you normally expect from a librarian. This becomes understandable when you find that he started his day with half a bottle of sherry.

monochrome photo
my parents younger than me
1963

Inspired by the life of Philip Larkin

(Published in Failed Haiku – February 2021)

I added the footnote because I had just been rejected by an editor for being obscure( it was a poem about a visit to Adlestrop). The editor who accepted it, did not use the footnote. You might want to read this, if you aren’t familiar with Larkin. I selected 1963 partly because of the poem and partly because of the sound. It wasn’t an easy decision because the rhyme counts against it in Japanese style poetry.

Meanwhile here are some pictures of my latest quiches, complete with ready made pastry cases. When I was a boy quiches were called flans and my mother used to make “egg and bacon pie”, which has been replaced by Quiche Lorraine. Haven’t we changed over the years? Change and improvement, that old thing.

The top picture is what happened to the leftover egg from the quiches. We just ate it for breakfast. The other pictures are quiches with a definite yellow cast to the photo and a couple of pics of the great biscuit disaster. I only had two cutters – the little man and a glass from the cupboard.

There is a lot of spinach in the flans, though you can’t really see it. We’ve also had it in curry this week. It’s going to mess my INR results up but I ordered a 500g bag with the groceries, which is a lot more spinach than it sounds when you actually have to use it. Green vegetables contain Vitamin K, which is the antidote for Warfarin so if you eat more, the INR goes down. You are supposed to eat the same things each week to stop the INR moving. So the choice is this – die of a blood clot, die of boredom, get scurvy. Discuss.

Slowly Bleeding to Death

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I have atrial fibrillation, as does Mark Spitz, the record-breaking American swimmer.  Mine isn’t as dramatic as his, mine was simply discovered when I went to the doctor and she listened to my heart.

“You have an irregular heartbeat.” she said.

“I know, I’ve had it for years.”

“We really should do something about it.”

That’s why I hate going to the doctor – I always come away with more than I take in.

I have an International Normalized Ratio (INR) test every few weeks to see how my blood is clotting. I need this because the doctors make me take Warfarin to stop my blood clotting too quickly. Until a few years ago I thought of Warfarin as a very effective rat poison.

If you have a normal set-up you have an INR of around 1. If you have atrial fibrillation they try to get it in the range 2.0 -3.0 which stops it clotting and prevents strokes and heart attacks. If you have a mechanical heart valve they like it to be a bit higher. It’s nothing special, a million of us have it in the UK and ten percent of the over 75s have it.

However, it can be a bit variable, and you may have noticed that I often complain about the testing, as the results can be very imprecise, which annoys me. I do my bit – eat a dull and unvaried diet, take the pills at the same time each day and let them take regular bloods. They, on the other hand, don’t do much, as I recently pointed out to them.

So, I believe I had got as far as 3.5 for people with mechanical heart valve and similar problems. The next step is 5.0 – 8.0. They start getting twitchy at this sort of level, particularly if it is accompanied by bleeding, and start threatening vitamin K injections. At 8.0 they start getting very twitchy . . .

And at 9.6, if you haven’t admitted to any bleeding, they tell you to stop taking the pills immediately and to go for another blood test in two day’s time.

I’m not sure whether to worry or claim it as a personal best.