When I think about the people I know who may be interested in the current situation I start to lose count. In all honesty I couldn't really tell what the interest level might be but I think about the Bowling Club membership, the multiple jobs I had, my friends and extended friend network, both mine and Carol's families, neighbours and acquaintances over the years, the amount of people I probably need to keep up to date with the situation is probably well into the many hundreds. This is one of the reasons I started to think about blogging however the other reasons include the education and guidance of others that will follow in my footsteps. I'm a technologist and I know that this footprint will be around for a good while if it actually benefits humanity and this is what I intend to do. At the same time this is some weird form of therapy for me and is in a way helping me come to terms with my illness.
So its T+8 (or something). Not sure for how much longer I'll keep up the day numbering, we will see. Today we were awake early to see Dr Kumar my GP who had yesterday prescribed me with sleeping tablets, anti depression pills and 3 bottles of morphine. When I originally went to see him about the heart burn stuff I went onto Ranitidine supposedly because this was cheap and easy. It seems when you are really sick you can get as much expensive medicine as you want even though the combination sounds like a molotov cocktail. We visited Dr Kumar this morning as we needed to get insurance certificates signed and stamped as we had to cancel our holiday in January to Steamboat Colorado for obvious reasons. This visit we didn't get cut short and managed to spend a fair amount of time with him.
From the surgery we returned home, I logged into work and helped out with some HSBC issues. At lunch we decided to go for a walk and took the path from Strathclyde Park to Chatelherault and back which is about 4 miles or so. We have lived here for 40+ years and never realised this walk existed. A nice relaxing walk in the trees along the river Avon. Carol and I talked about many things with me mostly bringing it back to 'I don't feel good, I'm gonna die' type stuff and Carol saying 'you'll be here for ages'. At times we drifted into conversations about the houses en route and at times we were almost back to normal. We got back to the car, I felt fine was good to be out in the fresh air. After picking up some shopping we returned home and I continued working the rest of the afternoon although as Christmas is almost upon us there wasn't a great deal happening.
Darren had done his usual in the last couple days of 'going off the deep end with technology' and bought a couple of Macs. As usual I get the pleasure of unboxing and configuring all the cloud software he needs to keep his business ticking over. With machines ready for collection, Darren fought the traffic and came over for a little while. Again, it was almost as if we were back to normality for a short space having a laugh and was good to see him.
My sister Dawn and her husband Alan then arrived and we had a good few hours with them, again almost normal, just chatting about the various stressful situation that our folks put us through when they buy technology products. We agreed that in order to give me some time to concentrate on my illness that Dawn would take over the Project Management aspect of parents introducing new technology - RESULT !
I said it was almost a normal day and we were doing well however I lost it with my sister a little bit. We cuddled and were in floods of tears a couple of times when the reality of the situation came back into focus and we tried to wrestle with the leviathan that was now upon us. Anyway, I managed to get around the deepening sadness by introducing Alan to the Sony VR thing that arrived a few days ago. TBH with everything going on I had it on my head for 5 minutes and immediately felt sick - what an investment that was. It may come in handy later on. We had a laugh at Alan negotiating the cyber universe as we all stood well back waiting for him to take someone out with a controller or throw up. Think he's hooked and probably realises that the biggest TV you can now get is the one that is 2 inches from your eyes.
So the appetite has been rubbish for the last few weeks with everything going on but tonight Carol made a prawn pasta dish which was amazing for the time I actually felt hungry and wolfed the thing down. Currently I am battling with reaching the 2000 calories I need to maintain my weight. It used to be so easy to hit when I was boozing, eating crisps for dinner and drinking Pepsi as if it were water. Now I am adding protein to berry and spinach nutri shake every morning in order to try and offset the fact that the rest of this day I seem to eat nothing but vegetables - oh how things have changed.
So normality can exist in small doses. You can have good days and I think when you do you need to savour the moment and thank God / Buddha / Allah / <Insert what you want> that you get to spend another day on the planet. Peace out.
