Yay... I'm booked in

I bunked off rehab today.
I did explain to them why I was bunking off, as one of our friends needed a little bit of moral support today and as Lynn was already in the village having her hair done, it seemed stupid to make her go to Ipswich and back again for tonight, especially with petrol being as expensive as it is at the moment.
We had a really nice lunch in the sunshine at a local pub, in fact we actually started burning at one point where the sun was so hot.
Was really lovely being ladies who lunch and not having a hospital visit or rehab for a change.
Fab weather, second day of no heating on in my bungalow and I haven't felt the need to wear gloves in my front room since Sunday night!
Yay... warm hands!

Turns out it was a bit of a celebration for me too as at long last they have called me to book me in at Broomfield for my coronary angiogram. One step closer to the transplant.
I have to be honest, I am bricking it about having this done. The thought of having a catheter put in my heart while I'm awake frightens the hell out of me. Apparently I have to be there for six hours from 8am and have to lay flat for 24 hrs and will not be allowed out unless there is someone there to look after me. Whether that includes those six hours I don't know, but I have to go and be assessed next week and will find out more then.
Questions that are burning in my head now, is how will I manage to clear my chest and what if I cough when having the angiogram done? God, I am scared.

I thought I'd book Julie to have her feet nibbled by little fishes in a clinic in Braintree, to get her ready for her holiday and me... well I just wanted a boost. Apparently it's all the rage and it's only a tenner on special offer, but alas because we both have verrucas, we can't have it done.
I wonder whether; a) it would kill them off as verrucas do produce a lot of dry skin and they might actually poison them?
b) would they make the verrucas bleed by nibbling off too much dead skin and then make the fish go wild and turn into piranhas?
or c) It's just that you could spread the verrucas, simple as?
Ah well back to the cheese grater!
All this sunshine makes you think of getting your much neglected feet and legs into some sort of ship shape so that you can actually show them to the sun and it people without blinding them.
When I do start exfolitlating (I can't spell it and neither can the spell checker!), I will probably lose a stone off my legs with the amount of dead skin that will be washed down the plug hole!
Must sort them out before I go to have this angiogram done, as they go in through my thigh and I don't want to worry about the procedure and my hairy white scaly legs too!

Lots of love Debbie x

Tick the correct box or do not pass go

I actually got up fairly early this morning and entirely of my own making and believe me that's an all time first.
I have no idea how I used to get up early for work and have energy to actually work well when I got there. I wake up tired now.
But to be truthful for a knackered person, I do cover quite a bit of ground when I am awake and functioning, however slowly.

I had to wait in for B&Q's to deliver my fireplace stroke garden heater, for want of a better word, which is what I chose to spend my voucher on from the girls at work.
I love being outside in my garden and hopefully I can have this alight in the summer evenings without blowing myself up when wearing my oxygen, as it's totally meshed in. Hopefully spark free.
B&Q actually gave you a time scale of only three hours unlike my TV delivery on Tuesday, which was 7am to 7pm and then came at 8.45pm!

So I spent my time wisely sorting out my paperwork for the various benefit people, who have now decided that they want to see everything again. Which is no problem, apart from the Jobseekers wanting to see the same form about my pension, which they haven't sent back as yet from last time and they don't accept photocopies.
Mind you, getting photocopies aren't so easy to get hold of anyway when you no longer work in an office.
Please tell me how people commit fraud? I can see they might do unintentionally as the forms are so crap to understand, but to do it on purpose they must be some real whizz kids!
I live in fear that I have accidentally put a decimal point in the wrong place or ticked the wrong box and I will be told to go straight to jail, do not pass go.
I have shed more tears out of frustration over these poxy forms when trying to fill them in then anything else to do with this disease of mine.
I used to be so on the ball. What has happened to me?!

All this aggro for £40.55 a week and it was on the news again today that they are cutting benefits again. By the time they get their act together, I will be paying them so I can stay at home ill.
Hello? Wasn't it the work's occupational health doctor who made me give up work in the first place?
A hundred lines... I must not be inconvenient and have a lung disease.

I did have one bit of luck today and that I was able to double my Tesco points and have £60 to spend on clothes for free...Yay!
Hell, should I have declared that too?
I must be in my monochrome stage at the moment as everything I brought was in black and white and mostly all striped like the old comic book burglar. Perhaps if they had little arrows up and down them as well, I could wear them in prison?
Still it's an excellent feeling getting something for nothing.
I will be the best dressed beggar on the streets anyway!

Lots of love Debbie x

Lick and taste cheques

Still seem to be rushing around like the proverbial blue arse fly.

I wanted to pay in two cheques before going off to Comets to sort out mother's aerial lead, before the cheques managed to get covered in even more food splashes. The tiller lady if that's what they are called, I don't actually know as my brain is pretty fried as you know... although that does conjure up a vision of ladies with very long fishnet clad legs and feathered head dresses that bob up and down... anyway she looked very grumpy at me when I gave her my two tomato sauce splashed cheques... whoops, but it was a homemade sauce!
For the younger readers, google 'The Tiller Girls' before asking 'what planet is she on now?' and mental note to myself... do not keep cheques in kitchen next to cooker!

Set off to Comets to get a gay aerial lead for my mother. I say gay, as that's the only way I could remember I needed two male feeders and not a male/ female feeder. Just had to remember not to ask for a gay lead when I gave up looking and asked the man instead.
Guess that was a wee bit too to ask of me and the man just looked at me as if I had just walked out of the clinic for the 'No, absolutely hope, this one is away with the fairies, throw away the key' people. I guess that's not PC either????
Still I have come away with a lead and a brand new DVD as my new TV didn't have the facility to play them. God my bloody mother is costing me a fortune. So far I've brought a new hoover which isn't half as good as the one I gave her and now a TV, all because she didn't want to buy one.
I pray her washing machine doesn't break down, because I'm damned if I'm buying a new one of them!

By the time I had shopped, had lunch with Reni before getting her to cut my hair really short as I had attacked it somewhat while she was away thanks to the run in with the blue hair dye and plus it looked like rats had been eating it in my sleep... looks good now though thank you Reni... By the time I got to have my physio at St Peters at Maldon I was knackered.
They were running late and it was very warm in the waiting room, plus the big old armchairs there are so comfy, that I woke up to see two very old men fast asleep too and some woman sitting opposite, staring at me with a 'something smelly is under her nose' look, because I was obliviously snoring... loudly.
Oh the shame.
I have realised that I don't use very many full stops in my writing, but lots of 'ands' and commas and I ramble, but I guess that's because my life doesn't have very many full stops or pauses either.
Sorry folks but hey it's a lovely day out there today!

Lots of love Debbie x

My head is spinning

Here's the thing... if you are told that your brand spanking new TV, which you didn't actually want to buy in the first place, but did because your mother's set had died and she was point blank refusing to buy another, so I offer to buy a new one so she can have my semi new one... if you're told it will arrive sometime between 7am and 7pm that's annoying enough, but to arrive at 8.45pm? Durr hello?!

I had to doze on the bed again fully dressed in case he came dead on 7am and then get Julie in to house sit while I went to physio for an hour in the afternoon at St Mike's.
Oliver took my TV around to mother's as she had the hump that she was now into day four of watching TV in her bedroom and she wasn't happy.
Oliver couldn't set that up as apparently her aerial lead had two male and a female conectors and apparently I needed two male pieces... hello are we speaking another language here?
Bless Derek, as he happened to have one in his shed, I won't ask why.
Mother now happy.
My friend arrived a hour early for her meal and walked in on all this fiasco.
The AWOL TV set arrived at 8.45pm and at 9.15pm, I was begging Derek to make his second rescue mission of the night and put it all together for me. Cracking picture though!

I also had the doctor who came out to see mother yesterday on the phone this afternoon and I have a sneaky feeling that she had the hump big time with me for getting her out.
The call was about my latest test results which Hannah and Ruth asked me to send in and it she gave the impression that she was not impressed with them doing so.
Luckily it had come back ok, well apart from my pseudemonas to which she said while yawning that 'there was no chance of eradicating it.'
Now I know that and I know that she has just has just been on maternity leave with her first baby and she could have been up all night, but maybe I'm being paraniod, but it sounded like a case of 'whatever' there to me.

Next time my sister moans that there is a different problem concerning mother nearly every day, I will probably have to go and stick my head in a cupboard to keep quiet!

Lots of love Debbie x

Patience is frustration

Patience is not a virtue I has come to discover, patience is frustration that another day has gone past and still nothing from either Papworth or from Broomfield.
I have two more tests to do and nothing. All I can think of is my specialist's words that telling me that I only have a two year window and already a month has past and dippity squat from anyone and I'm now down to an one year and eleven months window. Two years didn't sound as bad somehow, but I'm now beginning to realise how slippery time actually is.
Three years ago about this time of year, I would be counting down the weeks to my June holiday in Turkey, striking off the days on my calendar, getting excited. Now I have a cold fear that just wants to hold on to each day, but at the same time wondering if maybe tomorrow will bring my letters.
No wonder my nerves are as tight as a drum skin, as I find myself pacing around my bungalow just lately waiting for the postman to come, who of course brings me everything other than what I want and need.

I had to ask the doctor to come and see my mother's back again, so we can finally get her booked in to have the cyst removed.
I'm sure that the doctor thought I was making up the fact that mother couldn't get down to the doctors to be seen, as when I was telling the doctor about how feeble she was on her legs and how she kept stumbling. The doctor asked mother to walk from room to room in the bungalow so she could access her and mother started walking upright around the bungalow, near enough swinging her walking stick around like Charlie Chaplin!
'Me fall over? Not since I fell about of bed two summers ago, I don't fall do I Debs'
Ok, I'll remind her of that next time she moans about her legs and how she can't walk anymore or we have 'words' and she tells me that she fell in the kitchen after I had left like last Sunday.
I can understand that mother is frightened that she'll end up in a home, but all the doctor was trying to do was to get her some physio to keep her knees agile and keep her out of a home.
And we told her that as she was parading up and down the front room like Miss World!
Of course as soon as the doctor left, the real mother came back.
As I said, my patience is running out... correction, has run out on me. Patience is frustration.

Lots of love Debbie x

Brief encounter

Well yesterday was a triumph, as not only am I shoving cream up my nostrils, I now have to put drops in my eyes too as I'm allergic to the bargain eyeshadow that I brought the other week.
Sorry for putting make up on in the vain hope of trying to look a tad like a woman for a change!
I think I can safely say that the after effects of those strong antibiotics that gave me this brief well being feeling, have now well and truly worn off... bummer...though I can't blame the eyes on that.
Still however brief it was to feel well for me, it certainly was lovely.

We went to the cinema last night to watch the British comedy 'Chalet Girl' and actually it was enchanting with the beautiful snow scenes and the absolutely drop dead gorgeous 'Bill Nighy'. You got to love that man!
I think my imagination was on overdrive again, no not me and Bill and an evening of lurve, but that I could smell the crisp air and that pinch you get on your cheeks through the cold air.
I really want to be able to do some travelling again.
I still have wonderful memories of the first time that I saw the fjords in Norway by daybreak, but I really do want to experience other snowy places too and even try skiing etc. Well actually I just want to go places again, hot or cold, I'm not fussy.
I was such a late starter at going abroad and I really miss all the places that I could have gone and might not be able to do.

Still never mind, I had my lovely son cook mother and me a fab roast dinner of new season New Zealand lamb for Mother's day. Mmmm yummy. He is an amazing cook that son of mine. My eldest son missed out as he has an abscess under a tooth and has in great pain since Thursday even on antibiotics etc.
Made me realise how useless I am now. If he was to ask me to look after him, I wouldn't be able to get up all the stairs if he was in bed, as he lives in a town house and the kitchen is on the bottom floor and everything is up on the next two floors up loads of stairs.
He has promised me that he'll call me through the night if he is in a lot of pain again and I would give it my best shot at getting up and down, as I know what it's like to be on your own and frightened when you are ill.
He has an appointment at 9am tomorrow so fingers crossed it is sorted.

Lots of love Debbie x

And the lucky number isn't 73

A slight panic this afternoon at rehab for the team when my stats had dropped to 73 when I first arrived and 89 is enough to have them asking 'how are you' questions. I've never seen Hannah go so red and Ruth zoomed over like a shot to make me sit down. Apparently they had already had an ambulance out twice today at different rehabs and they thought they were going to have to do a 999 call for the third time with me.
Strangely enough though, I felt fine all be it a bit tired.

I was late getting to rehab because I really wanted to finish my ironing and I was a bit cheesed off, because of various phone calls to the bank and my housing association regarding my housing benefit payments this morning, but I hadn't been rushing.
Plus I had a call from the prescription people wanting to know whether I was contribution based or something else.
Needless to say I didn't get any straight answers from anyone. You ask a simple question and everyone goes round the houses with their answers. All I wanted to know, was do I get a 'Crips r us' card to show to the dentist etc and did the housing association alter my standing order or direct debit, which ever one it was or did I change it?
The bank said the housing association and the housing association said the bank, two calls each backwards and forwards and it was stalemate.
How the hell do people con these people as I'm having trouble getting what I am owed!

Still the day got better as I went to see Lee Evans at the Civic in Chelmsford. He was trying out his new material for his new tour. What we didn't like was cut out, but to be honest there wasn't much that we didn't laugh at.
My face was aching when I left the theatre. I don't laugh out loud much now a it brings on a coughing fit, but I did risk it a couple of times.

Now terribly tired again and my eyes are killing me, so off to bed.

Lots of love Debbie x