The Blues

In the waiting room I have my head deep in my book.  It’s in so deep that when they call my name I fail to hear .  It takes the receptionist tapping her feet in front of me, files in hand, to get me to stir.  This is the Welsh National Health and I’m being called in more than fifteen minutes ahead of schedule.   Aneurin Bevan, your dream is coming true at last.

The trick is, of course, that after checking your weight and your blood pressure (what do you want me to do? I’ll need an arm) and your name and address, mother’s maiden name, medical number, GP details, birthdate and secret password (mine is arse, apparently there’s a move on to popularise these once discredited words) I get to sit in waiting room number  two.  Empty apart from me and my book.  Medical students come and go.  A trolley of files rolls by.  The leaflets on the notice board advertising the rheumatic hip self-help group  and what to do when you fall over flutter in its breeze.

I’m reading the late Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, an excellent history of blues music.  Palmer was a music journalist and fanatical record collector with a personal library of blues albums that ran to thousands.  He’s explaining how it was that jazz improvisation came from negro string bands and early jump-up  groups having to extend the length of their numbers.  They had to do this to satisfy the demand of dancers who didn’t ever want to sit down.  Middle of this my name again gets called.  This time I hear. I pad my way to today’s target - the consultants room.

It’s all centred on this.  Me sitting there before the doctor, a pair of silent students arrayed left, my file in all its fat and paper-stuffed glory in the centre of the desk.  The pred levels we’ll leave as they are, 3 / 4  mgs on alternative days, the consultant tells me.  Get that down to 3 mgs each day by the end of the month.  The synovial cyst is the real issue.  Your MRI scans show that it might not be growing but  it’s certainly there.  They are so unpredictable these things.  It will take just a small shift  for the pain to start for you again.  She frowns sympathetically.  You are not in pain now?  I was last week but today, no.

There are drugs we could put you on, gabapentin for example, but it does have side effects.  I get read a list.  There’s everything I've heard before on the prednisolone danger directory and then more.  Fat face, night frights, pain everywhere, bleeding stomach, head spins, fear of the outdoors, suicidal tendencies, hiccups.  Get all those and you’d never leave your bed.  Not everyone will suffer from these side effects, she tells me, reassuringly.  Up to you.  For now I’ll pass.

We’ll see what we can do with your visit to the neurologist, she continues.  You’ve already been on the waiting list for 3 months, can’t be long now.  I’ll give him a call.

Then I’m back on the street.  Nothing actually prescribed and nothing new to do.  There are a few specialist consultations out there somewhere in the future, maybe a spinal injection if that department gets its act together and another visit to Rheumatology in six months’ time.

What would Charley Patton or Robert Johnson have done?  Sung about it a bit accompanied by their slide guitars, Pain Down My Leg Blues,  Hollerin’ ‘Bout Gabapentin, Shake That Synovial Thing  Mama, and then retreated to the bar.  Alcohol, the great cure all. If in doubt put half a bottle of Wild Turkey down your neck. 

Patton died at 48, Johnson at 27.  Doesn’t really give you hope. 

Pain Is Not A Precise Art

Sometimes with pain  you can make it start.  With luck you can also make it stop.    In my case that’s stand up, stretch a bit, and then the electric begins to flash.  Sit and lean forward and after time the sparks begin to stop.  But pain, of course,  has an antipathy to regulation, and it has ghosts.     Just when you think it’s gone it comes drifting on back: a veil, a bank of fog.  It settles around you like a dark cloak.  From out of the past there it is:  a heavy hand holding you back.

In desperation I’ve done all I know.  High dose prednisolone, double naproxen, same for co-codamol.  Yoga breathing.  Hot compresses.  Ice.  Lying in a dark room,  foetal position, Neil Young’s Psychedelic Pill on the player, loud, just to cover my moaning.  Today, though, we try for the light.  Out there, under the blue sky, heading for Homebase.

It’s a simple activity.  Car journey, car park, short walk through the green-framed doors past the display of cut-price couches, wheelbarrows and January-cheap Christmas decs.  We’re heading for the lighting.  New stuff for the hall.  Easy.  But, naturally, it’s not. 

The whole world has changed here.  Where once I knew instinctively what a 60-watt bulb looked and felt like, how bright it would be, how long it would it last, how much it would cost, how hot it would get, how many times I’d need to change it,  today I’m lost.  Watts have become lumens.  Simple standard bayonet and screw fit have been replaced by multi-sized  prongs, screws, turns, clips and holders.  The bulbs themselves have  branched into LEDS, halogens, incandescents and energy-savers with subdivisions that involve sodium, mercury, metal halide, sealed beams and shatter-proof tops. Bulb shape is a past thing too.  Today they are lozenges, globes, pyramids, cubes, drops, prongs and bubbles.  Lamps in profusion.  I have no idea which one I want.

Above the racks Homebase helpfully display a poster which demystifies everything.  Except it does not.  Lumens mix with watts, old merges with new, nothing is clear, nothing gets printed on the sides of the Made In China bulbs in the display below.   I’d like it bright.  Chances are though that I’ll end up buying something that takes ten minutes light up and will even then not be bright enough to find the door.  There’s a light like that in our bathroom.  I refuse to go in there for a pee without a torch.  

Right here the pain intervenes.  Electricity in the lower leg.  Rising fire.  I retreat to the store’s display of occasional furniture and sit. Usually works.   I’ve chosen a sort of armchair that looks like a throwback from the 1950s.  The past keeps recycling.  But then I’m old enough now to have got used to that.

I lean forward and try to make myself invisible.  But it’s no good.  An extended family of Chinese origin arrive, clearly in the market for 1950s throwbacks, and start to examine the chair while I’m still sitting in it. They want to see how it revolves.  One of them gets down and peers between my shoes to check the mechanism.  “This is comfortable?” he asks.   Yes, I nod, handing him the price card.  £50 it says.   I get up and stumble over to sit, instead,  on the edge of a unit which displays various sorts of tile cement and other things in tubes reduced for a quick sale.  The Homebase bargain bin.  Do I want anything?  Other than an end to the roaring pain, nope. 

The Chinese family have decided that they will purchase the chair and are carting it off towards the check out.  Good luck.  I thought it was overpriced.   We return to the car.  Sue has a bag of bulbs under her arm, she knows how to decode the new lighting world.  All I can think of is relief.  What it feels like.  How long it might last.  How to make it arrive. 

And then it’s no longer there.  I’m sitting and watching the road go by and become slowly aware that the pain has gone.   The immediate future, despite low wattage, might be bright. 

   

Teeth

The pred levels are sinking.  I’m down to 3 mgs daily now and on such good and familiar terms with the wonder drug that I’ve dropped the nisalone bit from its name in favour of something more streetwise.  For now the polymyalgia is almost a memory although I’m sure its traces lurk down there in the dregs at the bottom of my bloods.  The new enemy, and one of considerable power,  is the spinal cyst. 

Looking at the dates on this blog it’s obvious that I have been severely distracted for several months.  The latter half of 2012 has gone by without comment.  This doesn’t mean, of course, that little happened during that time – the reverse in fact.  Between September 2012 and January 2013 I've been property developing, to live in rather than sell on. The opportunity presented itself last October so my partner and I went ahead.  We sold up and bought anew.  A big house with its own drive half-way up Penylan Hill.  Don’t underestimate the attraction of a drive.  In the Cardiff world where the car is king and the pavements thick with cyclists having a drive is a bit like owning a strip of 5mg prednisolone – salvation on hand whenever there’s a need.

With gusto we set the sell and buy circus in motion.  I have a dim memory of the last time I did this, way back in 1979. I swore then that because of the stress, expense and outrageous hassle I’d never do it again.  Why  in 2013, then,  have I decided to ignore those warnings from my younger self?

Out there in the world of land and property  is a line of essential organisations who need consulting, paying, obtaining permission from, paying, talking to, paying, obtaining clearance documents from, paying, and just for good measure, paying again.  The line stretches out to the horizon and the faces blur.  The mesh of commercial, legal, fiscal, and governmental interests, all acting with due diligence, comprehensive record-keeping, and a clearance fee on each occasion (to cover essential costs) out bleaks Bleak House.  The cash in the bank account whirls down towards zero.

In the middle of all this, with builders taking the floors out, new central heating going in and the internal water supplies being rerouted I decide to have my mouth repaired.  This is the latest episode in a long-term saga which I won’t bore you with here but suffice it to say that for several decades now I’ve been a regular at the local dentists with broken bicuspids, misaligned molars, contracting canines and collapsing crowns. On a good day I can fracture an incisor on a banana.   

At the Dental Hospital they’ve made the offer to rebuild and I’ve accepted.  This means six or more two-hour attendances, drilling, pulling, refacing and reinserting with I don’t know how many injections of lignocaine to help us along.  I’ve read Martin Amis’s recollections of his own time in the dental chair.  That's in Experience,  his 2000 autobiography and a book with a lot more going for it than many of his novels.  I should be prepared.

When I get to UHW  the car park is unaccountable cordoned off and closed.  I park a mile away and head in on foot.   The rain is coming down as only January ran can and the cyst is letting me know what the world is about.  Pain is coming up my right leg like jets of fire.  Half way there I have to stop and stuff my mouth with painkillers.  I’m carrying naproxen and heavy-dose co-codamol. For good measure, as the pain is wrapping itself round me like a poultice, I swallow an extra  5mg of pred.  Might help.  It’s an anti-inflammatory after all.

In the dental chair I’m floating.  I’m set out so that my head is lower than my feet and I’m injected on both sides.  I’m not sure which world I’m in.  To hell with what’s going on inside my mouth all know is that the leg pain is going and then, after time wobbles a bit, is gone. 

A couple of hours later I’m in the Japanese recovering.  This style of dining has been chosen for a) its freshness b) its lack of calories and, more importantly, c) its ability to deliver a decent full meal as a sort of non-tooth threatening mush.  Ramen – chicken bits and noodles.  Soft as a brush, just right.  I’ve a bottle of Sapporo (4.7%) in hand and a bowl of edamame  as an appetiser.  Around me there’s a  multi-cultural melee of young people chattering and eating while simultaneously  pushing  their fingers at their smart phones.  They are dining on raw fish and seaweed, udon doused in soy and crab’s legs coated in batter.  It's the modern way.

I go for broke and swallow another 5mg of Prednisone with the beer.  That should fix it.  The top of a back tooth snaps and comes away like pieces of badly-fixed render.  I’m unfazed.  This has happened so often before so why should I be?   I’m back at the Dental Hopsital in a week or so, they’ll sort it then.

More importantly the synovial cyst pain has gone back to that place where pain goes when it needs to recover its juices a bit.  A fog in my lower back.  It’ll hang there, hiding, and come back out to burn me again tomorrow.   But for now it isn’t with me.  Glory be.  What made it go?  Pred, NSAID,  pain-killer, dental injection, lying upside down, time, wishful thinking, prayer, luck, or beer?  One of those. 

Not A Smoker In Sight

 Approaching the hospital is unsettling.  We’re on the fringes of one of the city’s 1970s estates, all grass and orange brick, underpasses, men out walking dogs.  Kids on skateboards.  Women in trainers pushing buggies.  The sun is up there, hiding behind cloud.  There’s a car-parked pub that does steak that sizzles.   Houses with washing on twirling lines.  On the main road are trucks and vans  rucking up road dust.  A lone seagull sits on a fence wondering just what it’s doing this far inland.

The entrance, once we find it, is modest, the car park free, the building low-slung and silent.   There’s no one hanging around the entrance, not a smoker in sight.    This could be a council office or a care home.  It could.  But actually it’s Spire private medicine.  A hospital outside the NHS.

In the waiting room there are comfortable chairs, no jabbering TV, no Coke machines,  and a complete lack of misshapen sprawl.  The coffee is free.  There are papers to read.  Admittedly they did take an imprint of my credit card when I arrived but that was, as the receptionist put it, just for identification purposes, best be sure.

Almost all writers in history have suffered illness.  Consumption, gout, bad livers, hearts that fail, the bloody flux, the ague.  They lose their sight, the use of their limbs, are confined to wheelchairs, kept in bed, made to take long holidays on the coasts where the air is clear.  They move slowly.   They are bled.  They leak.   But they all carried on.  They got up at dawn to bash the words out.  Thinking through fog.  Letting the pain wince its way out through their lines.  Bottling it just to get the books done.

Me?  I’m knocked flat by all this sudden vicissitude that’s seeping through me like a river.  Rather than be out there running across the world I’m inside my room worrying.  I must get a grip.  I need to let the ideas circulate again.  Encourage them.  Give them time to foam up and flower.  There’s that book I’m writing.  How the rock and roll changed my life.   How music is always better than poetry.  How sound in the air beats words trapped on the page.  The history, the past and the present.  Where we all fitted.  Where it all then went. 

I start to think about Howlin’ Wolf and how seeing him of stage at the Colston Hall in Bristol in 1964 changed my view of music forever.  Quite a Finch revolution that.  Wolf arriving in the centre of my quiet world like an alien. A 300-pound negro in a bad suit  roaring above Hubert Sumlin’s guitar lead, turning my idea of what music was thrillingly on its head.  I reach for my notebook but don’t get that far.

On the button I get called in for my appointment.  Synovial Cyst.  Ganglion.  Non-cancerous.  But there.  I’m shown the MRI scans, horizontal slices taken along my spine.   There it is at Level  4, nestling in the facet joint and pressing itself softly on the sciatic nerve.  A white oval the size of a peanut.  Would that be KP or Marks & Spencer, I ask.  The consultant laughs.

I get more than 30 minutes of description and discussion.  Prognosis, treatment, outcomes, risk.  Watchful waiting.  Further facet joint injection.  Surgical intervention.  These things ebb and these things flow.  Today there’s little sensation.  Last week my back and right leg were full of electric rage.  Listen to your body, I am advised.  Run if you like.  Exercise is better than no exercise.  Treadmills are not good for the joints but do a bit.  If there’s pain stop.  If there’s not then carry on.

If the whole thing gets worse then ask  for another nerve root block.  Waiting time on the NHS – 3 months at least.  Privately less than a week.  Try high does prednisolone for a day or two.  The stuff will circulate your whole body and some of it will stick.  If all that fails then surgical intervention will sort it. We’ll make an incision, move your muscles to the side a bit and then suck the peanut out.  You’ll feel like you’ve been kicked in the small of the back for six weeks but after that you’ll be fine.

So there’s a future.  Aged Finch sails on.  We shake hands.  Outside they get me to put my pin number  into their credit card machine.  The amount I’m paying  makes me wince but it’s only cash.  Inside I’ve got a new calm flowing. Worth every cent.

Me and the polymyalgia and the bladder stuff and the new companion Mr Peanut Synovial we all clatter out into the car park.   Rattle, smile and hum.  Out there I spot a fat woman leaning on the door of her Citroen C1 sucking on a Bensons.  A man in overalls on a ladder is trying to fix a faulty exterior wall light.  At the pub over the way they are taking delivery of beer in pressurised aluminium barrels.  The sun glints.  The world still works.  I head home, fast, to write it all down.

     

God of the Sea

This is the beach where Ulysses was washed up after his battles with god of the sea Poseidon.  Ulysses, hair in damp straggles, naked and unconscious on the sand, was revived by Naussica, daughter of the King of the Phaeacians.  So wrote Homer.  And as a reminder there’s the Naussica Taverna full of sweating and Homer reading diners staring down at me from the cliff edge.

Naussica – in Greek her name translates as burner of ships.  But out in the bay there are nothing but peddalos and heat. 

The beach itself in the parts that aren’t forever British is entirely Russian. They don’t look like us.  The men have bellies that protrude but don’t flop.  They wear tight and tiny bri-nylon swimming trunks, just like ones I used to have in 1977.   They sprawl across the Thompson Holiday loungers smoking their Russian cigarettes.  They don’t read.  They play cards, they drink. They lunge at the sea and emerge bronzed and dripping.  A woman with a tattooed Venus on the half shell climbing her belly.  A man with a bear growling up his.

I’ve gone to Greece with my prednisolone packed into both my check-in and hand luggage and with an extra packet in my pocket just in case.  The polymyalgia bubbles under.  The treatment is working.  No more proximate muscles like rusted slabs aching like they were trying to jump me to Mars.  Instead I have my new fellow traveller, the sly and slippery synovial cyst.

This one sits somewhere in my lower spine and can only really be subdued by high-strength co-codamol supplemented by Naproxen, a sort of super ibuprofen on speed.  Sounds good on paper but in practise it just makes you numb.  A better cure turns out to be alcohol which relaxes things enough to ease the agony.  We brought gin out bubble-wrapped in Sue’s suitcase and the local beer isn’t that expensive so things should be good.

Out walking I can feel it, Mr Synovial, pressing the sciatic nerve and making my lower leg feel like it’s got a cold chisel in its centre moving up and down.  With PMR you could run a bit and the pain would go.  With this one you have either drink or lie down.  And as the one often leads to the other, I find myself doing both.

In Corfu Town – Kerkyra –  after a long sit in a café opposite the truncated British cricket pitch we visit the Church of Saint Spyridon.  His remains are here in a gilded box, closed today but still touchable.  A line of Greeks take turns to kiss the place where his feet might be.  On high days they take him out and parade him through the streets.  He’s a preserver and a fixer.  Saint of salvation and health.

A women next to me scribbles something in Greek onto a piece of paper and puts it in one of the saint’s waiting bowls.  There’s a whole stack of other slips there.  They tower.  Prayers, pleas for help.  Worth a go I decide.  Help me, I write, Saint Spy, see if you can do something about this spine of mine.  I leave the slip unsigned.  Saint Spyridon will know who put it there.

I follow up this uncharacteristic act by buying a six inch candle from a box near the door.  I’m heading for the spot just outside where similar candles of supplication have been stuffed into a pit of sand and melted wax.  They waver and flame.  They look the Orthodox part.  Behind me an entire extended Greek family are emerging from the Church.  They carry candles too, all nine of them, women in black, children in trainers, men in suits.  The difference is that while my candle is 6” long theirs are five feet and thicker than your leg.   Aflame like Thor rockets they dwarf my miniature squib.  Beijing Olympic fireworks beside my November the fifth. Next to the candle dump is an icon depicting the great man in his golden beatitude.  The family take turns to kiss the image.  At this level of investment they are bound to get whatever it is they want.

Me?  Not a hope.

But then again it’s now a week later and I’m back home in the drizzle again, Saint Spyridon  a sunny memory.   The Cyst is still there but, amazingly, it is quiet.  No flares, no return of the lower leg cold chisel and no repeat of the shaking electric razzle scream of a pain I was getting up and down my right leg just before I went.   And I haven’t taken a naproxen since last month. 

Good boy Spyridon.  I'll be back.

Road Race

In an afternoon when the rain holds off long enough for the sky to go blue the best place to be is not in the city.   So I’m out on the roadside in Wales’ green desert, somewhere north of Builth.    The verge here has to be wider than my home garden, thick green, lush, durable.  The sun is on my back warming through my shirt.   It could be Hawaii but it’s Cefn Coed.  In the near layby a couple towing a caravan with a four by four are sitting on deckchairs drinking tea.  They watch the traffic roll by.  This is how we relax these days.  Roadside get away from it alls.

I’m  here actually to watch the Kate Auchterlonie Memorial Cycle Race.  Women in  lycra with numbers on their backs going past in a great herd on bikes.  As a spectator sport this one isn’t much.  The women do fifteen mile circuits passing me every half an hour.  They go at a hell of lick.  Lead motorbikes with flashing lights clearing the traffic, then a tight cluster of furious peddling followed by a few stragglers spread out down the road.  Blink and they’re gone.  And then it’s back to watching the breeze move the grass beyond the hedgerows and the kestrels hovering overhead until the women come round again.

To fill in time I march up and down the layby trying to free up the pain from my leg.  Is this the polymyalgia returning in a great flare?  I’ve upped the prednisolone from 5 mg to 10 mg.  The GP says it won’t matter in the short term but the head is already filling with fog.  I do a series of leg stretches, squats and knee presses.  I am watched blankly by the couple drinking tea.  I smile back  but they do not react.   

I go behind a tree for a pee and am immediately spotted by a vehicle traversing an otherwise totally abandoned dried up off road track.  The occupants wave.  The countryside’s synchronicity.  I pee on pretending they are not there.

The cyclists come round again.  I give them a cheer and clap a bit to offer encouragement.  For them traversing this circuit must be like watching paint dry.  They disappear into the distance.  I do a few more knee bends to beat the PMR back.

Up at the clinic the following day I get the news.  This isn’t polymyalgia bubbling up from where it’s been sort of slumbering.  Instead it’s my new friend the spinal ganglion cyst.  This is the growth the size of a small grape that’s insinuated itself somewhere in my lower spine disrupting the way the nerves work.  The result is leg pain, foot pain, and thigh pain, often all together,  in long slow burns, in starts and shakes and rushes and aches.  They fade and then they come back. They go and then they stay.   

The consultant puts me in the loop for another MRI scan and a further set of spinal injections.  Might fix it, might not.  You’ll also need to see a neurosurgeon who will discuss with you the risks involved in having the cyst surgically removed.  Risks?   The surgeon will explain it all to you. Doesn’t sound good.

I do the anticipated circuit of bloods, weight, urine sample, and BP measurement ending at the pharmacy where the great team of twenty or so NHS dispensers, heads down hard at work, take an amazing 30 minutes to get my prescription filled.  At the local Co-op the single pharmacist turns my monthly prescription for four different drugs and a tub of chewable calcium round in five minutes.  There’s a lesson here.

On the wall of the UHW Pharmacy next to a sign reading “Antibiotics will not get rid of your cold” is another which says “To ensure patient confidentiality please do not stand or wait against this wall.”  Better not hang about here I say to the old lady on sticks queuing next me.  She frowns.  I don’t have a cold she says, shaking her head.

On my way out under the grey shell of a sky, new tablets in a giant bag under my arm, I go through what the consultant has told me.   Hope for the best but the best is often elusive.  Try.  Live in the moment.  We’ll see what these new tests throw up.  Let’s see how you get on.   I’m really sorry this has happened to you.  She is too.

I’ve asked her if there’s anything I should now not do.  Stretch?  That’s fine.  Exercise?  That’s good but try to avoid running.  The action of all that pounding jars the spine.    Go on the bike instead.  It’s the perfect activity.  Cycling – much better than watching paint dry.  Sure is.

      

Slicing The Air

I’ve barely time to open my book among the waiting queues  at clinic six.  I’ve Nightwoods, Charles Frazier’s dark novel of North Carolina with me.  In this the violent mixes with the lost among the endless trees of the time-stuck Appalachians.  Frazier came to fame a few years back with Cold Mountain.  In the film of this Sacred Harp singers can be seen beating out the rhythm of  the shape-note rouser I’m Going Home, their hands celebrating  glory, slicing the air.  God is with them in their singings.  He is all around.  Down here in the clinic he also hovers, although maybe with not quite the same all-pervasive fire.  Files arrive, delivered in what looks like an ex-Tesco trolley.  Mine is on top.  I’m in. 

I’m also back out.  Five minutes is all it takes.  The prednisolone levels are continuing to fall.  I’m down to 5 mg now, a dose at which most side effects cease to be visible.  Healing, however,  will still be slow and susceptibility to infection from just about anywhere a worry.  The tests all show you as normal, the consultant tells me.  She smiles.   Normality, the aim of us all. 

A day later and I’m up the road in the Department of Oral and Maxilio-facial Surgery being told that the prednisolone will certainly interfere with the healing following my tooth extraction and that the alendronic acid may compromise bone recovery.  Polymyalgia, your tentacles get into everything.  Prednisolone go away.  I took 5 mg this morning.  I’ll have a go at 4.5 mg tomorrow.

The extraction is carried out by a dentist from County Clare wearing a white smock  two sizes too big for her.  Amid the small talk about the loveliness of Ireland and the wetness of Wales it sways about like a duvet cover. I get two mouth-deadening injections of lidocaine with another  six added as the procedure rolls.  My mouth doesn’t like giving up. 

She’s great at the talk, put the patient at ease.  We’ll just loosen it up a bit first.  You may feel some pressure.  Snap.  There, that’s the crown off.  Now let’s see if we can get it out in one piece. Snap.  No.  This is a difficult one.  I’ll have to just move around a bit.  You’ll feel more pressure.  I do.  She’s told me to raise my left hand if I experience pain so I lift it up.  It’s like the northern lights in my head.  More lidocaine. Then more again, just to be sure.

A second dentist who insists on calling me sir arrives.  He is bearing a drill.  We’ll just see if we can cut into this.  No.  We’ll have to slice the socket.    No.  Yes.  Crack.  No.   Have to cut a bit of bone out here, just so I can get a grip.    I Raise my left hand and get another shot of lidocaine.  My mouth is starting to feel as big as the Severn Bridge. 

But eventually it’s done.  My mouth is sewn up and stuffed with gauze.   Fragments of my left lower rear molar lie like pieces of moon rock on a dental tray.  I get a free packet of surgical cloth for use in supressing bleeding and a badly printed instruction sheet.   “For the rest of the day take things quietly” this says.  “Take only cool non-alcoholic drinks.  Eat a soft diet.  You may sit up but do not lie down.”   

Will Marks and Spencer sell things I’ll be able to cope with?  Rice pudding, coddled eggs, luke warm soup.  I’m sure they will. 

Back home sitting up but certainly not lying down and with a glass of 15 seconds in the microwave water beside me I stick on the Cold Mountain soundtrack.  I’m looking for spirit and uplift.  But instead I  get the Reeltime Travellers doing “Like A Songbird That Has Fallen”.  Pretty much it I suppose.