June 26th, 2023 · Posted by Skuds in Life, Politics
This story caught my attention on the radio news this morning (“UK’s high rate of avoidable deaths linked to NHS woes”) and I think the headline is more than a bit misleading.
Read a bit further and it says “The UK had one of the lowest levels of life expectancy – although the study acknowledged this would be affected by many factors, aside from the quality of NHS care” but the NHS is the only factor mentioned in the headline, and what these ‘other factors’ might be is not expanded on at all in the story on the BBC website.
The brief story on the radio news focussed on cancer survival rates, of which I have a little experience. I don’t deny that having sufficient trained doctors, oncologists, nurses, beds and facilities is important. Also I am sure that having more scanners so we can have more screening and earlier diagnosis would help greatly, but I really started wondering about some of these other factors.
Last night I watched Elton John’s Glastonbury set with a big grin and moist eyes. It was absolutely monumental. Yes he is getting on a bit, and everybody moaning about his voice is missing the point. He knows very well that he does not have the range that he used to have, hence the adjustments to the tunes. He is a lot more self-aware than the armchair critics give him credit for. (Contrast with Axl Rose the night before!) His piano playing has not diminished at all though.
Well I finally got round to getting my drone off the ground today. My drone app said that it was not good to fly, because of the wind speed, especially the gusts, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.
Because of the no-fly zone around Gatwick I can’t fly in the back garden or over the local playing fields, which would have been my first choice for getting the hang of the controls, so I hopped on the bike and went down to Ashdown Forest, making sure to get to a secluded area so nobody would see if I completely cocked up.
It was only once I had everything plugged in and ready to go that I realised it is at least six months since I read the manual and have forgotten everything, particularly the various camera controls, but I did manage to take a few pictures and videos.
One thing I am sure of: I really do live in the wrong place if I want to make this a hobby!
I really should try to find the mental energy to write here more than once a month, but meanwhile here is a summary of the recently-finished May. It was a good month. Any month with three bank holidays in it can’t be anything other than a good month!
With the days getting noticeably longer and it feeling like there were a few days without rain, I can only blame laziness for the fact that I walked a lot less in April than in March – nearly 60,000 few steps overall and only reached 10,000 steps on 3 days. As I only even got in the car three times and only went out on the bike three times, it sounds like I spent a lot of time indoors during April.
Apparently the wettest March for a long time, and it felt like it. It was a relentlessly depressing dampness all the way through, but with sufficient breaks in the weather for me to get out a bit more – and at least it has been getting a bit warmer.
The other day I realised that my slippers were falling apart. With all this working from home, combined with trying to stay in the warm as much as possible means that I get a lot more use out of slippers than in the past.
After work yesterday I decided to go out and buy some new slippers and I visited three shops within walking distance: TK Maxx, Next and Sainsburys but came home empty handed. In the whole of Sainsburys’ clothes section there were just two pairs of slippers, one in size 7 and the other size 12, so no use for my size 9 feet. TK Maxx was no better and Next was even worse.
So I returned home and ordered a pair of slippers online for delivery today, then thought for a while about cause and effect. Are the shops’ inventories so poor because so many people are getting everything online or are people going online because the choice in the shops is so poor? Or is it a bit of both in a constant, escalating feedback loop? Or is it just bad weather in Morocco like it is for tomatoes? (Allegedly. Nothing to do with Brexit obviously)
Another month where I didn’t do a lot or go out much – too bloody cold for me!
I did actually drive the car for the first time in 2023 – only for about a mile to pick Jayne up from work, but it still thwarted my ambition to go a couple of whole months without driving. I did manage to get out on the bike a couple of times and not just around the block a few times to keep the battery charged up. I went over to East Grinstead for a record fair and also went to Guildford for a hospital appointment.
I did that thing you should never do the other day. I tried to fix a trivial error by tweaking settings a bit, without backing the site up first and broke it. At my age I should know better. Broke it to the extent that I had to ask for everything to be restored from the host’s security archives. And then tech support said they didn’t need to do it as everything looked to be loading OK now.
Maybe the manual hacking around in the database that I did (knowing it would all be over-written) actually fixed it after all? No idea, but this is just to see if posting works OK and the original trivial problem has gone away too.
Tomorrow I have my regular three-monthly-ish post-cancer outpatients appointment – the first one in almost two years that will be face-to-face rather than on the phone. Back in September I had an annual CT scan to make sure everything is still OK and I have spent the last three or four months happy because I hadn’t heard anything from anybody. I always figure that if they found anything nasty they would get in touch and not wait until the next regular appointment. Basically I work on the assumption that no news is good news.
This morning I had a call asking where I had the scan done because they haven’t seen the results. This is not entirely surprising because it happened before and is a consequence of me electing to get the scans done at my local hospital and not go all the way to Guildford for it. The trouble is that it is a different trust and they don’t seem to do anything with the results pro-actively.
Cue 24 hours of panic. I am actually 99.9% confident that it will be all clear again, but somehow that 0.1% manages to take hold of the pessimistic part of my brain, probably because the whole sequence of chemotherapy, operations and recovery was so traumatic that any doubt triggers a sort of PTSD. I am seriously thinking that next year I will make the one-hour journey to Guildford for a five-minute scan just to avoid all this stress.
