No Trousers

 Chance is both an easy and difficult concept. Every time we toss a coin it’s 50:50 whether it’s heads or tails. It doesn’t matter how many times that coin is tossed or whether you’ve had ten heads in a row each toss is 50:50. So here’s an interesting take on how chance works.  In America there’s a game show that culminates with the contestant having to make a choice between 3 doors. Behind one door is nothing, another is a goat and the final door is a sports car. The contestant is asked to choose a door behind which they think the main prize is and then choose a door to eliminate. If they’re lucky when they get to two doors the big prize is still there. Inevitably when asked to affirm their original choice of door they always do. It feels like bad luck not to. Interestingly this tactic seems not to favour the contestant and no-one can figure out why. Then a viewer purports a theory. When the original choice is made the odds are 3 to 1. If the choice is made to change when the...

 Last night was, I think, the first normal night’s sleep I’ve had since I came into hospital. My body clock has been all over the place and I remember early on crying for a sleeping pill although I was in fever. I’ve had whole nights staring at the ceiling, trying to glaze myself to sleep. I’ve watched the most interminable dross on Netflix hoping to drop off through boredom. I’ve slept fitfully , two hours here and there and found myself staring at the ceiling at 3 in the morning praying for dawn. Last night though, last night was different. I fell into a gentle sleep at 10.30 and woke from it at 6 am. No drama or interventions , just a perfect night’s sleep. When I woke I needed the toilet but I’d weaned myself off the bedridden state and I knew I was capable of walking to the toilet. The toilet local to the four man ward was being used so I opted for the one at the bottom of the corridor. I was a little light headed, still on oxygen, but I made it and completed my task assuredly...

 The old variety theatre was in its pomp; a cavalcade of gold and blue and red and laughter burst through the auditorium at the antics on stage. Hectic music themed to suit the comic dramatic centrepiece wheeled in time to the balletic gestures of a tall balletic man with a wide grin and a penchant for winking at the audience. He was surrounded by plates spinning on what looked like bamboo shoots and he was assisted by a small be-capped man who moved like a monkey on a tricycle. The game was simple; stop the plates falling off and as each  of the characters cajoled each other to exert themselves the music became more frenetic and the comedic gestures more extreme. It was a simple game but the audience believed themselves to be watching comedy night gold. They weren’t the only ones watching Sunday Night at the London Palladium or marvelling at the comic mastery of Bruce Forsyth and Norman Wisdom. Thousands around the country tuned in through their 12 inch tv screens housed in w...

 It’s been a week since my last blog. On Thursday I fell. Into quite an extreme fever. I had no idea where I was, wrapped in hot wet sweaty sheets and apparently foetal. The evening hadn’t started well; and a number of staff hadn’t turned turned up leaving a pretty inexperienced team to cope. Pretty much all tasks are writ in stone so if no emergencies then no issues. Things started to go wrong and the line of command collapsed immediately, junior staff less able to challenge or demand support. I was spotted by a senior consultant  by chance who said”get him out of there now and into ICU. To me, ICU was  isolation, wires, machines that go ping and wait till you get worse or better. In reality it’s an intensive cosseting unit with one on one supervision. Total bed confinement and every minute dedicated to guiding my body out of the febrile hinterland that had trapped it. By day 3 I didn’t want to be anywhere else, they even had ice water in jugs, it was heaven. The consult...

 The sick man lay looking up at the tiled ceiling. He couldn’t move , maybe indolence, maybe exhaustion or maybe he was afraid to disrupt or break the wires that encircled him. He had noticed that if he did try to move they entwined and resisted, pulling him deeper into his resting place. Night was not the time to sleep, at least not for him. If he could get 2 or 3 naps in the day then that would be good enough. He tried to drift and focus on the veined pattern above him. Eventually the patterns changed to shadows and then a tableau as they began to take on their own life. The sick man needed to get closer as he saw movement and colour, a lick of bright orange flame. The ceiling seemed to be very close to him now and he was in. In the forest again, this time watching from just above a canopy of dark greens. The boy was on the soft forest floor, running, weaving, dancing across the forest floor. Every stride stronger than the last, his arms and legs seemed to spring like giant pisto...

Wednesday started ok but turned out to be a vile day. I had a fillip on Tuesday when one of the new anti-biotics seemed to significantly diminish the virus. Went for a CT scan which meant being wheeled through air conditioned corners and straights and it felt so fresh. I was placed in the scanner for a few minutes and when released I said to the operator, in my best Arnold Schwarzenegger “I need to go to Mars”. The operator looked at me confused and said “takes all sorts”. I thought “yeah I’ll take some liquorice allsorts. Im kind of getting my timelines messed up here so I’m losing some of the chronology but hopefully retaining some of the sense. There are always staff challenges in the NHS with the staff shortage of 100K nationwide. So when something goes wrong, like turning up to work when some of your colleagues didn’t, suddenly you’re expected to just get on with it.  Young soldier in the film Zulu: “Why us Sarge? Why us?” Nigel Green, staring full ahead and barely moving his ...

 I think in an earlier post I referred to my dad having his arm amputated. I’ve now been told he never did. The problem is that image has been fixed in my memory for 60 yrs so where did it come from? Did I conflate an overheard conversation? There was a very popular tv series in the sixties called The Fugitive where Doctor Richard Kildare was on the trail of a one armed man who’d killed his wife. At a time when we only had two tv channels it dominated conversations; I even remember it being excitedly discussed in the chip shop at the bottom of my road. Of course that could be another false memory. All these memories tripping over each other moving each other out of the way, forcing their way into the front of my conscience. It was 1967 or 1968 or 1969. The sun bore down out of a powder blue sky onto the chalky white Rhos-on-Sea lido. When the weather seemed more predictable and consistently benign it was one of the most popular attractions along with the Welsh mountain zoo. For me ...

Malcolm Gladwell is a Canadian social scientist who’s always good for an illustrative story. In one of his books he focussed on the barriers to social mobility one of which was assertiveness vs deference. Two families each with a child are in the doctor’s waiting room. The middle class couple say to their child “Now when you go in there make sure you challenge what the doctor says if you are not happy. You know how you feel so if you’re not happy with what he says then steer him straight.” The working class couple also briefed their child before he disappeared into the doctor’s office. “Now the doctor is a very clever man so you make sure you listen to every word he says and you do exactly what he says” I take statins . I have an inherited condition which means my liver thinks I don’t have enough cholesterol so kindly obliges by pumping it out at a rate of knots. I haven’t taken them since I came into hospital, initially because I was pretty much out of it  and latterly because I h...

 Yesterday was day eight of chemo; it’s a ten day course. It was a complete washout. Massive temperature spike meant I couldn’t get a platelet transfusion until ten in the evening and the blood transfusion didn’t even happen. The hacking cough was hacking me off and I was in a foul mood. “This shitty bloody cough is going to kill me” I complained. I was told when I was in Sales that I could drive the mood through the roof or through the floor. Speaking to my sister the other day she recalls that when I was tasked with babysitting her I became so frustrated with her I left the lounge and punched a hole in the bathroom door. Anyway I had realised that although I didn’t appreciate it at the time I was going to see much better days and a gradual improvement. What I wouldn’t be able to cope with would be the idea that every day I woke I would feel less well than the day before. The gradual or rapid decline into a deeper  malaise would just kill me but I suppose that is the nature o...

 It’s a slightly chill sunny September morning in the Brecon Beacons. I’m part of a 20 strong stag group that decided after a night of revelry around a camp fire a 9am park run would be a rollicking start to the day. I hadn’t drunk much the day before because I knew my running training really wasn’t coming along; in fact it was dying on its arse and I hadn’t got past 2k in any session; old age? The later activity was going to be gorge walking which I subsequently discovered involved walking to a gorge and jumping into pools from a great height. I mean; that’s gorge dipping. I opted out. The park looked fairly hilly but the sun was shining and all I really needed to do was take it a step at a time. I can’t remember how many circuits of the the park was involved but I started off very sprightly if not at world record pace. I could feel my breathing getting heavier and that brick wall starting to close in. I was about 3k in, doing ok, when the shutters came down. I could barely move. ...

 “It was all go around your bed last night. It was like an episode of casualty” “ I know, I thought I’d had it” I said “ never seen anything like that. How are you feeling?” I can’t pretend it didn’t give me a massive scare but on the consultant rounds that morning it was pretty much played down. “Sorry you had to go through that” said the lead consultant. “We’ll just make sure we accompany your next platelet transfer with an anti histamine infusion, that should do the trick” The ward overlooks a school and coppice so quite a pleasant outlook. There are four beds, one in each corner bound by a curtain rail designed to provide individual patient privacy in those more personal, stay away from the light, moments. Each bed is bound by a movable drip and a hinged tv with a built in phone swinging out from the wall. Nobody uses these because everyone has a smart phone and/or a tablet. The design is also reminiscent of how the world in 1969 saw the world in 2001. Joe who sits across from ...

 Pink, turquoise and gold water needles zinged across the front of my face as steam rose up through the forest floor. Tiny bats fluttered about me; they were guiding me to a place of calm away from the storm. I was running. I know that because I felt I was struggling for breath but that was easing now, I felt my lungs relax and expand as I extended my stride, stretching my legs and feeling the shackles that had held me simply melt away. I’m not sure what day it is. I’ve been in about 3 days and various cocktails had been queuing up to for the vein train.  A lady called Sue arrived at my bedside to explain that, because of the intensity of my chemo treatment, I would be getting a line put in. So there are 3 options for me: a fresh injection each time, a permanently settled double needle into the veins (a cannula) or a 50mm line from under my arm and up to one of the fat arteries near my heart. The latter make everything kind of easy: to take the blood, pump in the antibiotics a...

 So this guy is going on holiday and asks his mate to keep an eye on the house and feed the cat. When he returns he asks his mate  “everything  OK?  “Your cat’s  dead” he replied. .“ Good grief man you could have been less brutal” “What do you mean?”  “Well you could have said it was a lovely day and bounty was sunning herself on the roof and chased a bird, losing her footing and falling to the ground. She passed quietly doing what she loved” “Got it” “So how’s everything else been?” “Well your mum was on the roof” My phone battery was running out in tandem with my voice. I had blood cancer and someone had said they would call my wife but I didn’t know when. Only a message or two left “I have a lot of white cells”. My wife replied “what does that mean”. I think She knew what that meant. The battery on my phone died. The next few hours was about me getting assigned a bed and begging for a charger. Ten hours after arriving at the hospital I found myself in a ...

 About a week ago I was in a state of panic. I’d booked a cottage in South Wales for my wife and family and I was feeling very very ill. It was Sunday and I’d prepared dinner for the extended family but I felt so awful I dragged myself upstairs and left everyone to it. I was exhausted, worn down with a nasty chest infection and it wasn’t until the Monday morning, having slept 14 hours, that I felt well enough to get up. I made my wife, and my son who is staying with us at the moment, breakfast; I’m retired and the other guys work so it’s the least I can do.  I thought, as the day went on I was mounting a bold recovery but by Monday evening I was back to square one. After a fitful night I recovered my energy a little again but it was clear I wasn’t going to shake the bug off. I called the doctor a couple of times but by the time I got through it was late afternoon and I was told my only option was to book a telephone appointment for the next day. I was in a foul mood, I just wa...