I've been missing my blog but then I never seem to find the time. There's quite a lot of things going on - in my head anyway. One is my retirement which is not a retirement but more like a retreat from the NHS - and my last day at work will be the 1st November. Do you know when you stop putting up with things that you have been putting up with for too long - then the whole thing comes up as a series of giant resentments? Maybe you don't know, but that anyway. In relation to that I kept feeling an inner prompting to re-read 'Goodbye to all that' by Robert Graves, which I knew I had read many years ago and probably in my teen years. I couldn't remember anything about it except he was in the war and that he was disillusioned in some way.
I found the first chapter hard going but after that it picked its feet up - and it's the fascinating story of someone who gets all the way through WW1, who was motivated to sign up in the first place mostly because he wanted to put off going to university. The thing that captured me is that you get the feeling that you're getting told the story by a real person who can't be bothered lying so it's full of nuance and paradox. Half his relatives were German so he never believed any of the anti-German propaganda. He somehow survives. He takes you through the experience of being up at the Western Front - confusion, madness, carnage and wet feet. Continual shocking, pointless, careless, needless, accidental death. His sadness at inadvertently killing a mouse which has crawled into his clothes for some warmth while he's sleeping. He doesn't bother with any of the slightly contrived quirkiness and humour of Catch 22 - reality's mad enough and doesn't need dressing up. The increasing sense on the ground as the war grinds on that the motives of the government are not as stated - the increasingly insipid and saccharin propaganda in the newspapers back home, at stark odds to the realities. It's all awful and also relatable. My grandad went through all that. It's not impossible or even unlikely that they rubbed shoulders somewhere along the way.
Anyway, I was in the mood for it - reading about a world where it's unwise or possibly dangerous to say what you think, and where the little people get stamped under while the power hungry follow their agendas.
What am I even talking about here? Nobody knows, which is just fine.
I discovered that one almost sure-fire way to get far from the madding crowd is to go for a run on a tight little path edged by stinging nettles. I'm telling you it was worth it. I had bonus 'tingles' for a good 24 hours afterwards. And I found these wonderful Covid glasses on a wall.
Kids, if you find a pair of glasses on a wall don't put them on ffs. Don't be like me. They're good though aren't they?
So we're on to the next thing which is that I might be on the slippery road to veganism. I can just feel it coming. It started with wanting to clear up sinus problems that had been giving me headaches for months. As diagnosed by Dr Google obviously. One thing I found which helped and is quirky and fun is that it is a researched and verified THING that humming can help chronic sinusitis where antibiotics fail. The thinking is I think that the little hairs quivering in your face cavities create Nitric Oxide which opens blood vessels which speeds up healing. I've had quite a lot of fun with that and Peter has proved surprisingly tolerant. But you really have to to go at it for some time to make a difference and it's not ideal in every context. I have read many, many times that if you have sinusitis the first thing to do is cut out dairy, but I didn't want to. I don't drink milk but I've been living on cheese for a few years now. I'm a creature of habit and if something is working for me I'm reluctant to change it - but I was tired of the headaches so. So no more cheese. What do I eat now on my toast at lunch-time? Humous. Or however you spell it. It's good with cucumber. It's my new besty. I already had kind of a keen nose (and no jokes about the size of it thanks) but now I can smell round corners and through walls. My head is as clear as a bell. I think probably while I was wading through Google looking at diet and dairy and all that I started getting interested in the idea of food as medicine.
I listened to a thing that fascinated me about Dale Bredesen who has been working on alternative approaches to treating dementia. He says that what he thinks is happening in dementia is that the plaque which shows up in the brains of people with dementia is not the disease process itself but is the brain's way of protecting itself from a variety of different insults. He thinks that that's why treatments that have been developed which have aimed at removing the plaque from the brain have failed to help people. The reasons for the brain being inflamed and in trouble vary - viruses, toxins, heavy metals - that kind of a thing - so the way to approach it is to first of all determine what's causing the brain to react and build plaque, and then treat the underlying cause before any attempt at removing plaque. He has recently brought out a book with first hand accounts from 9 people who were in the early stages of dementia and managed to recover. It makes quite hard reading even though there's a hopeful message - because it brings home how frightening it is for people when they start down that road. He has tried to get approval for clinical trials but has been refused so far on the basis that he is not trying to treat one single disease entity - so if he's right about the causes of being dementia being various there's a catch 22 thing going on. One of the things he gets into is diet.
This led me somehow onto reading 'Your Body in Balance' by Neal Barnard which is all about how the modern, western meat, dairy, fat and doughnuts diet affects the hormones in our bodies and how he sees this as being the cause of the wide-spread rising tide of cancer, cardiovascular problems, diabetes and more. Again, it's a fascinating read - he keeps it accessible and funny but has all his references in place - and I think the strongest argument is that countries that have recently turned to the western way of eating have also shifted into the western way of becoming ill and dying. What he has to say is very damning of dairy foods - which I had thought of as being relatively benign - but he says there's a strong link with cancer - particularly prostate cancer. I've been feeding Peter smoothies with spirulina in them and he likes them - but he's not ready to give up cheese. I mentioned it but he started growling.
Okay, that's a lot. The last thing is about my frozen shoulder. I was going to go and get the thing where it gets injected with saline to distend the shoulder capsule and free it up a week ago but Stewart Kerr who does the procedure had tested positive for Covid so all his clinics had to be cancelled. I re-booked in for today. Yesterday I was off work so we went a leisurely run around Gullane and Aberlady and while there has been an absence of butterflies (which Peter has been trying to be stoical about), yesterday there was a super-abundance of them. They were all over the Buddleia which up until now had been roundly ignored by everything except passing whites. Isn't nature marvellous? They all pitched out for us yesterday anyway, including a cute and cheeky Red Admiral which landed on my Garmin on my camera hand, stuck its tongue out at me and said not to worry about getting my shoulder done because it would all be alright.
So I went through to Falkirk horribly early on the train this morning. It was a grey morning with rain clouds rolling in from the west, but a bit of a God Sky was arranged for my delectation just at sunrise.
I went and got the capsular distension done and a cortisol injection in the joint capsule and also in the bursa which was showing up on the ultrasound as a bit thickened and dense. It runs along the front of the shoulder and I think its where the trouble started. I should say that what Stewart Kerr at Life Fit Wellness in Falkirk does is uses ultrasound equipment to give him accuracy in injecting. He was happy to talk me through it all as we went - he is clearly a geek and likes cutting edge equipment and I like that he likes it. The shoulder capsule is quite small and the areas to be treated quite narrow, so being able to see in is a real boon. My only previous experience of ultrasound was assisting with uterine scans at the family planning clinic where I was only there as a chaperone. I assumed all ultrasound scans were just a vague blurry guess of a thing where you'd have to take the doctor's word for it - but this was a whole different experience. Because it was superficial - "close to the surface' he quickly clarified, in case I was going to take the huff - there was a real clarity. I could understand what he was showing me. He had a doppler thing on it that showed colour and showed up hot areas of inflammation as tiny red fireworks. I had a lot of tiny red fireworks on the sheath of my poor biceps tendon. When he put the cortisone in it showed up very like sunlight breaking through the clouds in a God Sky, and the water showed (I'm sleepy now, so could be making stuff up) as beautiful, blue oceans.
So now I need to get rehabbing and see how I go. It'll take a couple of days for things to settle and see where I'm at. I can already do some things I couldn't do, but there's local anaesthetic to wear off and cortisol to kick in so it's a changing picture at the moment. I'm glad I've got it done and interested to see what happens next.
'So is that you finished then?' I hear you say, starting to breathe a sigh of relief. Well near at, hold your horses there - one last thing. When Peter and I were heading out yesterday we heard the news that our next door neighbour Rose had died that week. She was here long before us, we couldn't have been much more different from each other, and in over 20 years we have got along just fine. It wasn't a surprise that she'd died - she has always smoked and drank like a trooper since we moved in and was definitely at least in her 70s when we first arrived. The only other thing that we knew of that she lived on apart from vodka and cigarettes was Fray Bentos pies. We knew because she accidentally set her kitchen on fire in the first year or so we were here and we got the fire brigade for her. She was really shaken because her sister had died in a chip fan fire, and she never did it again. We were always happy to help her replace her smoke alarm when the battery started to chirrup :-).
She had had a hip replacement and managed to rehab herself from that well enough to once again tackle the three flights of stairs up to the flat on her own. You'd often meet her taking it in stages like an attempt on Everest. She called us both pet and I have been calling Peter "Peter Pet" for years because it just stuck and it was funny. She told Peter to keep playing the piano because her husband (who died before we arrived) used to play the piano and she liked to hear it. After she had rehabbed from her hip replacement, she got breast cancer, and has been slowly going down-hill for the last couple of years. She pretty much went to ground during Covid as she couldn't afford to get exposed to anything.
She was of a generation that liked terrible sentimental ornaments and her nephew David had put them out on a table in the street yesterday saying for people to take anything they wanted and he'd chuck the rest out. We had to have a piece of Rose to keep with us. Peter nearly went absolutely contrary to type and selected an angel playing a violin as a keepsake - but it was a step too far - too much - so I chose a Peter Rabbit toy for the Berlingo and a cat in the basket for our book-case.
So Good-bye to Rose. Really the end of an era for us.
Our Best Neighbour Ever.
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