Tuesday 5 July 2016

A Few Fury-Inspired Random Observations

I'm not in the best of moods. No, that's not true. I'm experiencing one of those low days when I want to cut off my own head. Without going into detail that even Memoirs Of A Fire Hazard baulks at I have no sense of self worth today. So let's cheer everyone up with a few random observations inspired by my abject despair.

Yesterday I was in Tesco at lunchtime. There is a new-ish one just over the road from work. There are steps leading down to it and it is crawling with students but the good news for access bigots like me is that it has a lift. The bad news is that said lift is often blocked with stacks of trolleys. When I get to the bottom I'm forced to squeeze through a gap the size of my potential to enjoy today. A gap between the lift door and the trolleys which is very probably a health and safety hazard at worst and at best a major inconvenience and obstacle. I know people who would not be able to negotiate a way out of this gap if they were to try it, which if nothing else has just made me laugh to myself at the thought. Sorry.

So I have started buying fruit for lunch. Laughably, I decided a diet might help with the self worth thing. It hasn't, but that is largely because it hasn't made any physical difference yet. Or is it? Perhaps I would still be a crank if I looked like Chris Hemsworth. Anyway, yesterday I was in Tesco buying my fruit. I paid for it, put it in a bag, thanked the lady serving me and turned away. I took one push forward to clear the area where people were queuing to get served. I lifted the bag to put it in my ruck sack for the journey back to work. Plastic bags in the mouth are not a great look I've decided. As I lifted it the can of coke I had just bought with my fruit (diet? what diet?) shot out of the bag and rolled away from me and under the shelves storing the multipacks of crisps. Now if you are a biff you will know that the first thing to happen whenever you have any sort of mishap in public is that everyone immediately rushes to your aid as if they're Jack Bauer in a hostage situation. Sure enough before I could say 'my coke is three feet under the hula hoops' there was a lady on her hands and knees in front of me scrambling around to try to retrieve the rolling can. As much as you would like to physically drag her back to her feet and tell her not to be so fucking stupid, you just have to let this sort of shite play out at that point. It was over mercifully quickly, and she handed the can back to me as I tried to mumble the kind of apology that was pure Hugh Grant in it's delivery. Mortifying and yet par for the course in my shit show of a life. And you want to talk about self worth?

I used to have a car. Now I have a pile of bird shite that has bits of metal sticking out of it. Several hundreds of years ago my employer declared that as it was having a new entrance built on one side of the building it was moving the disabled parking facilities into the main car park. For three weeks, they said. Like when you lent that copy of 101 Great Goals to your mate in 1984. Again it is perhaps a disability thing, but I know people who have actually died since I lent them books or CDs. I myself am still in possession of a terrible trilogy of videos starring Juliet Binoche which I acquired from a now estranged uncle. Perhaps that is why he no longer visits. He just doesn't want those fucking videos back, ever. You want to see them. They are so utterly depressing. They make this blog entry read like a giddy Timmy Mallet anecdote. Back at the car park and somewhere near the central plot of this delirious, angst-stained rant, the new disabled parking facilities are right underneath where a tree hangs over the fence in the car park. This is a favoured depositing location for the local flying wildlife. Liverpool has seagulls the size of donkeys. Day after day they shit on my car, a turgid metaphor for my state of mind today.

Also today, I suppose I should report that I have been ill. I was off sick from work all last week with yet another infection. This is possibly the same infection I lent to my friend in 1984. The doctors seem to have no clue how to deal with it. I went for my routine four-monthly appointment with the nephrologist last Tuesday. We argued about whether or not I should go on long term anti-biotics. I argued that I should because I'm desperate now and anyway, they would probably just make those Saturday night karaoke sessions at Ice Bar that bit more interesting. The nephrologist only turns up in person to these appointments about as often as my estranged uncle and so this boring circular argument was actually conducted with Sojan, a staff nurse and a Doctor Brown. She spoke to me like I was five, insisted I have further blood tests that day and shortened the length between my appointments to three months. I liked her, though she would not prescribe anti-biotics long term. It was only after a slightly undignified whinge on my part that she agreed to prescribe me any at all. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.

At around 9.30 that night, already ill remember, I got a phone call from a doctor at the Royal telling me that my blood tests had shown that my potassium level was too high. I needed to go into A & E as soon as possible to have it checked again and possibly treated. Otherwise my heart might explode. Or something. Good luck finding my heart. Four months ago they pulled the same shit on me, and Emma and I waited in A & E for four hours. After repeated blood tests we were told that the reading was fine and that there had been some mistake during the transportation of the blood sample. Naturally I assumed they were at it again but I reluctantly went into the hospital at 10 o'fucking clock at night in anty case. One day these empty threats they make about my impending death may actually come true and then I will look stupid, won't I if I haven't listened to their advice? We were there so long that my employer's old disabled car park almost reopened, at which point I was told that following another blood test the potassium level was still too high. I'd need treatment.

I've had this treatment before, back in 2013 which if you are close to the edge of suicide you can read about again on these pages. It's just a drip, which involves butchering my arms but which is not overly complex in its nature. That didn't stop the nurse who walked me through to the treatment area asking me whether I would need a hoist to get on to a trolley. Firstly, I don't need a fucking hoist thank you very much I'm not Brian fucking Potter. Secondly, I don't even need a trolley. This treatment can be administered very simply with the recipient sitting in a wheelchair. These suggestions and implications were just yet more evidence of medical professionals who ought to know better reacting to a wheelchair as if it is a fucking car bomb. So I sat in my chair, and an altogether more sensible doctor and nurse combo administered my treatment. And they did so with understanding and humour and pleasantness, and all sorts of other things I have never experienced before at Whiston Hospital. I didn't even mind that they put the first drip in incorrectly which consequently meant that the initial few minutes of the treatment felt like repeatedly having your arm punched by Anthony Joshua. An Anthony Joshua who has a lot of nervous energy to expend and is as angry as I felt at the start of this blog entry.

They got me home by 2.30am Wednesday, fully 13 hours after I had left the house for my original appointment. One week on, my arms are still sore and bruised.

And that, folks, was a few fury-inspired random observations. Don't we all feel better?