To blog or not to blog

One of the problems I encountered whilst on the last lot of treatments was that I was advised to avoid flying – one assumes in an aircraft, although avoiding hang-gliders and micro-lights seems to me to be a good life rule anyway and I don’t have the upper body strength for Icarus wings. It was all to do with an increased risk of blood clots. You will recall that the medication had played havoc with my body’s production of both white and red blood cells. I guess it works a bit like this: Take an average school playground to represent my blood, full of all types of cells, or ‘children’. So, take away the white kids (best not tell anyone you are doing this or you’ll probably have bother with OFSTED) to represent my while cells, and then take away the black kids (or red cells) and what do you have left? Just a load of Chinese kids.  Now, we all know what the Chinese are like, they group together (12 to a house on our Avenue, with Chinese Karaoke Opera playing at all hours but that is a gripe for another time). So the Chinese kids represent the platelets in the blood and, as per our MSG-loving friends, the platelets are responsible for clotting.  So I guess that explains why I was susceptible to Deep Vein Thrombosis and no way was I going to risk that (if only because of the stockings which are never flattering). This meant that we were not able to go to my Brother-in-Law’s wedding in Northern Ireland or even think about a holiday abroad. We did, at one point, hatch a cunning plan to get the train to London and then on via the Chunnel for a long weekend for two in Paris. But we would only have argued as I would have insisted on going up the Eiffel Tower and David would have insisted on NOT going up the Eiffel tower. I can’t imagine many things that I think he would rather not do. Well, not that don’t involve naked women of the opposite sex. So, the extortionate price and the almost guaranteed end of our relationship, plus the fact that the meds made me feel completely wasted, demoted that idea to the back burner and tagged it with ‘maybe when you are feeling better’.

Stopping the medication though had the huge bonus that I was once again allowed to take to the air and so David and I started shaking piggy banks and checking down the back of the sofa for enough money to get away.  He briefly revisited the notion of gay Paris (which I doubt really lives up to that name) and soon started to look towards the Mediterranean. We had Crete in mind; maybe on a subconscious level I thought that the Minotaur’s Minoan Maze might prove less complex to navigate than our lives at the time.  In truth we just wanted somewhere in the sun that wouldn’t be too full of ‘Brits Abroad’.  Neither of us have any interest in 24-hour binge drinking, sunburn because you passed out from the Vino, falling down outside the hotel and ending up in a foreign A & E department with concussion.  Something less vulgar was needed, something with more than three stars and absolutely no Karaoke or Kiss Me Quick hats. When you put limited budget, must be sunny, not on a hill (Hill is just a misspelling of Hell for me; Hull is too but for other reasons), decent star rating, all inclusive and a time-slot with no wriggle-room, choices are limited but we found somewhere in Crete as we had hoped. LastMinute.com had just the thing and so we booked it. In a race against the clock I had to get my passport renewed and that was an uphill battle in its own right with my photograph being rejected twice and a holiday booked for a few weeks hence.  But a late passport was the least of our concerns when, lying in bed watching the news one night I heard “Holiday firm Travel Options who also run Kiss Flights have today gone into Administration…” and my heart sunk.  I checked the paperwork. I re-read the small print. I read it again, just in case I was seeing things. There is was, as I feared, “Holiday tour operator: Travel Options”. So three weeks before we were due to fly we found ourselves without a holiday.

I really don’t know why I was surprised at this. I don’t know why I hadn’t expected it. People say I am a pessimist, but I never saw this coming. After three years stuck in a nightmare with all we have been through I honestly thought that the Karma of the Universe would grant us just a week away. But if Karma is a chameleon it has blended so far into the background of our lives as to remain invisible, and clearly we have no right to expect just a little good fortune. Thankfully ATOL and the Civil Aviation Authority will step in and luckily we were covered to get the full amount refunded. One day. But that means a claim and forms and all that kafuffle. It is not a speedy process and not one that can respond to the fact that David’s holiday time from work was committed for a few weeks hence.

The Royal Bank of Mum stepped in to lend us enough to book another holiday and there followed a few days of internet scrapping with all the other people who found themselves in the same position. I would find a holiday on t’interweb and before I could press ‘book’ it was snatched away by someone else. But tenacity is (or at least should be) my middle name and I found us a holiday in Turkey.  With a huge sigh of relief and the little stash of spending money we had saved or been kindly given by our friend in Germany who took pity on us, we eventually took off for the sun.

Turkey was a delight (see what I did there?) and much more than we expected. To be honest, that wasn’t much to ask of it though as my only knowledge of Turkey comes from Midnight Express and centres largely around an Istanbul Prison in the 1970s. Oh, and a vague recollection of a song:

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul

The weather was splendid and the accommodation, although small, was quite acceptable. The complex was vast but well designed and never too busy; we always managed to find a sun lounger and there were enough pools for the yabbering yoofs and braying brats to be kept well away from the more tranquil adult pool. Nobody forced you to ‘get involved’, there was no enforced ‘Welcome meeting’ where “Hello holidaymakers, I’m Sharon-but-you-can-call-me-Shaz and I’m here to make your holiday go with a bang” attempts to flirt with anyone under 60 and you are obligated to play bingo and take part in a belly dance contest. Any ‘entertainment’ was sufficiently distant to not disturb us if we wanted peace and quiet. We went ‘all inclusive’ and that proved to be a great success. The food was plentiful, tasty and edible – which I do find important qualities in gastronomy. There was always fresh salad and fruit, with meats cooked on barbecues outside each night. They did the most amazing things to watermelons, avocados and radishes and even offered a class in fruit carving, although nobody’s letting rip with a scalpel on my plums in the near future thanks you – I like my fruit to remain intact. We don’t drink alcohol but Coke, Fanta and water were all freely available as were ice creams and even midnight snacks.

We were in an area rich in Roman and Byzantine ruins and hired a guy to take us on a personal tour of some of the best historical sites. This was far better than the more organised boat trip which we also endured later in the week. It cut down the amount of walking and waiting by an enormous amount and meant that we were not stuck in the hotel but could be driven round the best sights of sites in air-conditioned comfort. We could take as long as we wanted at each location and didn’t have to stand in queues. The amphitheatre at Aspendos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspendos is stunning and the best preserved in the world. Not being attached to a coach trip, we were there at a time when the place wasn’t swarming with happy snappers and between us we got some great photos, despite David getting vertigo anywhere above about three steps up and me being a semi-cripple practically crawling up the ancient stones akin to Edmund Hilary surmounting Everest, except HE had Sherpas. That good old British do or die attitude kicked in and I made it to the Gods and boy was it worth it. If anyone ever wondered what the Romans did for us, apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, they should stand at the top of that place and listen to the acoustics. Add sound engineering to the list too!

We also visited the aqueduct that fed Aspendos town on the plateau hill above the amphitheatre, which was a stunning sight against the clear blue sky and must have looked amazing when it was first constructed. Photographs can’t do justice to the sheer scale. We travelled back via the gladiator town of Perga http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perga but my gammy foot prevented too much exploring!

The next day we took a more familiar group excursion which failed to live up to the brochure’s promises or the enthusiasm of the chap who sold it to us but did let us see the ancient town of Side (pronounced See Day) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side%2C_Turkey and the temple of Apollo which was about as Epic Roman Ruin as you could possibly hope to see. Bazaars and queues and children and tourists and far too much walking for poorly me when we thought we would be on a boat all day. Luckily I had just started some new tablets for my foot which helped enormously and at least shifted the pain from right in my face to periphery attention – but that is a digression for later.

We spent much of the rest of the time by the pool, with books and bottles of coke. I swam for the first time in ages and vowed to do more when we got home. We lazed and dozed and generally relaxed and for a few days we could pretend we were how we used to be. David had half a day (which turned out to be much longer) off on a quad bike doing manly macho things and getting covered in dust so that when he came back he looked more like a clay cast of himself than flesh and blood. I too got caked in mud but in a different way as I treated myself to a Turkish massage and ‘relax therapy’ at the hotel. And THAT was amazing, albeit I had to keep telling the guy that if he tried to massage my left foot he would end up with it in his face. A Turkish coffee body scrub is as close to heaven as I think you can get without exchange of bodily fluids although I was less convinced about the merits of painting my face with mud. So we both had a day getting down and dirty even if not together. The journey back to the airport was something of an experience, then mini-bus driver got lost, tried to sell us Turkish wives, narrowly missed a wandering goat (the moped driver behind didn’t) and I think tried to draft us into smuggling him into England as an illegal immigrant.

It was a great holiday made all the more special by the fact that we had a whole week together and all the health hiccups and work worries, bills and bustle of ‘normal’ life were set aside for a while. But the bubble burst and we had to come home to find it all still waiting for us.

The universe is supposed to be about balance, Yin and Yang, that bloody Karma chameleon, and we foolishly hoped that a nice week away was our entitlement, our payback to balance out all the grief we had endured over the last few years. How very naive of us – it worked the other way; a good week in Turkey meant that something awful HAD to happen upon our return and to set the Universe back in kilter, driving to work one day David hit a patch of oil and played pinball with the motorway crash barrier gaining a new high score and crunching my little car in the process. On the down side he was by a matter of fluke driving my car that day but on the plus side nobody else was involved and he wasn’t hurt.

My poor baby was battered and bleeding, with broken joints and scratched skin, but rushed to hospital by a man from the RAC who shook his head and did a good impression of Rolf Harris saying “it was just toooo week, I don’t think it’ll make it throooough the night”.

So we locked horns with the insurance industry and started to try to pick our way through a process which seems designed to confuse, obfuscate and complicate. I could write a book on what happened but for your sanity and mine I will try for brevity. I was entitled to a hire car for four days while a decision was made about whether my vehicle was a write-off. This happened, I got a car from Enterprise without fuss, but the four days expired before I had heard any decision about my Fiesta. Under the terms of the policy if the car is to be repaired I should have a hire vehicle for the duration of the repair, but if it is beyond economic repair (BER) then I cease to qualify. But what happens when, on a Monday morning, you have taken the four-day hire car back but still don’t have a decision from Zurich? I was stuck – I might be entitled to a hire car for the next few days or I might not. I couldn’t make any plans, couldn’t arrange my life at all. No point in hiring a car if Zurich were going to give me one anyway. But Zurich didn’t understand that. Asking a simple question like “when will you have the decision?” proved too much for the Bangalore helpdesk muppets.

I have every respect for helpdesk staff; they have a difficult job, take all the flack, have to be extremely good at their jobs, have a huge amount of product knowledge, patience and skill. I know. I have been one, I have run support desks and David spends much of his life staffing one and coming home exhausted and frustrated with tales of idiot customers. But Zurich’s offering is something else, something born from the pits of hell and staffed by people who have clearly dropped a chromosome and been plugged into a ZX81 to compensate.  I reference a computer here because clearly they had no will of their own and everything was driven by very set scripts. If you asked a question that was out of sequence or not on their screen you sent them into a recursive loop with lights flashing, steam coming out their ears and “does not compute” warnings blaring in the background.  Computer says ‘no’. Really, they could not answer even the simplest question unless you phrased it exactly as they had it in front of them, and when David phoned they could hardly understand him at all. OK, so he is from Northern Ireland but he doesn’t have that strong an accent. How they can’t tell if he is saying ‘eight’, ‘two’ or ‘three’ I will never know.

The details are not important, the outcome was. My car was indeed written off and eventually it was established that I would not get a hire car and would have to just wait and be patient for the settlement figure to arrive. No, they could not send it by bank transfer as it had to go by cheque because, for some reason, that is an easier process. Who uses cheques these days? I can’t remember the last one I wrote. They are out-dated, slow, expensive to process and prone to getting lost in the post. Bank transfers are fast, cheap and secure. But Zurich remains firmly positioned in the 1990s and nothing I could say would get them to budge.

Clouds and silver linings though. This has meant that my car will now be replaced. We had just paid it off, so at least there was no negative equity on it or hassle with outstanding payments. We have found a new car, well, new to us. It’s a Peugeot 207 1.6 VTi and chosen not so much because it was in very good nick and with low mileage for an 07 plate but because it is an automatic drive. I know automatics have a bit of a ‘grandpa in his slippers’ reputation but my reasons were sound.  At the moment I can’t drive very far at the best of times because my left foot is still causing pain and using the clutch after more than a few minutes becomes a new form of torture. So I’m limited to a 2-mile radius provided I have popped enough pain killers to floor a charging rhino. Thus an automatic, which has no clutch and can be driven without any involvement at all from the left foot, seems an ideal answer.

We should collect it at the weekend. There is still plenty to go wrong. The cheque from Zurich will only just have scraped through clearing, as will a cheque from my mother who has once again come to our rescue and lent us some extra money to help. Of course the Insurance paid a lot less than the price of a new car so we had a shortfall that is going to stretch us to the limit. We have gathered together every spare penny we can find and shoved that all in the bank and I think we will scrape by at the weekend with just about sufficient funds to make the payment, IF (and it is a big IF) everything lines up, the bank remember to raise the transaction limit on our card, the tax goes through with no issues and we manage to sort the insurance. I am sure that Murphy and his Law will be waiting in the shadows for us though. And what goes wrong won’t be what we expect. Maybe a tornado will blow through the showroom and destroy ONLY my new car. Maybe there will be another strike at the refineries and there won’t be any petrol to be had. Maybe a jelly monster from out of space will eat us all. Something will go wrong. Wait and see!

Now I am giving the liver treatment a break I have has time to concentrate on other things with the people at the hospital including the aforementioned leg pain. During all this trouble with cars I have had two appointments at the hospital (which is why having transport was kind of important) to look in more detail at what is causing the pain.  We all thought it was neuropathy, problems with the smaller nerves in the foot and leg. So the first test was to check this and involved Nerve Conduction Velocity (NCV) tests of the electrical impulses between various nerve endings. This was just like a TENS machine, sending measured pulses of electricity down the nerves and measuring the time they take to get from A to B. That was simple enough, if a little disconcerting to have bits of your body made to twitch outside of your control. Dr Frankenstein was on to something. The next part of the test though was much more gruesome and involved a needle deep into the tissue of the muscles in my legs and ‘listening’ to the pops of electrical activity as the muscles were tensed and relaxed. That but was less fun.

The outcome seems to be that it isn’t neuropathy that is causing the problem but something further up. Put simply, the problem isn’t at the plug; it’s in my ring circuit. That means spine. That means an MRI and I have now been for that scan too. Whilst I only feel pain on one side the tests showed that the muscles are very weak, surprisingly so, or at least they are functioning as if they are not getting the full signals. I suppose some weakness is to be expected, I am not exactly active, going for a jog or even a walk is not really an option at the moment, but  they think that these tests show more than just a weakness due to lack of exercise. Who know what they will find or what the outcome may be? It could be compression from a slipped disk, an infection, a trapped nerve or anything. So that may be another challenge, but I shall persevere, I shall climb every mountain, ford every stream, and follow every rainbow, ’till I find my dream. (Am I starting to sound a wee bit too much like Julie Andrews?)

Our leisure centre has finally reopened, following all the hassles with the residents association and people who had not paid their bills, the repairs and the politics. But the pool is once again functioning, albeit not as nice as the one in Turkey and so we are trying to go swimming a couple of times a week and that will help build some strength back and hopefully I will start to feel a bit better about myself. My body image is the stuff of another blog. I just hope nobody decides I have to have an operation on my spine. I played Operation as a kid and it put me off the idea of such things completely. Do surgeons really think you have a ‘bread basket’ in your stomach and ‘charlie horse’ in your right thigh? Does a buzzer go off and your nose light up if they don’t have a steady hand? And the poor man who gets operated on ends up with no ‘bits’. You know, THOSE bits. Just look at the picture. He had all those important things removed (his funny bone and his Adams Apple) and they still managed to whip off his goolies too. And I’m not risking THAT!