I’m free!

Not in the John Inman, tape measure up the inner-leg Mrs Slocomb’s wet pussy sort of way, or in the Billy Hayes escaping from a Turkish Prison at the end of Midnight Express sort of way (sorry if you haven’t seen that and I just spoilt the ending). But more in the way that Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms get released when you boil water. I feel like a gas breaking free of a liquid, atoms spinning off into the great wide open with great gusto and a tendency to be poetic. The fart you have been holding in until you left the dinner party and then could finally let rip outside. The cause of this sudden freedom: my Little Blue Car. I had a Little Blue Car before, the one that tried to audition for Strictly Come Dancing by waltzing across the motorway slip road before pirouetting into the barrier with about the same amount of grace as Mr Blobby and Ann Widecombe’s love child on skates. But that was the Old Little Blue Car and now I have a New Little Blue Car, thanks to Zurich insurance, loans from the Bank of Mum and tallying up the coins we found down the side of the sofa. I jest not – our sofa is like a savings bank. And a pencil case. And somewhere to store nasty letters from the bank you don’t want to read. Shergar is quite probably down there somewhere, and Lord Lucan, The Holy Grail, Atlantis and Amelia Earhart (or at least her plane).  We take the cushions off and ‘Cyclonic bagless technology vacuum’  it regularly, but like a bed-ridden American, there are folds and flaps and deep, deep pockets that seem to harbour the collected flotsam of our lives.

So how has NLBC brought about such a feeling of freedom and why did OLBC not offer the same? It is all about my foot.  The ‘neuropathy’ in my left leg has made driving a manual car absolute agony (manual gear box, not manual as in ‘feet out the bottom, running as per Fred Flintstone’). I was OK for the first mile or so but after that every depression of the clutch caused me to grimace and groan from the pain.  I know it was real pain as I was doing it when there was nobody present to give me any sympathy. This has tethered me to a radius of about three miles, maybe four if there is not much traffic and a good tail wind. Trying to get anywhere at rush-hour is hard enough but the stop-start trudge of the traffic calls for more clutch work than you realise, and doing a hill start which requires controlled release of the clutch has been an uphill struggle. I’ve managed. I had to.  It was that or taxi fares. A return trip to the hospital was 6.8 miles, total cost £17.20 on the worst occasion – or I could grit my teeth and pray for light traffic.

Traffic is a fickle thing and you throw yourself on its mercy when you live in a city.  Like a menstruating Lesbian, it is best avoided when it is having a heavy flow day or showing signs of congestion. Catch it in the wrong mood and you can lose half your life just trying to pop out for a pint of milk (to find out you have been stuck in traffic so long they only sell milk in litres now). It is an angry, unpredictable beast.  And, by the by, whoever came up with the idea of speed bumps and then tried to explain them away as a method of ‘traffic calming’ should know that calming is the one thing they do not produce.

We have a plethora of early warning systems for traffic problems – you can check your route on t’interweb and have traffic updates texted to your phone, there’s ‘real-time’ updates to your GPS but everyone who has used these with any regularity knows they can’t be relied upon – your route is just as likely to be completely clear as tailing back to the Chanel Tunnel. And if you ‘come off at the next exit’ you are probably going to find yourself in an even worse pickle as two dozen articulated wagons, several hundred angry commuters and Mr and Mrs Wilburton in their Ford Cortina towing a two-person caravan all try to make their way along country roads barely wide enough for horse and dray. Predictions of traffic flow are at best, best guess; you can put up as many cameras as you like, build computer simulators that can plan twenty years into the future, install traffic lights and RTA broadcasts but nothing in the world can predict that Mr and Mrs Wilburton’s caravan is going to get a puncture on the top of a blind hill.

Avoiding rush hour is not always possible, like when you have a date with a voluptuous MRI scanner.  My most recent MRI scan was scheduled for way after Rush Hour (quite deliberately on my part) but the Gods wanted a giggle and caused several other patients to cancel so that I was summonsed early (half way through a cup of tea no less) prompting a hectic and whirlwind crawl, bumper to bumper across the city.

Whoever coined the phrase ‘rush hour’ must have done so with an absolute sense of irony and a tongue so far in their cheek that they caused ulcers and probably couldn’t speak properly for days. Serves them right. Maybe it is because people rush out of the office at exactly the same time, eager to get home in time to watch The One Show (although I can’t see why; that new Welsh woman is unintelligible most of the time and fluffing her lines the rest. Still, she LOOKS like Christine Bleakley and as most people are gnashing away at their beans on toast so I doubt they noticed the change).  Or maybe it is because they get a rush from the extreme sport which is ‘getting out of the car park’.  It can be chaos and at every opportunity some fuckwit will do something stupid, like the mother who pushes he buggy out into the road to force the traffic to stop, or the bus driver who adopts the ‘I’m bigger than you’ method of crossing three lanes of traffic. People lose all sense of fair play when they get behind a wheel. Box junctions become disputed territory – mini versions of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Horn blowing and angry gestures replace common courtesy.  If you do dare to ‘let someone in’ you are met with a torrent of abuse because being nice is a sign of weakness and the pack descends on you ready to take you out at the next set of lights.

But one muddles through and hopefully reaches one’s destination with a full complement of wing mirrors and not too many new dents or scratches in the paintwork.  A little flustered, weary but ready for one’s appointment nevertheless. This was by no means a first date; the MRI and I are getting quite pally. I call her Maggie, which seems an appropriate shortening of her first name.  It’s her penetrating stare and the way she sees right through me that I find so magnetising.  She makes the hairs on my arms stand on end and in fact on this occasion I nearly fell asleep in her tender embrace until a nurse came in and broke the spell. We still keep in contact – she writes, I align myself to magnetic North when asleep in bed at night, and attract iron filings.

I heard from her few days ago when my results came through. They were looking for evidence in my spine of pressure on a nerve causing the leg pain; in medical-speak Perineuropathy or radiculopathy. Ridiculopathy more like, judging by the report which came back in such medical jargon that it would keep campaigners for plain English moist for months: “Heterogenous marrow signal with geographical area of high intensity on the STIR sequence”, “tear in posterior annulus at the L5/S1 level” and “There is also a low signal seen within the marrow of the iliac bones with no corresponding high signal change on the T2 sequences.”

I Googled and Wiki’d and Binged (or should that be Bonged?) to try to make sense of it all and think I deciphered it to mean that they can see where the lymphoma used to be and that I have a slightly slipped disc but there is no evidence of anything pressing on the nerves.  In other words, “we didn’t really find anything new”.  The whole report is trimmed with an air of not wanting to commit to a diagnosis in case it is wrong, which seems to me to be a sad indicator of how far we have wandered down the path of “where there’s blame there’s a claim”.  Do we really want a litigation culture of ambulance chasers and the inevitable waste of valuable time and resources that this demands?  Culpability and accountability are fine but medicine is not an exact science.  We know a huge amount, we have scientific methodology and validated processes but in the end so much of it if down to guess work and intuition. If the doctor makes the right call you get better. If not, you stay the same, or get worse and he tries again with another guess. With treatment like mine no two people respond the same to the drugs, and we just don’t understand enough to be able to predict exactly what will happen in every case. I have always said that in science there is no truth, only what we believe at the time. Once the atom was thought to be the smallest particle – and we held that as true until the atom was split. Doctors are the shaman of our day; they point their sticks and shake the bones and utter their mystical truths. Most of the time something miraculous happens but sometimes it does not. We keep going back to them because they are the best chance we’ve got so let’s not make their jobs impossible and leave them feeling so much pressure from litigious consequence that they are afraid to try their next best guess.

Of course, in all this, I am left with no idea of the next steps. The leg people say it isn’t legs and the spine people say it isn’t spinal. We are not quite back to square one, as we have eliminated two major possibilities but more back to the drawing board  and I will have to wait and wonder.

I can live with the leg pain for now. I’m on new pills and they seem to be working well although I fear the recent phase of itching may be an unpleasant side effect. I could scratch my entire body to pieces, rake it to shreds with a sharpened fork, dig my nails in and scrape furrows into my arms and legs, not to appease my inner masochist but to try to gain some relief. I’m almost hoping it is eczema – from which I suffered as a child and which is known to be triggered sometimes following my treatments. At least if it were eczema I would not risk having to stop the pills for my foot, which have made such a difference, hence my newfound freedom.

I can now drive in relative comfort and certainly no more pain than when sitting on the sofa. Getting an automatic car was such a good idea. OK, it’s a bit ‘slippers and Horlics and tartan blankets round your knees’ but for me there is a damn good reason to go automatic. Although you have to be careful hw you tell people: if you say ‘I have an automatic’ they immediately fall to the ground, dive for cover and call for an armed response unit. In truth, it is technically a semi-automatic as I CAN override the gears, but by similar token, you can’t announce in public that “I have a semi” without risk of prosecution for lude behaviour. But sod it, I DO have a semi – a little blue semi – and now I’m not limited to my 3-mile radius. I really do feel like I have been released from a virtual prison. The world is my playground once again. It is hard to explain how emancipated I feel or how much being unable to get around took away from me, lessened me, encumbered me. For those of us who drive, we take the skill for granted, we don’t think twice about it, there is no stress or pain or restriction. To lose that is to lose a freedom. And there are so many of these freedoms that I fear we soon all may lose.  I just hope that the current government spending cuts don’t leave us all realising that you often don’t really appreciate a thing until it is gone.

They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Closed down the school, the clinic
And the local butchers shop
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And this is now what we got

They took away all the jobs
and billions from the public purse
The charged all the people
for the pleasure of their curse
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And took away what we’d got

Hey student, student
They’re gonna charge you extra fees
Education cutbacks adding to the squeeze
Jeeze!
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And ruined the whole darn lot

Late last night
I heard it on the news
Benefits are going
The poor are really screwed
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
‘Til it’s gone
They sneaked into power
And the country can go to rot

They sneaked into power
Serves us right that it’s gone to pot.

Speaking of things which have gone, summer is now but a distant memory and we seem to have jumped straight through to Winter bypassing the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness to dump us unceremoniously into winter’s icy grasp. We don’t seem to get autumn’s any more, not the chocolate box autumns of my youth anyway, that lasted for months and brought the brightest days, clearest skies and the russet rustle of richest leaves. I picture orchards full of trees dripping rosy apples, hazel nuts and walnuts falling from the branches, conkers and harvest festival, hedgehogs. It has all become so grey. The trees try to don their splendour and wrap themselves in colour but somehow the damp and dark days diminish their dazzle and leave but a dank and depressing dreariness; they shed their leaves as tears. Each morning recently I have awoken in the hope of a bright, crisp day when I could wander off with a camera and try to capture a little of the magnificence of the season and each day has lived down to expectation. Or, in fairness to Mother Nature, when she has shown us a flash of her scarlet and gold, I have been stuck in a waiting room unable to enjoy anything.

We had one nice(ish) weekend and one day a few weeks ago which was dry enough for an hour or two, allowing us out with the cameras and one afternoon when I gathered some leaves and berries which I brought back home to photograph. These images were actually taken on our dining room table where I could control the light and not get rained on! They came from a little earlier in the season than I wanted, but I still wake every morning hoping for a clear blue sky and a chance to jump into my wellies and go wander down by the river with Ratty and Mole and Mr Toad and jam sandwiches and lashings of ginger beer.

Maybe I sentimentalise the season, remembering the good bits of many past autumnal days and blending them into a composite that becomes more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it is always mostly monotone and shivery-cold. I blame Michael Fish – things have never been right since he mis-forecast that hurricane and again, we see a ‘science’ that is based on best guesses. Our local forecast is seldom right for now let alone tomorrow or later in the week. They stand there in front of their animated maps promising so much and stating things in such absolute terms when really they are just making calculated guesses; guesses upon which we base our lives and make decisions and take chances, just the same as with the traffic updates and the medical prognosis. But maybe that isn’t such a bad thing as a guess always leaves room for things to turn out better than anticipated. In that at least there is some hope, some small chance that it will be sunny or the traffic jam will have cleared or I will get better one day. Maybe.