Further News?

 Well, not really. Post hospital I've been being a good girl and doing everything my doctors and physiotherapists require of me. So far so good but the point when all could fall apart is still about three to four weeks off. 

I've a few concerns. I still have numbness and altered sensation in my bad leg (it feels as if someone has applied an elastic bandage too tightly over a thick pad on the sole of my foot - I've actually woken up trying to take this non-existent bandage off a few times.) This, combined with my numb leg, makes walking somewhat difficult because I can't get any normal rhythm going. As well walking without the walker is also hard although I am persevering with hands free walking in safe places where I have easily accessible things I can grab if it all goes sideways. Sigh.

So life is not a bowl of cherries at the moment - but since it's cherry season in Tasmania there is actually a bowl of these delicious goodies in the fridge right now. I'm going to savour every bite of these luscious imports because in the wider world Western Australia is in the middle of shortages and consequent rationing of some food and grocery items. This is because we import many consumables from the eastern states by road and more importantly by rail and currently unprecedented rain has caused serious flooding and both road and rail links have been damaged. The road is now open but it will take some time before all the trucks backed up in South Australia will reach the Western Australian distribution centres. While this will help it's expected the rail line, which has been most badly damaged and brings the bulk of supplies, will be unusable for several weeks - and this means cherries are unlikely to be available since the local season has finished.

We're not going to starve, of course. We have local sources of fruit, vegetables and meat and there are still local suppliers of dairy products but to see how the shelves have been stripped in panic buying you'd think we'll never see food again. Of course we can't always get our favourite items but Pisces and I are largely enjoying the substitutes we're being sent - we mostly do our grocery shopping online and if they don't have what we want we get given something different. Apart from that some of the shortages have encouraged me to pull out my old yoghurt maker and start making my own again and when I can manage to stand long enough to knead some dough I just might make bread.

Catching Up

 I don't know if you've noticed but I've been away for a while. I have to say it hasn't been much fun. For a few months I'd been having increasingly severe levels of what I was told was sciatica due to a back injury I sustained many years ago and which has been an ongoing problem ever since. It flares up and after rest and/or an injection it subsides and I go back to normal. This time though it hadn't responded to a couple of injections and was getting steadily worse. While I waited for an MRI and my GP threw ever more painkillers at me I was getting more and more disabled. Walking was slow and painful and I was having to use a walking  stick all the time. Then I woke up on Saturday 9 December and couldn't even shuffle into my bathroom which is only a few steps away. I rang the bell - my husband and I have one each in case of emergencies and this was definitely one. Even before he arrived from his room - he snores like a train these days - I'd realised this warranted an ambulance ride to the Emergency Department. 

Ambulance services are somewhat stretched here at the moment and this was obviously not life threatening - excruciating maybe but even severe pain does not qualify - so it was close to two hours before it arrived. The paramedics - usually called ambos in Australia - were great. They quickly got me into a wheelchair and up our very steep driveway and onto a stretcher in the ambulance. It turns out that ambulance stretchers aren't all that comfortable for someone with severe back pain that all their strong painkillers weren't even touching. Sigh. 

All but one of the hospitals north of the Swan River (this pretty much cuts the city in half) had their EDs closed and ambulances ramped outside so I was taken to one some distance away in central Perth where I was triaged and taken in fairly quickly. The ambulance ramping problem has been on-going for some time and while you will get immediate treatment if it's life threatening you might otherwise have quite a wait in an ambulance so I was very grateful I got in so fast. 

A succession of doctors came to assess me over the next couple of hours and it was decided to admit me and book me in for the next available MRI which was on Monday. At last - I already had an appointment for one outside the hospital system but it was at the end of January so this was a great improvement. While I was in the ED I'd started to get numbness in my foot and by the time I got to the ward it had progressed up to my thigh. Along with all this my knee kept giving away whenever I put ant weight on it. As a result I spent the next ten days wheelchair bound  before advancing to the walking frame I'm still using. I do have exercises to do that I'm assured will eventually kick in - the time frame is ten to twelve weeks and I have to say they had better work. I have no desire to stay like this. 

I had my MRI on the Monday and it exposed several lower spine issues - one is the joint damaged so many years ago and as a result now seizing up in multiple ways, the other is a bulging disc in the next joint down. How I damaged this joint is a mystery - although I have a few suspicions. I'm a keen gardener and had dug over the veggie patch which might have had something to do with it. At this point I was transferred to a private hospital to be put under a physician who specialises in spinal injuries. She arranged for me to see a neurosurgeon who offered me the choice of a specialised injection or surgery. Unsurprisingly I chose the injection. For now it's wait and see - apparently it can take some weeks to work so wish me luck.

The Things You Learn

 I don't often talk about my health issues here but I'm making an exception today. I have macular degeneration which means I am slowly losing my vision. I'm lucky that in my case it has been very slow but over the past year I've been beginning to really notice deficiencies in what I can see. Macular degeneration is when the macula, which is the part of the retina that gives you clear vision through your line of sight, disintegrates meaning you lose the central part of your vision. In my case at the moment this means I have blurred bits in the middle of whatever I'm focussing on and other things are distorted. So far it's not too bad because my peripheral vision in my better eye is compensating to some degree but this isn't always the case so sometimes I can see with only slight blurring but on a bad day I might not be able see the face of someone who is only a a relatively short distance away from me. This can change quite fast so at one time I can see relatively well but within minutes it can change so much of the world is a blur. Because it's so erratic I've had to give up driving because I can't be certain that I'll be able to see consistently enough to drive safely. 

All this makes life more complicated and I'm having to find ways to live with this condition. These are things like making sure that everything is put away in the same place in the pantry for instance so that on a bad day I can still find it and insisting that nothing is left out where it can be tripped over. I'm not yet at the point where I need much assistance but things like reading can be problematic if the font is small for instance. My laptop and Kindle are a great help here because I can enlarge the font and I've put magnifying glasses strategically around the house, even carrying a small one in my handbag, to make this easier.

Largely I've been working out these things for myself but now I've had a visit from an occupational therapist who works with those who have mobility and vision problems and I can see  a whole new world opening up. One thing she suggested was to upgrade our lighting and she made her point by bringing in a lamp with a much stronger whiter light than we've generally got around here. I'm still in shock as to how much difference this made. I had thought the lighting around here was perfectly adequate but it seems I was wrong The reading sheet she had me do at the beginning of the session where I struggled to read the last lines became clear enough for me to read them, not perfectly clear but good enough. This was only part of what she suggested and we now have a list of changes to work through. Some are expensive but most are relatively cheap. Who'd have thought there was so much we could do to live with this condition.

The OT was also very helpful with regard to my back problems which have morphed over the last few months from somewhat painful which is inconvenient but manageable to very painful and debilitating. It turns out there are things out there which she thinks will help and I have to say I hope she's right. One of these is a new bed. Apparently mattresses only last seven years.  I've no intention of telling you how old mine is but let's say it's quite a lot older than that. There's also a stool that I could use in the kitchen for less standing and she says I need a new office chair (that last is not a surprise but I realise now I cannot put it off any longer). There was much other food for thought and I'm actually looking forward to my next appointment which is to be at a speciality shop aptly named The Back Shop.

Modern Warfare

Remembrance Day got me thinking. This day always seems especially poignant for me because it marks the end of the war where, apart from the tragic loss of life, everything related to warfare changed. For the first time war involved large scale mechanisation. There had been the beginnings of this back in the smaller wars of the later part of the nineteenth century but the Great War (as it was known at the time but which we now know as World War One) was when machine guns had been refined to be even greater mass killing weapons, tanks were first used, enormous ships brought soldiers in huge numbers in from all over the world to the battle fields of Europe and the Middle East, trains were used extensively for transport with temporary lines being laid and taken up and aerial warfare began. As well there was the first large scale chemical warfare with the use of gases such as chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas as weapons. It was a long way from poisoning water sources or tossing contaminated items at the enemy to infect them with disease. While it's now forbidden under the bizarrely named Rules of War quite recently the president of Syria used gas against his own people in the on-going civil war in that country and I'd be very surprised that this would be the last time.

This war was when modern warfare really changed. Although war had always been horrific in the numbers of dead and injured and disrupted lives caused by actual fighting as well as all the other problems which civilian populations endure - looting, destruction of crops and homes leading to mass starvation and murder and rape by rampaging troops full of blood lust to name only a few - the distancing that mechanisation provides makes it even easier to lose sight of the actual people involved. I'm not saying there aren't times when we have to fight to defend ourselves - obviously that can and does happen - but there's been a great change in the way we fight wars. It's no longer men armed with a spear or a sword face to face or even canon fire and arrows where there are limits to how far they can reach. Mechanisation has changed that and now we have drone strikes and autonomous weapons that put war at an even greater distance from those waging it. Even worse are the rockets which can travel half way around the globe carrying hugely destructive weapons that can wipe out entire cities. 

I grew up during the Cold War where even in as isolated part of the world as Western Australia we lived in fear of nuclear war. That these weapons and the technology to make them still exist is scary because while they do they may fall into the hands of despotic leaders or other extremists. When they're combined with weapons that are autonomous it's a frightening prospect for the future. Artificial intelligence is only as good as its programming and I for one am not convinced that we are as good at doing that as we like to think we are. 

Remembrance Day

 Lest we forget.

Pond Life

A few weeks ago you might remember that Miss Five and Mr Two "helped" their father to reline and fill the pond in the garden. I intend to stock it with local Western pygmy perch to keep down the mosquito population - they also co-exist with frogs, which is important here. 

The advice was to leave the water to get rid of any nasties for 4-6 weeks which I did. Turns out this was not a great idea without first stocking it with plants because it was soon a glorious - I joke of course - green with an algae bloom the likes of which I've never seen before in a garden pond. So now I have started over with clean water and some water plants.  

The first of these plants is nardoo. 

This is a native water fern the spores of which when properly prepared were used by our First Nations people as part of their diet particularly in inland areas. The important part here is properly prepared because it can be toxic unless correctly treated. As I have no plans of growing enough to eat I'm not particularly concerned about this aspect. 

The other one so far is a water forget me not.

I'm not at all sure if this was a good choice as it may get to be too big but we shall see. Somewhat urgently now I need to make a visit to a local nursery that specialises in all things aquatic to invest in some water lilies and pygmy perch to prevent another algal disaster.

I thought the frog which has taken up residence in the pond might be unhappy about my disruption to his home but it seems I was worrying unnecessarily because he's out there making himself heard as I write and has been doing that pretty much all day.  "Hello, ladies," he's saying. "Come and make beautiful babies." Even if a female goes to investigate she's unlikely to mate and lay her eggs there because two quite small water plants are hardly going to be enough to provide suitable anchors for them.  He, though, remains optimistic. Good luck to him I say.

Fun and Games

We've just had a busy and enjoyable weekend, something we needed after multiple serious health issues hitting in both our immediate and extended family in the last month. So we were very happy to get together for lunch with my side of the family at my niece's rural bush block to celebrate several birthdays and a wedding anniversary.

My niece is an artist and she and her husband bought what was a somewhat run down property several years ago and have transformed it into a lovely home which bursts with creativity and unexpected artworks. Every time I go there I find something new to love and much of it began as found objects they saw and have repurposed. Add in that on this occasion nearly all the family were able to get together and it made for a lovely day. The next such gathering is likely to be at Christmas and I'm sure we will still be talking to the resident turkey cock and not seeing him on the dinner table.

Virgo came with Ms Five and Mr Two - her husband was busy prepping for Mr Two's birthday party the next day - and the turkey was very popular with Mr Two in particular. He spent a considerable part of the day running after it - it was outside the yard fence - then coming back to tell us all about how the "ticken" said "gobble gobble". No matter how often we told him it was a turkey and he repeated it after us, the next time he came back it was to tell us about the gobbling "ticken".

Sunday was Mr Two's party at a local park. He chose his party outfit - his sister's Spidergirl costume from back in the day complete with a vivid blue tutu - and had a wonderful time. Mr Two is really into vehicles these days - he wanders around with at least two clutched firmly in his hands most of the time - so Virgo had decorated his cake with a selection of miniature trucks and earth moving vehicles much to his delight and that of all the other children. The guests included a number of two year olds - boys and girls - and some of Ms Five's  school friends. The party went smoothly although there was one almost escape by a two year old who was spotted just before he reached the top of the exterior fence and who later had to be removed from a tree before he was out of reach and the whole was summed up by one of Ms Five's friends who on opening her goody bag and finding a toy dump truck, the bucket of which could be moved up and down, squeed with delight before she sighed and said "This is the best birthday party ever.".