The Goose Is Getting Fat

It’s been 5 days since I had my ‘house arrest’ lifted and so far I have managed to get off my lazy butt just once to venture anywhere. With Christmas approaching at what seems like Mach 4 Friday was spent in town trying to sort out this years Christmas present purchases for Gill and the family. It shouldn’t have been too difficult because for the past 4 or 5 years we have gathered as a family to swap Christmas lists over a communal tea. Of course some of us find we have extensive ‘would like’ lists whilst others struggle past suggesting Next vouchers. From these lists we buy what we want and then inform everyone, except the recipient, to cross it off their lists to avoid duplicate purchases.

Armed with said list I thought I would have little difficulty making inroads into the chore but it proved more difficult than I had hoped. Gill and I like to be a little adventurous with our purchases, taking peoples requests and working around them to get something a bit quirky. As an example my nephew had asked for a hoodie, now I know my sister would like something smart from Next to fit the bill but I feel at 11 it’s about time he started to rebel a bit and what better way to do that than with a slightly more ‘dangerous’ hoodie. Perhaps something with “Satan says, Lock up your daughters” may be a bit too dangerous but I didn’t want to get him the safe, middle class option. Could I find anything, could I hell as like. I tried the skater shops, music stores, alternative clothing emporiums but nothing. I even tried John Lewis and Fenwick’s in a fit of desperation but the only dangerous thing there were the prices, £95 for a hoodie to fit an eleven year old!

I did manage to get a couple of things for Tony, my brother in law, and a couple of little bits and pieces for Gill, but that was it as far as presents were concerned. I ended spending much more on myself, hmm. I bought a thick, bum length, wintry type jacket to keep my poor kidneys warm, a long scarf and a couple of CD’s. On the couple of listens I’ve managed to fit in since getting them home I think I might just have hit on my top 2 CD’s of the year so far.

If it proves not to be my favourite of the year, though I think it will, Coheed & Cambria’s ‘Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV: Volume 1. From Fear Through The Eyes Of Madness’ has by far the best title by the proverbial mile. Its musical style is rather difficult to pin down, yes it’s predominantly Prog Rock but you also get plenty of touches of straight ahead Hard Rock, a splattering of West Coast lightness and I’ll be damned if they haven’t sampled the odd keyboard section from Hawkwind. Closest attempt at pigeon holing? How about Rush playing King Crimson or visa versa, that’s not quite right but it will have to do for now. What it is undeniably though is dark. Very, very dark, so dark I felt distinctly uncomfortable with it at times. It will take a couple more listens to get my head around it some more but no other CD has affected me quite as much this year.

On a much lighter note the other CD I purchased put a smile on my face and even had Gill laughing out loud. ‘Rock Swings’ by Paul Anka is just pure, light hearted bliss. He has taken some fairly well known and often cheesy rock classics from the past 25 years or so and given them the full, Las Vegas swing treatment. Favourites so far are Survivor’s ‘Eye of The Tiger’ and Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like teen Spirit’ which I can’t stand usually. The great thing about the album is that you don’t have to know the songs on it, although you will miss out on a couple of jaw dropping moments, because it stands on its own as a great collection of well produced, well written songs. Freed from their usual pigeon holes these songs are allowed to grow into something far more majestic than you could possibly imagine – brilliant!

Freedom(ish)

Hey hey, good news at last. My consultant phoned me yesterday with my latest results and told me that he feels happy to relax my house arrest somewhat. So, as long as I take things easy, I can now venture into town to do some shopping. This will please Gill because I think she was beginning to wonder when, or if, I was going to be able to sort out her Crimbo pressie. It also means I can pop down to the coast for a stroll, although I’ll still have to give the watering holes of Tynemouth’s Front Street a wide berth. Of course I plan to spend my first day of freedom in the house finishing some odds and ends I have been putting off. There just aint no pleasing some people.

It’s Showtime!

Back in the dim, dark, distant past i.e. the seventies UFO were a band seemingly always on the brink of breaking into rock music’s big time. They had a lot going for them, an insanely talented guitarist, a vocalist who didn’t feel the need to ape anyone else’s style, a showman bassist, rock steady drummer and a keyboardist/rhythm guitarist who could hold it all together. They even had managed to gain a foothold in the notoriously difficult American market. Like many others at the time however they failed to make that step up and fell apart in quite spectacular fashion. To make matters worse rather than giving things up as a bad job they continued through the years with various line-ups dragging their name through the mud. In all there must have been well over 30 different line-ups of UFO through the years.

The mid nineties saw something of a renaissance in UFO’s fortunes when the classic 70’s line-up were tempted to reform by the lure of rich Japanese fans throwing shed loads of money at them. Of course it couldn’t last and their insanely talented guitarist lived up to his insane tag and left the band mid tour on at least three occasions causing said tours to be cancelled. The other guys put up with this for about 10 years only because Michael Schenker, for it was he, owned 50% of the UFO name and the others couldn’t tour as UFO without him. They finally lost their patience and bought him out about 2 years ago replacing him with Vinnie Moore a much vaunted American with, importantly, no history of psychiatric problems. He joined the classic core of Phil Mogg (v), Pete Way (b) and Paul Raymond (k/rg), with new boy Jason “I’m Johns son you know” Bonham on drums.

This incarnation of UFO had been stable for about 18 months and complete a number of tours throughout Europe and the US before deciding to record a DVD on one of the German dates during this year’s spring tour. They chose Wilhelmshaven as the lucky venue and invited fans from across the globe to attend. Being the sad fan boy that I am I spent ages on the internet trying to work out how I could get over for the filming? However, I soon discovered that apparently it is the most difficult place in the world to travel to and wasn’t prepared to pay the several hundred pounds it would have set me back. I know, fair weather bloody fans, eh? I was, however, prepared to spend £15 on the resulting silver discs.

So what is it like I hear you ask? Well for a fan boy like me anything they put out would have its merits somewhere and it is a well put together package. But, oh I don’t know, it just doesn’t work for me. I see the pretty pictures and hear the lovely sounds but none of it really moves me. I want to be there smelling the sweat, feeling the crush up front with some 20 stone German breathing stale lager into my face. Perhaps that’s what it is supposed to do, make me wish I was there but I wanted something else, more immediate. I want some connection but the disc doesn’t give it to me. Look, it’s not a bad DVD, I would quite happily show it to someone as an example of what my favourite band were like and be quite proud of the lads. It has all the classic songs present and correct as well as 4 tracks off their latest CD to keep you happy…but…maybe my current health situation is giving me a different perspective on things and I’ll grow into enjoying it as things improve, we’ll see.

Oh, and by the way, in typical UFO fashion Jason Bonham has left the band since the DVD’s recording.

Brain Damage

I’m obviously feeling worse than I thought, or at least my brain is atrophying as I sit here at home. Yesterdays ECHO appointment turned out to be nothing of the sort, I had in fact not read the appointment card properly (i.e. at all) and the actual date of my scan is Wednesday the 16th of January. I guess I took one look at the word Wednesday at put 2 and 2 together to get 23,465,798 just the sort of thing that sometimes infuriates me about my own patients. Memo to self - be more tolerant of the poor souls in future, they’ve got a lot on their minds.

I guess I made the error because I expected everything to be planned in the near future and I imagine it will be something that the consultant speeds up when I see him on Monday. I also received 2 different appointment dates for another MRI scan today so I guess we’ll sort that out as well whilst we are at it. Truth be told I just want the whole thing sorted as soon as possible, yesterday preferably.

This morning was spent delivering my sick note to work and passing on some helpful hints to the girl who is covering one of my clinics at the RVI. It was nice to see everyone, well everyone who wasn’t off on the sick or away on holiday, which amounted to about a third of the unit. I then popped in to the ophthalmology department to get my eyes tested to make sure there has been no damage caused by the hypertension. I was given the all clear but was left with blurred vision caused by drugs which hyper-dilated my pupils so Gill was pressed into giving me a lift back to sunny Wallsend.

Tomorrow I plan to take things nice and easily, watch a couple of DVD’s and listen to some music. I managed to sneak a copy of UFO’s new live offering into the house yesterday so will have a good look at that once my eyes are back in focus and it’s about time I completed my annual ‘best of the year’ compilation to send down to Rob in Harrogate.

Just When You Think It Can't Get Any Worse...

Well after a metaphorical kick up the arse from Sid Smith today I’ve ventured back to blogland. My reasons for being away for so long are multitudinous and, frankly, rather lame but I did tell you all to expect this sort of thing in my first ever post.

What excuse do I feel like using then? Well let’s go for the health issue as it’s been the main focus in my life for the past 6 weeks or so. It all started with a headache I just couldn’t shift with any combination of preparatory medications and which felt as if someone was driving six inch nails though the temple of my voodoo effigy using a jackhammer. Being somewhat loathe to visit my GP I put up with this for 5 days before the sleep deprivation just became too much and I gave in.

As, I imagine, with most GP surgeries I was unable to make an appointment with my own GP at short notice and was given a slot to see someone I had never heard of never mind seen before. Don’t you just love the peace of mind the NHS doles out with its continuity of care policy? Anyway the GP gave me thorough going over and once I had convinced him that if I had been suffering from untreated meningitis for 5 days I might be dead by now so it would be safe to discount it he took my blood pressure. The look on his face as the reading of 210/105 came up was quite something and I have to say I’ve never come across one quite as high in all my time working in oncology. This spurred him into action and I was hurried out of the surgery with a prescription for some beta-blockers and an appointment for an ECG at North Tyneside General Hospital (Rake Lane) that afternoon.

I have only ever been to Rake Lane a couple of times before as a visitor and have never had the need to use public transport so I had no idea how to get there. Of course I didn’t admit this to the GP and so I wandered down to the Wallsend Metro bus exchange as I seemed to remember seeing busses heading up Rake Lane departing from there as I waited for my metro to work. I just got to the stop as a bus arrived and so I hopped on. 55 minutes later the bus eventually pulled up at the hospital after a wonderful magical mystery tour around the Hadrian Park housing estate and Cobalt Business Park, I guess I didn’t pick the express route. The ECG caused some concern to the staff who wouldn’t let me leave until both it and I had been examined by a medic from the coronary care unit. I wasn’t unduly worried as I have had a known heart murmur since birth and the quick glance I had of the ECG reading didn’t look like indicative of a heart attack to my admittedly untrained eye. A couple of hours and several blood tests later I was allowed to go home under the proviso I stayed off work and went back to see my GP ASAP.

So there we have it, at this point I had been cleared of any heart damage and my only problem was hypertension for which I was receiving medication. Of course that was 6 weeks ago and life has a way of complicating things just for the hell of it. To cut a very long story short and to maintain your will to live: I have been back to the GP surgery a further 3 times seeing a further 2 GP’s; my medication has been changed 4 times; I have been referred to a renal physician at Freeman Hospital and seen him twice; I have had a further referral to another renal physician and been her ‘guest’ on ward 4 at Freeman Hospital; I have had an ultrasound scan of my kidneys; I have had an MRI Scan of my aorta; and, finally (?), I have had enough blood taken to make several black puddings.

My current medical position is that I have suspected Fibro Muscular Hyperplasia of my renal arteries and a confirmed coarctation of the arch of my aorta. I am currently under ‘house arrest’ at home and am not allowed to go out without telling anyone where I am going and taking my mobile phone but preferably going everywhere accompanied. Oh, and by going out anywhere my consultant recommended the bottom of my street and back! I have a further appointment to see the consultant on Monday and ECHO scan this afternoon for which I have to make my way to the Freeman which is just a bit further than the bottom of the street, eh Mr Consultant? The likely course of action is to have some angioplasty on the renal arteries and surgery to remove the coarctation if they can’t stent it. All in all I don’t think I am going to get back to work this year, Gill and I have had to cancel our long weekend we had planned for December in Budapest and, yes, AND I've been told I can't drink alcohol at least until this is all sorted and maybe never again!!!!!!!!.

Not the world’s greatest excuse for ignoring the old blog here especially as I’ve been at home with access to the PC but as you can imagine I’ve had one or two things preying on my mind recently.