The Judge RANTS!
Date: 15/04/24
Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Wait...
That I am not domiciled - not even for tax purposes - in Happyland at the moment should be taken as read.
Following my visit to Broad Green at the beginning of February, I was hopeful that all of my outstanding 'issues' would be resolved in short order, giving time fully to recuperate before Spring kicked in.
After that...nothing.
Until March 18, when I got another call from the surgeons' PA. The conversation went something like this:
PA: I'm calling to give you the date for your procedure.
Me: The ablation?
PA: No, the valve.
Me (deciding to follow the thread for a moment): Ah! When?
PA: April the second.
Me: O....kay. What time do you want me there?
PA: Seven-thirty to eight.
Me: p.m.?
PA (rather short): No, a.m.
Me: Sorry, but there's no way I could get there for that time.
PA (shorter still): Well then, you'll have to come in for three p.m. the previous day.
(I realised afterwards that 'the previous day' was Easter Monday. Can you imagine trying to use public transport in Greater England on a bank holiday?)
Me: But the ablation has to be done first, and I've heard nothing about that at all.
PA (pausing): Oh. There's nothing about that in the notes.
Me: It has to be done first to get rid of that problem before the main procedure.
PA: Just a minute. I'll read the doctor's letter...(pause)...no, there's nothing about an ablation in there.
Me: Besides which, I have to have the teeth checked out first, and I haven't been able to get an appointment with my dentist until April the ninth.
PA: Oh...(pause)...I'll have to go back to the surgeons to see what they say.
And there ended the discussion.
Since then, silence.
And then last Tuesday came my checkup with the dentist. I knew things weren't going to go well, and that there would have to be two or three appointments after that to sort everything out. It turned out to be worse than that: in between lecturing me about my carelessness in the gnashers department (it had been over four years since my last visit), I was told that I would need four follow-up appointments. Such is the state of availability of dental treatment nowadays, the next appointment wouldn't be until the second half of June, and the final one wouldn't be until August 1. Only then would I be able to tell Cardiology that I was ready for my valve job.
So here I am, stuck. Stranded. Becalmed. And facing another summer where I won't be able to do very much, or make much in the way of plans for what I can do. The ablation - not being dentally-dependent - could take place at any point (and, knowing my luck, the hospital will attempt to give me a date which would clash with the dentist's), but will it?
In the meantime, I am - or, at least, I feel - limited in what I can do. In any given five-day period, it goes something like this: one day where I feel that I can really do things beyond the norm; two days where I'm capable of doing a fair bit; one day where I can do at least the bare minimum; and one day where even that feels beyond my powers, and am reduced to doing nothing but watching YouTube videos all day.
(My latest craze with that, by the way, is for clips of those huge crushing and shredding machines at work as they chew up and spit out plastic and metal waste up to the size of a small van. Of course, YT now thinks that that is all I want to see, and I may well end up having to delete the YT cookie to reset it, just like I had to a few months back when, because I had watched two videos on the subject, it decided that I only ever wanted to view clips of babies farting).
That this is all very dispiriting and enervating is, of course, a given, which means that even those activities which don't require much...erm....activity are in no small degree stymied by a distinct lack of 'go' and of an increasing level of kapok in my head. This is one of the reasons why there have been so few updates here this year (the other reason being that so much of what is going on in the world - down to and including outright genocide denial - is so far beyond analysis that one might as well seek to explain it by means of interpretative dance).
And so, with the small but noticeable increments of debility now beginning to make themselves apparent, this is where I find myself.
