Monday, October 16, 2006

Test matching

Still waiting for my test results. More pain and fever. Angie dragged me off to my GP last Wednesday (?) who prescribed huge doses of painkillers and antibiotics. The fever finally began to subside yesterday, but the pain is still there. Now it has migrated round to my back as well and another point has blossomed which feels exactly like appendicitis should. What the hell is going on down there?

My head is foggy and I can’t concentrate properly. About all I’m managing is this stream of consciousness stuff for my blog. The day job has had to go by the by, and no work at all on any of the projects I should be devoting time and energy to.

My Doctor has told me to keep on with the pills and talk to him on Thursday if I’m not feeling much better. If I can remember. I’m having to rely on my mobile phone and bits of notepaper for a memory at the moment. A highly unsatisfactory state of affairs, even if I seem to be writing lucidly enough.

How do I feel? Irritated and tetchy. Frustrated at my inability to think straight for more than thirty seconds at a stretch. In the words of the prophet, “It’s just one damned thing after another.” I’ll be glad when this episode is all over.

Saturday, October 07, 2006

The second test…..

Ended in a draw, as they say in cricketing circles. On Thursday I was purged and emptied until I was passing purer water than I was drinking from front and back. More regular than a good bus service, every half hour. It was four o’clock on Friday morning when I finally got a couple of hours sleep down on the front room floor.

Angie propped me up while we were sitting waiting for the tests with some women who were obviously veterans of the procedure. They were laughing and joking about an awful daytime TV show with ‘Celebrities’ visiting people in hospital. I can think of no worse fate than some crummy actor, hamming it up for the camera doing the ‘luvvy’ thing at me before buggering off. Personally, I’d be screaming for security before they got anywhere close. The consensus was to switch it over to where Paul Schofield and Ferne Britton were doing their innocuous chat and stuff morning show. Not that such programmes are much better, but at least you don’t have to put up with some non entity squealing pruriently for the camera at a rather unpleasant medical procedure.

The Colonoscopy went okay, as far as these things do, although watching a camera travelling up your large bowel is quite a psychologically unsettling experience. The inner surface of the large bowel has the colour and texture of worms skin, at least to my eyes. What with the sedatives I couldn’t feel a thing, and to be honest things were a bit foggy around the edges. As with all this type of memory, the best I can manage is flash cut sequences like lots of five second mpeg files jumbled together. I have problems keeping them in sequence as my mental referencing system shuttles back and forth faster than I can think.

Considering some of the things I’ve done to my digestive system during my often wayward life (Heavy duty Curries, other junk food, massive alcoholic self abuse) everything looked in remarkably good order to me. No polyps, nasty suspicious lumps or anything. However, the Consultant took five biopsies to look for ‘micro’ something or other which he said could mimic the symptoms I’ve been experiencing.
I
t could of course be that my symptoms just mimic bowel problems. I’ll just have to wait for the next test. Whatever that turns out to be.