Dom Davis (The Blog)

The weather has, of late, been unseasonably nice; something that The Zozo and I have been taking full advantage off. On Sunday we decided to head out for a swim so I showered, donned my swimming shorts and my jeans that had been strewn on the floor the night before. 5 minutes later and we’re downstairs just about ready to go.

Next thing I know there is a sharp scratch on my thigh. Initially I thought I had something sharp in my jeans that had just jabbed me… but the pain was getting worse, on second thoughts have I just been bitten by something? Nope… pain still getting worse… I’ve been stung!

Trousers off and round the ankles I make an indignities escape into the kitchen to find out what manner of beastie has attacked me. Closer inspection revealed nothing on my leg and nothing obvious on my trousers, however, by this point The Zozo has found the culprit, a wasp who was now languishing in the living room.

Initial thoughts (or in my case hysterically screamed orders) were to get the can of Raid and empty it on the little fucker, you know, just so it knew it was dead. This was hampered by not actually being able to find the Raid and by the fact that The Zozo doesn’t like unloading that much pesticide near her spiders or Pinky.

The Zozos second plan of attack was the use of physical violence applied by the favoured weapon of school children in changing rooms across the globe: the damp, twisted and flicked towel. *bam* Direct hit, guts oozing from the now very dead wasp.

My leg still itches from the attack but I draw comfort from the fact that it’s cold outside today. And it’s going to get colder. The wasps are dying. Hopefully slowly and painfully!

I work in an old converted flax mill on the top floor. It’s an open plan office which has some of the original features of the mill, including the roof beams.

Under the eaves, where my desk is situated the beams are an occupational hazard as they come down to head whacking height. Normally at least one person will bang their heads every month and I’ve had my fair share of knocks. Yesterday, however, I didn’t so much as bang my head as clobber it. I was talking to someone so wasn’t looking as I moved to walk away. I was about to head home so I was moving at a fair pace when *BAM*, I hit myself round the head with several thousand tons of building via the medium of a roof beam.

The side of my head took the brunt of the blow and it was all I could do to stand there and just keep blinking. Still, I didn’t pass out or throw up so I figured I was fine, if a little stunned, so I resumed my journey home, albeit with a raging headache.

Rather oddly both sides of my head were tender this morning when I washed my hair. I also have a slight bump on my head to remind me to take care when walking under the eaves. I suspect I’ll be extra careful for the next few months and it’ll be a while before I next clonk my head.

Yesterdays slushy didn’t happen unfortunately due to a lack of sufficiently sugary drink to apply to the machine. I also have gout in my knee which is a tad sore and difficult to walk on.

Now I’m a great believer in modern medicine and will happily throw great handfuls of pills down my throat if it will work. That said I’m not adverse to more traditional treatments to supplement this. For example, cherry juice is supposed to be very good for you when you have gout. It’s also high in sugar if you don’t get the reduced sugar stuff I normally get.

Yup, you can see where we’re going here can’t you? Cherry slushy to wash down a handful of pills. It’s certainly one way to turn a problem into a resolution start point.

That said, having a knee that I can barely walk on is problematic at best, not least due to the fact I’m supposed to be going clubbing this weekend. I shall be guzzling loads of water over the next 24 hours but if it hasn’t improved by tomorrow it may be a trip to the doctors for a slightly more permanent solution that a never ending prescription for NSAIDs to manage the pain and swelling. Hopefully this will be another set of pills to manage the root cause rather than a “no really, change your diet” answer otherwise meal times could become distinctly dull. At least I’ll have slushy to wash everything down with

* Can you see what I did there?

The gym I attend isn’t the cheapest in the world. It’s not the biggest, or the best equipped either. What it is, though, is quiet and the staff are friendly. Quite often I’ll have the entire gym and pool to myself. It also seems that they take forever to make the membership cards, but that seems to have worked in my favour. I renewed my membership in November, went regularly until mid December and then, for one reason or another, haven’t been back until today. At some point during that hiatus they finally sorted my membership card and, because it had been noticed I hadn’t been for a while, added a month onto the membership for free. Which was nice.

The gout does unfortunately mean I’m just in the pool at the moment, but I made up for it by doing 60 laps in 3 tranches of 20 with a session in the sauna in between each. I should probably point out that the pool is only 18m long so it’s not quite as impressive as it sounds but, assuming I don’t cease up overnight, I plan on going again tomorrow.

So I worked from home today so I could go to the doctors and get some better pills for my gout. Since this was my second visit with the complaint I was given some pills to treat the symptoms (and the pain), the ability to renew the prescription over the web and a diet sheet. This is not the first diet sheet I’ve had. I’ve also had diet sheets on limiting Oxalate (Oxalic Acid) and monitoring my calcium intake. This new diet sheet is to with purine and limiting the intake of that.

Looking at all the foods that should be avoided listed on the all the diet sheets I have worked out that I am now limited to a single species of Lichen and water. My view is ‘sod that’. Medical science has provided me with the ability to stop the symptoms via the consumption of pills so rather than reducing the diet even further I shall simply change the diet to include these pills

It’s always amused me that people find basic PC maintenance and assembly difficult.  Plugging the bits in? Look at the connector, find a hole with the same shape (and pin count if there are pins), plug it in. Simples If you need a screwdriver then you probably want to be a little confident in what you’re doing, but, provided you take not of what came from where it’s still fairly straight forward and, although the cables may have funny connectors, the game of match shapes to find out where it goes still holds once you get inside the case. If you need specialist screwdrivers then you probably shouldn’t proceed unless you know what you’re doing.

All PC hardware comes with Magic Blue Smoke. If the Magic Blue Smoke escapes then it’s game over for, at the very least, that component and quite possibly for the entire computer.

Finally some bits spin. A whirring noise is good and normal. A rattling noise indicates forthcoming failure (bearings have gone), grinding noises are generally never good.

Even laptops can be handled with these basic rules, the only difference is you’re likely to hit specialist screws pretty quickly and some of the bits can be really fiddly to get back in so proceed with caution.

Once you get more familiar with the hardware you will be able to tell, sometimes by sound alone, what kind of repair you’re looking at. Sounds like a Lancaster Bomber taking off? Not a huge problem, couple of £10 fans to replace the ones whose bearings are on the way out and you’re as good as gold. Rattling, grinding noise when you pop a CD into the drive? Going to need a new drive. Can we guess which one I’ve got? Go on, guess.

Yup, popped a CD into my laptop yesterday and it made a hideous noise, the kind of sound that is only really made when the finely calibrated components are out of whack and a large bit of spinning plastic is ramming into the drive at God knows how many RPM. This is what is known in the business as ‘an expensive noise’. Thankfully the machine should still be under warranty, but it will mean dropping it off and leaving it at the Apple store for a period of time. I might see if they can fix it while I’m away, drop it off Friday on my way home and collect it two weeks later on Monday when I get back.

However many years ago it was I last saw my urologist he told me I had a small kidney stone on the right hand side. It wasn’t doing much so he suggested we leave it and see what happened. There are two ways this stone can leave my body: naturally and artificially. Passing a stone smarts a little and it’s the kind of thing you notice. I’ve not passed the stone. lithotripsy, ureteroscopy and other artificial methods of getting rid of stones are also not the kind of thing that would go unnoticed so I think we can safely say I still have a stone.

These days I no longer have the fancy health insurance with the Harley Street urologists and am dependent on the NHS who, while great at scooping you up off the floor and getting you going again, can be a bit slow for non urgent things. If we remember I rocked up to A&E on valentines day complaining of a kidney stone. They x-rayed me, gave me some nice painkillers (although not the really nice ones) and sent me home with the message that they’d be in touch.

A few months later I got a letter saying I’d been referred to a consultant and that they wanted to give me a CT scan. CT scans are much more fun than X-Rays (and infinitely more fun than IVUs which are basically a legal form of diagnostic torture) so that was cool. Then I had to go speak to the consultant (pitch up to outpatients, wait for over an hour) to be told the CT was inconclusive and they wanted to do another CT. Could have been done by letter, but at least I was being processed. CT the second was a few weeks ago.

Today I got a letter from my consultant. Turns out I have a kidney stone. It’s not moved since the first CT and they’d like to remove it. Apparently they are now able to see the kidney stone on my original X-Ray “now that they know what they’re looking for”. Clue was in the “I have a kidney stone in my right hand side”, but there you go, at least they found this one (they’re now 2 for 5).

I’m now on a waiting list for a rather fun little procedure where they shove a laser up your… well, lets just say they put you to sleep and when you wake up there’s no stone and it hurts like hell to pee. This is an overnight job which will then involve a couple of days recovery. Why am I telling you all this? Well basically I will require VAST amounts of sympathy during the recovery time and I want you all to be prepared.

The one downside of my interview suit is that the shoes are phenomenally uncomfortable. They are a pair of stiff leather Churches and the right hand shoe has developed a crease which means that with every step my big toe has a fold of hard leather rammed into it. Normally it’s uncomfortable for a day or two, but gets better. This time the pain seemed to get worse… but not every day.

Worried I may have done something bad to my foot I went to see the nurse at the doctors surgery who first suggested hairline fracture, but then went on to conclude it was tendinitis once I’d pointed out the pain was not everywhere she thought it was. The advice was to rest the foot and it should get better over a couple of weeks. And get better it did, slowly, although on days where I walked further it hurt a bit more.

Last night, however, it was worse than it had ever been, to the point where I was awake for several hours despite copious amounts of fairly potent pain killers. Noting that this was my last weekday before I became gainfully employed, and therefore the last day I could easily do anything about it, I toddled off to the local minor injuries unit. My thinking was that since they had an x-ray there if it needed to be x-rayed it wouldn’t take too long.

The bod there poked and prodded, asked questions, poked some more and then decided that he was fairly sure it wasn’t a stress fracture given I was too fit and healthy and I’d not put undue stress on it, just worn some bloody uncomfortable shoes. He then went on to explain how there was an outside chance that it could be gout, a minuscule chance it could be arthritis related, and a possibility that it could be related to my kidneys being inflamed and not filtering uric acid properly. He went on to tell me that while an x-ray would rule out (or confirm) a stress fracture the chances of it being that were too low to really warrant doing one so he probably wouldn’t and, on reflection, it’s probably best if I did gentle exercise, elevated the leg when resting, applied ice if needed and avoided anything like Deep Heat…

At this point I needed to interject to find out just exactly why one would avoid Deep Heat. Apparently, I was told, it is entirely the wrong thing for an inflammation injury such as this and would simply make it worse. It was at this point I realised what had happened. The day before doing to the doctors, and yesterday, I’d gone to bed with the foot being sore, so I’d applied Deep Heat thinking it would help. Last night I applied masses of the stuff. Instead of making it better I’d just made things worse, it was just tendinitis and perhaps, if I laid off the Deep Heat, it would get better by itself. Whoops :S

This morning I woke up with a slight twinge in my side. Nothing unusual in that. These days I wake up with all kinds of aches and twinges, but todays twinge didn’t go away. Instead it decided to get steadily worse until, at about 8am, I decided enough was enough and I was going to fight back with some of the more potent pain killers in our medicine cabinet. Unfortunately these take time to kick in and I ran out of the quick fix tactical nuclear pain killers some time ago so things started to get even more painful.

After a few minutes walking round the house in a fashion similar to the oh-my-god-I-need-the-loo-but-someone-is-in-the-bathroom thing the people do when they don’t think anyone else is looking [or is that just me?] I decided I’d better pack a bag with a few bits in it just in case this wasn’t going to get better by itself. After all, I know this pain and the conclusion is, more often than not, A&E.

After having packed my bag¹ things were getting to be really quite bad and it was making me cry so I called in reinforcements to take me somewhere with better pharmacological supplies than I have. Unfortunately, en-route we found out that the local drop in places wouldn’t take me and that I was going to have to go to A&E (see, told you). Joy.

1 hour later and I’m being dressed in one of those ever so fetching gowns with a nurse shoving a cannula² in my arm and another nurse doing the blood pressure and temperature thing. Of course, by this time the pain was easing and I’m beginning to think that maybe I should have just ridden it out and not bothered everyone.

6 hours after that and I’ve been X-rayed, pumped full of contrast, X-rayed again several times, peed into tubes and pots, had blood taken and told a number of people that I woke up this morning and I started hurting in the same way I hurt the previous God knows how many times I’ve had kidney stones.

Upshot of it all is they can’t see a stone (although that’s not to say there isn’t one there), they can see inflamation, there is blood in my urine and they’ve given the the pharmacological items I need to stop it hurting should it start again³). Although this morning I was in very real pain time has dulled the memory of the pain and I am left thinking perhaps it was all a storm in a teacup :s Still, for places to take your fiancée on valentines day A&E has to be up there on the list

¹ Clean underwear, clean tshirts, clean socks, laptop, charger for laptop, charger for iPhone, headphones – no toothbrush or toothpaste :S

² You know, the things they jab in your arm with the 18foot metal spikes that stick into your veins and will rip your arm open causing you to bleed to death if you so much as think about looking at it in the wrong way just so they can take blood and pump you full of contrast easily.

³ Unfortunately none of it opiate or synthetic opiate based but I they’re moving away from that these days and at the end of the day if it stops the owie I’m happy.