HOME PAGE FOR COPD OR EMPHYSEMA PATIENT DIARY
ALTHOUGH JOHN DIED PEACEFULLY IN HIS SLEEP ON JUNE 10TH 2008, THIS WEBSITE HAS BEEN LEFT UNCHANGED. PLEASE VISIT THE MAIN WEBSITE AT EMPHYSEMA-COPD.CO.UK FOR DETAILS
Joan is my companion, friend and part-time carer. Without her my life would be miserable. The photograph was taken lin 2005 in our garden.
I want this site to be a companion site to my parent site www.emphysema-copd.co.uk and introduce some of my writings, photographs, interests and a diary of a daily slog against breathlessness and my disease - Emphysema(COPD).
This is now being updated as from FEBRUARY 2007 since I have more time than I did when I was engaged in establishing the main site.
There also appears to be a demand for a FORUM or discussion group for COPD. I am only a one man band so to speak so goodness knows how i will find the time for three sites. However the new site of patient & carer contacts will be set up in March 2007.
March 18 2006
Well I have to start somewhere so why not on a cloudless day with one of my few recent trips out along the seafront. Lovely, apart from the bitter wind which took my breath away as soon as we emerged from our sheltered patch facing the sun on a limp sea. It has been ghastly lately - the cold I mean - and I am cautious about exposing my body to it. Some people might say I was over-cautious but I know an exacerbation at this stage is to be avoided. I saw my GP last Tuesday and he said "so you managed it then, you got through the winter without falling ill." I collapsed on his desk with a touch of breathlessness, and alarm as he shook my hand. I looked wildly round for a sink to wash my hands!!! Seriously though I always offer my hand to everybody I like or appreciate as a mark of respect, but I have to remember to not touch my face and wash my hands as soon as I can afterwards. He took my blood pressure that with all the exertion and the heat in the surgery had surged past the 160 mark. I reassured him that he had nothing to worry about since I took mine twice a week with a very expensive electronic machine and that normally it was well below 140/82. And then I remembered that the last time I had seen him we had argued over the merits of these over the pump up kind that GPs have been addicted to for over a century.
Well my health tests over, we moved on to normal NHS matters from a GP point of view. Naturally he was happy to see my smiling face in the paper, and the COPD weather reports which he naturally regarded as pretty useless and a waste of resources. I'm not entirely convinced about their usefulness either but.....His view of my lovely little seaside town was that it was a deprived area. I naturally protested that my own property price hardly refected that kind of status. But he was referring to the housing estate, the low incomes, the lack of jobs, the elderly and the sick. And the latter two meant me. Coming back to health, he told me that as a patient I was a "model of perfection" - my blood pressure must have increased somewhat as I reached for my Bricanyl. "Oh I wouldn't say that" I protested, considering the vast cost of my "at home pharmacy", my addiction to sleeping pills, bottles of oxygen cluttering up the hallway, miles of plastic tubing caught up in bannisters and boxes of beer in the garage. And all because I smoked myself into this condition.
I steered him gently, - you remember folks www.emphysema-copd.co.uk. He was pretty pessimistic about COPD and lung cancer patients and just about everybody who was obese or suffering from Long Term Chronic Conditions. Apparently they came to him asking for solutions, as if it was somehow his fault if he couldn't supply them. Increasingly it seems patients will not accept responsibility for their own conditions. The majority of his patients with COPD or other lung conditions continue to smoke, do no exercise, fail to take their medications correctly, and obese patients do not eat less - do I need to go on. By this time I was feeling weak and feeble and somehow crawled out of the surgery mounted my mobile scooter and headed for the pub. The perfect patient collapsed into a pint of bitter.
March 28 2006
I've been pretty busy lately doing very little at all. I've been trying to finish the page on PROGNOSIS on my my other site and keep putting it off! I guess I don't like to face the future when its depressing or at least if I make it so. Still I'm glad I have and faced my demons and my page is nearly complete. Other than that the cold weather has now given way to warmth and rain and so I still haven't been able to get out much. Last Saturday I managed a quick dash on my mobile scooter to the shops and seafront between the showers.
I spent some of this afternoon in our Co-op Supermarket. Many of the shoppers were grossly overstated or to be politically correct obese. However because it was Saturday there was a sprinkling of lovely and mostly innocent underdressed teenagers, which I tried not to notice as I examined any tins that I came across. My chariot – I must think of a name – perhaps the Kaiser or Abundantia or Hilaritus, yes Hilaritus – and this because I have became a serious collector of encrusted Roman coins last summer, at least for two weeks. No - for most people in the Co-op this afternoon they probably only thought that it was bigger than Waitrose. But for me the word Co-op has resonance. The world-wide Movement, the Co-op has its roots in the early part of the nineteenth century when the industrial revolution resulted in exploitation and misery for many working people. Often people had no choice but to buy goods from unscrupulous local shopkeepers who had a monopoly of trade. These private traders adulterated products, putting chalk in flour, and reaped large profits.
Whereas now, people buy from large supermarkets, because they lack choice so that unscrupulous managers who have a monopoly of trade and soak our foodstuffs with preservatives, so that it takes longer for us to rot should we choose to be buried like me.
However having said that, the original co-op shop that is acknowledged as the place where the Movement began, was opened by 28 workers on Toad Lane in Rochdale, Lancashire in 1844. The founders are known as the Rochdale Pioneers, selling, basic items such as flour, butter, tea and candles, but it was how they ran the business that made them different - quality products at affordable prices with customers having a true stake in the honest and down to earth business. Quite I thought rummaging through some tubs of taramosalata and humous and trying not to notice the frightfully flat stomach of a near naked teenage shopper. I must be extremely old and ill that I have to dress up in numerous layers of clothing, a hat, gloves and a scarf round my neck, when the temperatures are above zero.
By now I had arrived at the egg department with precisely shaped eggy eggs from enslaved chicken which I could hear shrieking along with the long dead 28 workers on Toad Lane, Rochdale.
I had to negotiate a number of steps on leaving the Co-Op with two heavy bags of shopping. From an easy walk through the shelves, the expedition now turned nasty and I was once again fighting for breath in the ‘death zone’ – a term fondly applied by climbers to altitudes above 8ooom. And all the grotesque and underdressed persons in the world became one grey blur as I sunk into Hilaritus now wet through in the spring rain. And I can tell you the view of the car park was nothing at all as impressive from Everest.
Still I was soon motoring along at a pre-ww2 speed with Joan charging ahead acting as guide and mentor. Although her constant waving and encouragement did not take into account that Hilaritus and I had to contend with traffic, and a host of baby contraptions and elderly go-karts – I say this unkindly since Hilaritus is a superior machine all together. It even has a mahogany reproduction dashboard and big wheels that are I think manlier.
And here I am on the promenade.
Shortly after this it rained and rained!
Other than that I have returned to Ebay to purchase more mountaineering books, especially those that deal with Everest and the Death Zone. When I read about the mountain climber's plunging oxygen levels, pneumonia, high altitude sickeness, and labouring steps I am at home. But of course I used to climb lesser mountains myself when I was fit and chain smoking.
Most of the climbers I admired are dead now but I now labour on at sea level!
As you probably know by now I am indebted to 1&1 for making it easy and relatively inexpensive to run these two sites but rather than clutter up these pages with banners I will provide a direct link to their web site to encourage you to make your own web site
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