From Twitter 10-02-2009

• 15:13:45: afternoon all. just back from a clinic visit where I met Nurse Hattie Jacques with a mitteleuropeanische accent...very traumatic.
  
• 15:14:49: @cemab4y congrats. hope it's good.
  
• 16:51:24: Believe me, beloved Chicagoans, losing the 2016 Olympics will be seen as the best move you could make. I'm in London dreading 2012.
  
• 17:01:21: RT @kyriabeingbanal I saw a porn DVD called Chloroformed and Ready. You know your'e a loser when even your jackoff material needs roofies.
  
• 20:03:11: #followfriday of course, @GaySkyHooker is always a good read. @kalandaka for squirrel-lovers, and @therealgokwan for outrageous flair.
  
• 20:06:05: @urbanbohemian i always find it therapeutic to take a jar of coins and a pile of wrappers and count the former to place in the latter...
  
• 20:15:50: @GaySkyHooker reading your tweets are a bright spot in an otherwise grey London day...always!
  
• 20:20:32: i haven't turned on the TV in two weeks. Do you think I ought to try it now to see if it still works??
  
• 20:35:23: @therealgokwan as long as you had your towel on what's shameful about it...
  
• 23:29:37: @MrPandaBehr i have my netbook by my TV chair and if I need to surf while watching TV I do...
  
• 23:37:55: @GaySkyHooker i don't suppose a tight t-shirt would be enough to camouflage?
  

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

Happy Birthday, legalmoose

...and many happy returns of the day.

Yesterday

As most of you will be aware, I'm a diabetic and constantly have to go to the quack for this checkup or that checkup. For my foot I go to Kings College Hospital Diabetic Foot Clinic. For diabetes itself, I am currently attending the Diabetic Clinic at St. Thomas's Hospital. I go to my own GP for prescriptions and anything other than diabetes.

A couple of months ago I got a letter saying that I had an appointment with the lipid nurse at the Diabetic Clinic at St. Thomas's. OK, no problem. That's all the letter said. No instructions about what to bring (urine sample, perhaps) nor restrictions on whether I could eat before the appointment.

The rest of the background to this is that, while taking simvastatin my cholesterol has been normal to low (for a diabetic) and my ratio of good to bad cholesterol has also been very good. So seeing the lipid nurse or doctor isn't top-of-mind for me.

Yesterday I turned up at St. Thomas's at around 11:05 am, saw the receptionist, then went to wait. The nurse's assistant came out and took my blood pressure (127 /71!) and weight (not so good). To the waiting room again, where a few minutes later the lipid nurse emerged and called my name. Into her office we went. She is from a middle European country and had the accent to match.

She started by asking a few questions which others had asked me before in the clinic, and the answers to which were on her computer. Then she said, "You've been fasting, haven't you?" I said, "No, I haven't." "Why not?" "The letter I got didn't request me to fast and the time of the appointment (11:30am) wasn't conducive to fasting, anyway."

She looked at me: "You should have known when you made the appointment that you needed to fast." "Hold on," I said, "First, I didn't make the appointment—the clinic made it. Second, I'm diabetic, on insulin at night, so morning fasting could be dangerous for me." She was wearing my last nerve very thin indeed. She then ordered me to fast whenever I come to the lipid doctor or nurse.

Then she came to my record and asked me whether I had any family. I mentioned that I was married in a civil partnership. She said, "There's nothing here to allow for a civil partnership. I'll put you down as 'Cohabiting'." I replied, "No you won't! Civil partnership is equivalent to marriage, so you will put me down as married." Nerve is now even thinner.

She then said, "Do you have brothers and sisters?" I replied, "Yes, one of each." "We must make sure they know that they are at risk for diabetes and hypertension genetically." I looked at her and, as calmly as I could, said, "My brother had a heart attack at the very same age I did, with angioplasty and a stent, just as I had. He was at the same time diagnosed with diabetes. I think he knows already. My sister is well aware of my brother's and my situations, so I'm certain she knows of her own risk as well. In any case, they both live in America so the NHS won't be taking care of them anytime soon."

She then proceeded to lecture me on the evils of bariatric surgery, telling me about the grim side effects and promoting the virtues of simply eating less and exercising more. I had really had enough, and told her that I had been lectured like this for the last 50 years or so, and none of it was helpful enough to help me to lose weight. I know all this. What I need is help to lose weight, and bariatric surgery is my last hope of outside help bar wiring my teeth shut; it has also been shown that certain types of bariatric surgery assist in fighting off insulin resistance in your body, even before weight loss has begun.

She ended the appointment by giving me a ticket to have blood drawn for lipid testing, saying that the fact that I hadn't fasted didn't matter, really. Some other tests would be run and when she got the results she would send them along to me. I told her: "I already get enough bumpf from the NHS—please don't send me the results unless I need to follow up on them in some way or other. She countered: "We like to keep our patients involved in their treatment." I had to be firm: "Let's save the NHS some money and not send results unless something or other needs to be done, please. Thank you." Reluctantly, she agreed.

Those who are familiar with the "Carry On..." movies will remember the Matron, Hattie Jacques, who was a blunt, no-nonsense head nurse in many of the films. The Lipid Nurse reminded me of the Matron, so sure of what she knew and imposing it on everyone else in the hospital. It goes to show you that a good "bedside manner" is vital when doctors or nurses are dealing with patients; how much brighter and useful would this appointment have been if the Lipid Nurse's manner had been helpful instead of confrontational.

I emerged, had my blood taken by a lovely nurse (all the nursing staff who do the routine vital signs in the Diabetic Clinic are a joy, especially the dishy young man who was also in the Cardiac Intensive Care unit when I was recovering from my heart attack) and then marched back to the bus for the trip home and to lunch in the church Drop-In. I was not best pleased.

Today, even better

It was Saturday, and I awoke with some eye irritation, probably from a piece of the hard crust that forms in the corner of your eye when you're asleep. This is always annoying, and made me feel pretty awful. Blood sugar was good this morning, though, and thus I had an interesting day.

I decided that I needed to clean some of the pots and pans that had been accumulating grease deposits for a while, so off to the DIY store at the Elephant I went. Bought two boxes of Brillo, two different types of pot cleaner, and some caustic soda for the upstairs bathroom (hair gets down in the trap and there you have it…).

I cleaned the enamel casserole pot first. It had lots of brown gunk on the bottom, burned on. The pot cleaner (kind of a paste, applied with a web cloth) seems to have softened the gunk—then the Brillo pad and a little elbow grease removed it. I was amazed. It's still a bit the worse for wear, but it's clean. I followed that with a shine on our Moka espresso pot, and that cleaned up too. It is amazing how accomplished doing this kind of thing makes you feel.

I kvetched to my friend Fraffie Welch in Marblehead about the awful Tesco corned-beef hash I had a few days ago after reading her column in the Marblehead Reporter. She replied saying that Prudence hash is the best canned hash around. Unfortunately, this isn't available here in the UK and I don't think it would be a good idea to get another appetite that can only be satisfied by hauling cans back from the US. So, I made my own.

Sliced some raw potatoes and parboiled until they were nearly done. Sautéed onions in my mother's black cast-iron frying pan, then drained the potatoes, cut them up some more, and dumped them in to fry along with the onions. Took two cans of corned beef (Yes, I know—I should have used fresh corned beef but you can't get it here, at least not in the places I shop), wondered yet again why these cans have a key rather than just letting us open them normally (perhaps it's the squareness of the cans), then had to disentangle the first key from the can lid because the second can was missing its key, and finally got them both open and the contents mashed up and sliced a bit. Into the frying pan it went, and I fried it until it was heated through.

Tesco's hash was something that looked like what I used to fill my diaper with, studded with large cubes of barely cooked potato. My hash, while it was not perfect, had some texture and flavour. I made myself a salad, poured a glass of Diet Bitter Lemon, and voilà!



Couldn't finish all the hash, so into the fridge it went for tomorrow's dinner. HWMBO will be back Monday morning, thank goodness! Back to normal.

Of course, while I was making my dinner, others were catching and eating theirs. Yesterday I went into the back garden to discard some vegetable garbage on my compost heap, such as it is. I was startled to see a large spider web above the heap, with a very large spider waiting for its dinner smack in the centre. I'm kind of an arachnophobe, so I was a bit unnerved, but discarded my garbage and went back inside.

Today, of course, there were potato and onion peelings to go onto the heap, but when I took them out I saw that the spider, too, was eating its dinner. A bee was caught in the web, and the spider was coming and going, eating a bit and then moving around a bit. Perhaps it had already injected its venom to liquify the bee's innards, for easier digestion.



Does anyone else think of The Fly when they see this picture? I know I did. I hope the bee was already dead by then.

In Masonic symbolism, a beehive symbolises the industry that we should all show in our public and private lives. I wonder if a spider in her web is even more symbolic of the effort to which we should strive each day. I feel accomplished today, like a bee but also like the spider. I am glad that I don't have to capture my dinner, kill it, and then liquify its innards in order to eat it. The spider, were it to know about our lives, would probably be quite happy not to have to run to Tesco's every time it was hungry, be behind one of these people who makes the clerk pick change out of his hand to pay for his shopping, be in front of a guy who had obviously been inside his house for months smoking every waking minute and exhaling into his clothing, and being served by a guy who was suffering from too much work and too many boneheaded customers—thus making me the perfect person at whom to snap when it was time to snap.

I wonder if the spider has to clean off its web when its bee dinner is finished, to make the web ready for breakfast.