Lockdown Diary - Friday 26th February 2021

Up especially early for a Friday:  our cleaner is coming today and, as always on a Friday, the first carer of the day is early too.  When the carer arrives, with the cleaner hot on her heels, I'm up, dressed and ready.  I show the carer my latest work of art whilst she is getting my wife's meds done. We share a joke and she gets on with setting the PEG feed pump up and giving meds.

I seem to have returned to a lousy sleep pattern this past couple of weeks.  I'm really not sleeping well, waking often with much on my mind. This isn't helped by the twins both being up all fucking night chirpsing - I'm constantly woken by chatter and once I'm hearing it, it's hard to get back to sleep, especially given my mind is thrashing too. More drugs please!

I'm off to Woodley for 8 a.m., having already breakfasted,  so that I can post something early, pick up meds from the pharmacy for me and my wife, go to the GP surgery to pick up a letter for a consultant, grab some cleaning stuff the cleaner needs and also - phew! - grab a coffee for me.

Back before 9 a.m. in time to start work.  I'm due to give a presentation at 10 for an hour so I get psyched for that.

From 10 onwards its a stream of back-to-back calls, somehow at 11 a.m. I'm meant to be in three different meetings for an hour! Decisions, decisions, decisions!

It's looking sunny out but I am stuck in staring at a screen - either attending meetings or writing and reviewing stuff.  I'll be glad when the day is over, though equally I know there's lots I won't have finished.

Post-vaccination yesterday, my wife has been very tired, which I guess means her immune response has kicked in.  The combination of the body's immune response and MS generally seems to have this outcome - total fatigue and exhaustion.  I guess all in all this response is much milder than it could have been, so pretty good.

With the help of the letter I've picked up from my GPs I am able to book a slot with a consultant about my hernia for the following Friday. I hope the wait for surgery isn't going to be too long after that, but who knows.

Back to work!

Son #2 is still doing his training course, notwithstanding the fact he's not going to bed until around 7 or 8 a.m. then getting up for the course by 2 p.m., which means son #3 and I are on dinner duty again.  To be fair I chose easy meals for the rest of the week because I knew we'd be doing most of it and probably getting heartily sick of it too.  

Dinner, Frankie Boyle, sleep (at least to start with)

Today's choon takes us back to 1972 and Annette Peacock's experimental and ground-breaking album 'I'm the One'. From it this is 'Pony'.  Some of her ideas, especially feeding her voice through electronics, were way ahead of time. Check the album out, it's really special.


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