Category: Personal

Game Changer – Lung CT Scan

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

It is a nice sunny day and before lunch you download the CT scan results from yesterday. There is no commentary.

You open them up in a data viewer and you see an anomaly.

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You do not need to work for SpaceX, NASA or ESA, in the rocket propulsion department, to note that something is wrong here.

You can see that the anomaly presses into the lungs on the left hand centre side of the image.

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And that the joins with the ribs are also a bit off having downloaded a free trial of a medical data visualiser.

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Quickly you come to the conclusion that whatever it is/was you thought you might have been doing is now wrong.

The game has changed.

In my crystal ball I see more medical appointments, scans and probably a biopsy…

The Beep-Beep Toad – Alytes Obstetricans

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Over the last few weeks, we have been playing a nocturnal game called “what is that sound?”. Around 11 pm when all else is quiet and dark we hear a quasi-electronic sounding beep spaced at ~4 second intervals.

It gets so that you wait for the next beep!

It is tad irritating when you are nodding off.

So, I have variously stopped the voltage getting to the external lights, the supply voltage to the LNB detector on the satellite dish, and the electrical volets. None of which made any difference. The beep-beep is not here during the day. Only at night. Electrical causes are ruled out.

Last night it sounded like it was coming from the rose garden. I went out to explore wondering if I would discover some hidden electronic device. No. It went quiet when I approached.

Having spent time in Zambia and Queensland I am more accustomed to weird frog noises.

A Google search this morning revealed The Common Midwife Toad!!

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This now adds to our wildlife tally with the two fire salamanders in the basement {vide sanitaire}. The slow worms are due to start leaving hibernation soon. Then we will have the grass snakes, some of which swim on the pond.

I don’t know if knowing it is a toad will make it easier to sleep. There is no electronic catastrophe pending.

We shall see….

Summer Job and Patent Decision

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I saw a summer job advertised for someone to help do tours of the local distillery. They wanted a trilingual person for two months over summer. Seems a bit of an ask…They are probably not all that common.

I have said hi and that I am interested. The demographic who might visit a distillery are probably not rabid smart ‘phone users or teeny gamers. There may even be the odd grey hair. Having said that, I am probably compatible. I have offered to help with the “franglais” translation into English for the web site. I could be DR X who gives the tour.

I’ll not hold my breath for a reply.

The quantum optics patent comes up for renewal in May. I have to decide if it is worth another ~£150 to keep it live. I could simply let it expire, fadeaway. I can’t really see a way of taking it forward to any kind of commercialisation.

I have had my MRI yesterday. Hopefully they can get the results to the spine surgeon for the appointment next week. Otherwise, there will be an iteration. Getting an appointment with a rheumatologist here is not facile. I need a referral. I am 90% convinced that there is some immune implication in my joint pains. It is not well received to suggest to an “expert” that they may have overlooked something. We may have to let them do their round(s) or inquiries before we get any meaningful traction. People have processes which you cannot always accelerate.

Failing that I could do a Zoom consultation with some private Harley Street type geezer in London for a few hundred quid. I have imagery which I could send electronically.

I’ll will be surprised if there is no immune component. When you put your arse in an MRI scanner you do not know what if anything they will find. There is an entirely new branch of medicine based upon instrumentation and not symptoms.

You never know what is around the corner.

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For some reason over the last day or so people from my undergraduate degree course have been popping into consciousness. I did briefly touch base on LinkedIn and then deleted my account, disappeared back into the aether.

The whole house move situation has been given added uncertainly thanks to Uncle Donny and his game-show tariff board. He missed his vocation as a corny game show host. The scores on the doors…

We will visit Jersey just to see how being surrounded by people speaking English feels. It will add a feeling to the variables. The bank in Paris want to touch base. Last year I asked about a bridging loan. We shall see what he wants / advises.

It is sunny here today…time to feed the stray cats soon…

CT scan of my lungs on Monday…looking for the evolution of COPD and possibly some kind of fungal aspergillus feature? Farmer’s lung would be another factor in the must move house equation.

I wonder how many people are sighing at the folly inflicted upon the world from the USA…It is a bit sad really…so unnecessary.

Is the great USA afraid of fair competition? Perhaps it needs to fill cauldrons with boiling oil and man the ramparts of fortress USA.

Make America Paranoid Again…

Hiatus and Nanna Houses

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This morning it is spring. The sun is shining, all the cats are happy and the two male ducks were swimming on the pond. It is quiet here.

Looking at the pond I was reminded of the annual clearance work which makes it a blank canvas for spring. It is clear, sooner or later I am not going to be able to do this. I thought to myself “was that winter longer than usual?” We are immersed in nature. Maybe now I could consider warmer climes.

We will need to downsize possibly to a house that is convenient for my (our) increasing disability. It is a when question. At the moment there is a brief hiatus in the medical appointments. I am due an MRI on Friday for my sacral/lumbar spine and a lung CT on the following Monday. We know there are antibodies to fungi in my blood. The CT scan will see if I have a colony in my petri dish lungs. If so, I will be on some antifungal or other, something ending in “ole”. My guess is that the pain levels are not sufficiently elevated yet to warrant any kind of operation. I don’t anticipate that anything can be done for me, anytime soon. I can self-medicate in the meantime.

I have had a look close to “parc y scarlets” for bungalows.  At first pass it looks feasible to get a property either disabled ready or easy to adapt, close to the South Wales university hospitals. Provisional feasibility is established.

There is a weird sense of waiting for something. Don’t know what. There is nothing pressing / urgent our end. There is a sense of need for change. It is not huge yet. It is a hint which may get larger or fade.

I think the world and humanity are lost. There is no sense of communal direction. The initiatives to ease climate change seem dead in the water, thanks to our cousins the other side of the Atlantic.  We must wait for genuine catastrophe before we, as a species, can be arsed to act. Which kind of puts an altitude recommendation on choice of nanna house, it must be 50 metres above sea level.

Every time I have contacted the outside world it has inevitably fizzled out and gone no-where. There is a lesson herein. The take home message is that I am by and large done. People are busy with what is important and pressing for them. Even if that is pissing about in social media. I have cast a fly and there are no takers.

At one level I suspect that some have unfinished karma. On another I know that there is no chance they are ready to even begin to face that “reality”. To me it does not matter if I am right or wrong.

Shit happens and then you die…

The blog is up for renewal soon. I could cancel it, bin it and erase various temporary email addresses, to make some “space” to see if anything new comes in.

Since we got fibre broad band, we now have a “fixed” line telephone. The other day it rang. We had no idea what the sound was. We looked at each other. It turns out it was Orange calling suggesting that we update out on-line answering service. Why? So far, I have made two calls to HSBC customer service, possibly in Bombay via UK. Nobody has the number…

Yeah it is quiet today… soon the witching hour lunch traffic might begin.

I will be making a batch of Teriyaki marinade this afternoon and doing some long overdue pruning…

The right to stay in France expires in under a year…need to keep an eye on that ball…

La raison est ce qui effraie le plus chez un fou.

~ quantumdreamer ~ Leave a comment

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“What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation.”

Anatole France

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People can be ultra-judgmental if you stray in any way from the norm, the rules, if you dare to be even a smidgeon different. Those who have lost hope and succumbed are quick to label others feckless dreamers. They can be punitive and unforgiving.

For many reasons and with many feelings, “The Dead Poets Society” is / was a film for me of awakening. Later because of various real world events it had a haunting and melancholic wounding personal resonance. It spoke volumes as to where society misplaced it values and then inflicted them on others. Young people had their entire self-worth invested in exam results, success, winning and achievement. Off piste expression was frowned upon, goals were the be all and end all. Compliance seen as the way, you must play the game to get ahead.  Even if it means dying a little inside.

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As such so often the baby is thrown out with the bath water. There is no way to convince a narrow minded person with a blinkered view that this is true. A frog at the bottom of a well is an expert on the well bottom, but it has never seen a pacific sunset on a white coral beach in the tropics. The frog cannot begin to conceive of an ocean let alone a sunset.

There is no reliable way to be 100% confident either of my sanity or my insanity. This especially through a blog. I could be a season card bus ticket holder to Barking or park my 4×4 in the drive of my expensive Godalming home having studied PPE at Oxford. There is no need to decide or choose.

Only in a very weird situation would it matter if I was a crackpot fantasist or not. Sat where I am, I do not impinge on the world. I have the time to daydream and it impacts not, provided that I do the garden and cook dinner from time to time.

Nevertheless, how people decide, perceive and assimilate the world can have real world effects.

Thanks to recent events in the USA the world is becoming an ever more divisive, coarse and unpleasant place. Nuance is being executed by social media sound byte firing squads. The monosyllabic and the droning are draining the will to live. Hope is being replaced by pissing contest.

If you don’t comply you will be berated in public and written out of the script, sidelined with those who do not toe the line and suck up enough. Manna will not fall from the high table, the Fed. There will be no place at the banquet-orgy of US economy for you. War, trade war.

I see nothing inspiring, nothing uplifting, no succour for the poor and the needy. I see no harbinger of hope or joy nor for that matter of humanity. I see no Christian values.

The lights of the world are slowly going out…

You can judge for yourself who is more sane, you or I?

I have Aspergillus fumigatus-specific IgG Antibodies

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As part of the ongoing medial investigation my lab results have come back to test for aspergillus fumigatus antibodies. I have a value of 45 mgA/L which is apparently significant. My IgE antibodies are normal-ish which means that I am not in the throws of an allergic reaction.

Aspergillus fumigatus is implicated in farmer’s lung disease. There are some esoteric linkages with arthritis. There is some kind of immune thing going on, my HLA-B27 test was negative. But there are IgGs in my blood, some for Aspergillus flavus too.

So, I have the fungal pathogen aspergillus fumigatus somewhere in my body and have made antibodies which are circulating in my blood. It is possible to grow a colony in a petri dish. Yuck.

I am a fungi to be with.

This little blighter may play a role in my asthma and “COPD”.

I am exposed to compost and rotting grass cuttings, it is damp here. Best guess is lungs, I am due a pulmonary CT scan on the 7th of April. Which is soon.

If you type the first few letters into Google, AI predict diagnoses Asperger’s …

If it is serious I anticipate that the lung doctor or GP will give me a call this evening. It seems a chronic, long term thing at first pass.

Another piece of the jigsaw puzzle….

Loose Ends

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Thematically the notion of loose ends has been active in the period of hibernal sleep, pralaya, before the post equinox activity.

“Pralaya is the period of sleep between cosmic revolutions as well as dissolution of the body and cosmos.”

The skirmish with the coypu is coming to a close, there is about 10 m more of fencing to repair on the northern boundary, the single wire, six conductor, five string electric fence, is offering deterrent. There has been no sign of coypu in the pond for a week now.

Finally, after an hour or so on the ‘phone and with an abortive attempt I have managed to replace the UK secure banking thingy. I have had a couple of nice chats with Indian gentlemen in the sub-continent. One of them had a nice sense of humour when I asked for a 50:50 or ‘phone a friend for one of his questions.

I await a replacement Carte Vitale; the current estimate is two more weeks…

I have asked for an HLA – B27 genotype test which will help to close /open one door concerning a diagnosis for my back pain. A telephone call to the surgery on Monday will see if there is a prescription waiting. Although there is an MRI appointment early April for an S5 – L1 investigation I am not sure there is a point to it, nor if it justifies the price. If I get a positive HLA -B27 test then I can ask the GP to change the target of the MRI to sacroiliac joints which can be diagnostic of ankylosing spondylitis. If no test is forthcoming, I could just go though the motions and let it all drop until next year. I asked, it was ignored, let it play. Do not inflict myself. Do not push or strive.

I have been following up on the Brisbane property title deed prompted by the recent dream. The title search reported four properties in the same full name as my father, two near Brisbane and two near Cairns. One of the titles fits my memory and there are two > $1 million Australian properties on the plots. I have asked for a historical title search from registry this morning. This is probably only for historical interest.

I get a Titanium tooth root drilled in in a couple or weeks to be followed by a crown in a few months. Three teeth are similar in price to an old style, non-computational, second hand car. First pass is to only get one done; the other side of my mouth can remain nonfunctional.

The tuner in our satellite TV decoder failed and we await a replacement from Ireland. I will tune the receiver dish to Astra 2 in geo-stationary orbit and we will have UK TV back, fingers crossed. Watching rugby with French commentary is not the same.

I know this is a dangerous thing to say. But there does not seem to be any actions on my part outside of these currently on my to do list. Nor does there seem any other than gardening or medical for the near future.

I may be a loose end for others, but I see no action required of me. This seems unlikely as I am not “in” (m)any other lives.

On the back burner there are noises that the French property market is starting to warm a tiny bit perhaps aided by the ECB interest rate decision last week. The chronic decision of house down-sizing may come onto the cards later in spring-summer.

Yep, there are curve balls, spanners etc…

Then on the horizon is the big-one. In March 2026 our right to stay expires along with our health rights, our bank cards. Everything French except my driver licence runs out on the same day. We may get booted out back to blighty.

Given the right wing nationalist rhetoric which can be found on many sides, our future here does not look as secure as it did two years ago.

Gee thanks Donald and Elon and Boris…

This residence thing needs watching, hopefully something is put in place in a timely fashion. Though it could be a lastminut.com lash up.

This morning, I was awoken by the dawn chorus, there are daffodils and primroses, the roses are budding. Spring is putting her toe through the threshold of the year…

Medical Merry-go-round

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After the visit to the orthopaedic surgeon no replacement hip surgery is currently foreseen. Instead, I have been referred to a spinal column – pelvis surgeon following a programmed (S5-L1) MRI. They will use the water (T1) and fat (T2) resonance decay times to determine if the nerve roots are entrained, pressed upon. There is no neuropathy so this seems unlikely. I will be back to square one, I will not pass Go, nor collect £200.

Way back in ~1994 the Imperial College heath centre were trying to figure out why I was having major pain in my lower spine and pelvis. There was very restricted motion of my hips. They mentioned ankylosing spondylitis (AS). It went on for months and they could not figure out what was going on. There was a lot of pain and this preceded my depressive breakdown ~1995-7. The prospect of incurable ankylosing spondylitis as a ~30 year old is not an attractive one.

I am going to ask the general practitioner for a blood test for the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) B27 which is strongly implicated in AS.

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There are some very lengthy forms for genetic consent here in France.

If this suggests AS I may be on the NSAIDs and Tumour Necrosis Factor Inhibitors. One of which is lenalidomide which the wife takes for multiple myeloma.

TNF

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I would like some more clarity before anyone reaches for the knife…

Out of Touch and Largely Irrelevant

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It is probably a time of life thing. There is much hoo-ha about awards ceremonies in the entertainment industry at the moment. I suspect like generations before me I fail to recognise over 60% of the protagonists and I really don’t care who won what gong for which piece of over hyped “entertainment” nor who is snogging who or getting their tits out for the cameras.

It is so profound that I am way out of my depth.

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Over the last year I have emailed various people and have received a most bizarre response, four times now. The reply has contained the expression “thank you for reaching out”. WTF.

What does that mean? Am I in quicksand? Am I in desperation heading for sectioning under the antiquated mental health act? What planet are these people on? Where does this little gem come from?

I don’t know…seems incongruous to me.

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I think it fairly safe to conclude that I am largely irrelevant. I am perhaps only relevant to one human and three cats. That seems to be the reality of life at the moment. It seems likely to remain that way.

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I am clearly out of touch with the world at large…

Survived Another Winter – Spring Cleaning

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It is the middle of February and the long range weather forecast suggests that the month may end with a warmer Southerly wind. This means that we have probably survived another winter. How many more we have left, is moot.

I have organised my dreams in this blog and am happy that there is not much more to be done with them. The web stats suggest that this is my least read blog ever. I have made no effort to promote it or optimise SEO because dreams are not about force and anyone floating by like a cloud, is welcome.

There are around 200,000 words here with ~ 250 posts and a total of 600 registered views {non France}.

It is possible that people read content without the stats monitoring it. There is no way to quantify this. Based on evidence very few are interested. I am not surprised; people have way more important things.

The plan for the site renews in May and I have a mind to do some spring cleaning, to wipe the slate perhaps. The reads for my Substack are also very low. Maybe a fresh start?

I am perhaps due a big operation sometime in 2025, perhaps not.

I have been getting some big dreams of late which bear no commonality with my day to day life. The wife even had one thematically linked too.

If we were to sell the house to down size to a nanna-flat or bungalow, spring summer looks to be the time to start. We have had all the diagnostics done.

I am far from the normal mundane currents of life, a little eddy in a backwater. It is very unlikely that this will change. Although the universe has curve balls, I am not even at the batting home plate, should it seek to pitch. Any incoming is probably going to be health related.

In a sense these dreams are an insubstantial pageant which bears little tangibility to the life quotidian. They prove nothing though hint at more. Maybe they are tendrils from a far off land, a far off place, a time that never was, ghost echoes in the web of life, an unmanifest potential not even nearing a threshold. Perhaps a faintly traced charcoal sketch of karmic comedy and tragedy writ filagree on rice paper.

Impermanence is not attained by many, they take so very much for granted.

Maybe that time is again at hand.

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PROSPERO, to Ferdinand 

You do look, my son, in a moved sort,
As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.


Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. 

Sir, I am vexed.


Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. 

A turn or two I’ll walk
To still my beating mind.

The Tempest – Act 4, scene 1 William Shakespeare