It’s not quite a Jaguar

I’ve been driving in my car

It’s not quite a Jaguar

I bought it in Primrose Hill

From a bloke from Brazil

It was made in fifty-nine

In a factory by the Tyne

It’s a bit old but it’s mine

I mend it in my spare time

Just last week I changed the oil

The rocker valves and the coil

Last week it went ’round the clock

I also had a little knock

Madness

————————————————————————

I have had my ultrasound and ECG “stress” test and I am now crock for the rest of the day. I managed to get my heart rate up to 86% of the theoretical maximum for my age pushing a bike load of 130 Watts. I could not sustain it for long.

The ST segment did not show further depression below the isoelectric line suggesting that the blood supply to my left ventricle is not yet compromised. The doctor had no explanation for why the ST segment was depressed. He did not seem worried and so there is no show stopper for the fitting of a bionic hip.

I have not had my heart rate up like that during exercise for a long time. I am probably unfit but I will guess that I am not as unfit as other 100kg men made in ‘64 of my height. Especially those from Newcastle.

They still think I am a fat bastard though.

I have an exercise burn in my quadriceps which is a bit of a novelty. They have shaved my chest a bit for the electrodes…

The Peugeot 207 also clocked earlier this week it now has ~100,040 miles….

Not quite ready for the scrap heap yet…its seems.

What is on the Dance Card?

Next week returns us both to the medical merry-go-round. The wife is getting the results of her post breast cancer full genetic work up and I am having a preoperative stress echocardiogram because there was an anomaly with the ST section in my ECG trace. This could be due to ischemia or larger than usual size and ageing. When you look in Pandora’s box you never know what you will find. Our understanding of where we stand could change. The results for me might influence the go/no go for the hip replacement surgery. There may/may not be something wrong with my ticker.

In about a month’s time I have a full blood work up at which I will finally find out my blood group. I will get to meet the anaesthetist, the physio and a dietician. The latter no doubt will imply that I am a fat bastard. Explaining to French people that you do not eat vast amounts of charcuterie, cheese, fish and shellfish is not facile. They do not get it. The don’t do, vindaloo. They will want me to lose weight. I am currently a nice round 100kg. When I bust my hip I dropped below 85kg.

The notion of downscaling house is still on the cards and chronic. We need to do it. What we don’t know is how crippled I will be post operation(s). This feeds into the bungalow or single floor flat versus house decision. Currently single floor is favourite.

After watching the NF/BNP march in London yesterday I wonder why did Blair Peach die. Maybe it is time to reboot the anti nazi league.

Come back to blighty.. really ….. hmmnnn…

So far I have written up 77 dreams this year. There are others I can’t be arsed with. The dream length of late is heading past 1000 words. Why I am dreaming about AI I do not know. I do not use it nor know anything about it. I hate prompts to use bloody copilot.

I also have had numerous pseudo-technical or pseudo-scientific dreams. I do not mix in the kind of circles where I might discuss these nor chase them up. I don’t have to write research grant proposals or come up with ideas. The only person outside medical and this house I speak with is the ex-farmer who helps out in the garden. He does not care about quantum.

There are also Tibetan and Toltec dreaming themes. Again I do not move in circles where these might be in any way applicable. There is a part of me which mildly dreads going to bed. It means an hour in the morning typing up dreams.

The basic notion is visit UK see how it feels. Get bionic hip fitted – recover over winter. Maybe put house on market. Decide UK or France. Move. Or wait, get second bionic hip fitted, recover, put house on market, move. I looked at property in Erice Sicily yesterday.

Our right to remain expires end of March 2026. Probably there is no problem with renewal. Depending on the vagaries of French politics we could be much less welcome. The decision for the second hip is timed for around spring 2026. We too could become unwelcome immigrants.

All this flag waving marching creates fear and uncertainty. Seig heil…

There are a lot of things in the garden that I am going to have to let slip. Maybe in January I might be able to turn my hand to them.

I have a couple more months of increasingly painful / useless right hip on the cards. I need to only stand for an hour or so a day which limits what is possible. I can still do brief DIY painting and cooking and using the strimmer.

We will have a little more info by next Saturday…

Volcano Islands – DNA – Nirmāṇakāya- Warrior Girl Dream 23-08-2025

Here are last night’s dreaming sequence. It is a little “bitty” and is in three parts.

The dream starts on a mediterranean-like island. I am walking along a trail with the wife. We are carrying rucksacks; it is sunny but not hot. We are on a cliff side path far below is an azure-blue sea. Ahead of us is a port town from which we aim to take a ferry to our next destination. In the middle distance we can see a rocky island with fertile splashes of green farming land. It is less cliffy but dominated by a peak which I know is a supposed extinct volcano. We start to have a drone’s eye view over the island. Small volcanic vents open up around the island venting first smoke and then the occasional pyrotechnic of red hot lava. The central volcano starts to smoke and vent too. We can hear the rumble of pre-eruption. It is pretty clear that the island is unsafe and that we will have to alter our plans. If the volcano blows the island will cease. We cannot go to that island yet.

I say that we need to find a hotel for the night. We walk into town as night falls and the nightlife starts up. There are bars and clubs. It is Greek. We find a large hotel on a central plaza. The wife thinks it too expensive but I know they like to fill all the rooms. I go to reception where the hotel manager / owner is. He is an oily man with yet black hair. I ask him for a room it is £50 per night. This he says is because the pool is out of order. I accept and ask what time breakfast is. The hotel is in need of TLC.

The dream fades.

I am now in a medical centre come hospital on another island which feels like Jersey but may not be it. I am in a waiting room with many others. My name is called and I am taken into a consulting room by a woman of similar age to me in a dark navy-blue nurse practitioner uniform. She does blood pressure measurements and listens to my chest. I gesture to her where I have had my chest hair shaved for a recent ECG. For some reason we both find this funny. She takes down some historical details. Then she gets an envelop out of her desk drawer. She proceeds to take a lock of my hair which is much longer than it is this morning. She places this in the envelope. She then proceeds to trim all my finger nails with scissors. Collecting the nails and placing them too in the envelope. I say that I hope she is not going to use these for voodoo or witchcraft on me because everyone knows that these are key ingredients. She says no, the samples are for DNA tests, the government wants to test my DNA to check if I am normal or not. I say to her that I have had a normal birth and not a different Nirmāṇakāya manifestation vehicle. It was not thought created. I came out of a womb. The DNA results should come back as entirely human.

Outside the hospital I go down a hill to where the ambulance entrance is. I see the nurse posting the envelope into a bright red old-school UK mail box. I wave at her, she waves back.

The dream fades.

I am now in a large metropolitan building which has been subdivided into a number of flats. The building has a common room area with a watercooler and seating. I am standing there when a tall man comes in. He is holding is mouth. He says that he has broken a tooth. I know he is Hungarian because we have been out for a few beers. I say that I can drive him to a dentist and explain how things work in England. I ask him to show me his EU health card. He does. I say show this at the dental clinic and they will reduce the amount you have to pay. We are joined by a young woman who has recently moved into the block. She is around mid-twenties and has jet black pig-tailed hair and is heavily made up. I know that she considers herself trendy.

I take the Hungarian to the dentist in my car and drop him off in reception I give him the number of my mobile ‘phone in case there is difficulty. Neither of us foresees any. He will have to wait for hours. I go back to the block of flats where I am some kind of custodian.

The young woman is still there in the communal rooms. She wants to go into town and asks me to accompany her. There is a mild sexual frisson from her part towards me which is completely unexpected by me. She takes my arm in hers and we walk out into the night. I am quasi-paternal.

It is very urban and under the yellow street lights she starts to tell me how she is trying to change. She has a lot of piercings and several large tattoos. She is of mixed race a real melting pot of nationalities but speaks pukka English, posh. She says that she is a warrior girl, that she is striving to be a warrior girl. In a London accent I ask if she means warrior gall or warrior gell, innit. This makes her laugh. My accent is unexpected.

I say to her that being a warrior is harder than she might imagine and that whatever her preconceptions are, they are wrong. I say to her that is a  good thing to aspire to be a “warrior gall”. This makes her happy and she tries to skip. I cannot. I look at her and we both laugh.

The dream fades.

A Fly in the Ointment  – ECG ST Segment Depression

Earlier this week we learned that the specialist machine doing CT angiograms is very busy at the big hospital in Saint Brieuc. They are backed up and will not be able to do the study before the date upon which my hip operation is scheduled. This means that the risk is less quantified. They are possibly worried a little about how I might respond to being hacked open and losing a few wine glasses of blood while someone saws off the head of my femur and whacks in a Titanium implant.

The added concern comes from my recent resting electrocardiogram (ECG) in which the ST level was depressed below the isoelectric point.

The ST segement is seen as potentially diagnostic for a number of conditions, lowering is correlated with these things.

Causes of ST segment depression:

Myocardial ischemia

Hypokalemia

Digoxin

Cocaine

Left ventricular hypertrophy (with concurrent T wave changes)

Bundle branch blocks (with concurrent T wave changes)

———-

I can exclude the three middle suggestions unequivocaly.

———–

——–

The depressed ECG ST wave form is characterised as above into three basic types. My ECG has a lowering of  about 1 mm and is most like the horizontal depiction above

Bearing in mind that I have spent decades looking at spectroscopy traces on chart paper, oscillosocpes and computer screens it is easy for me to spot “anomalies”.

Whenever I see ECG traces the first thing which comes to mind is, “why is the data so shite?”

Is the test human not grounded, is there a floating earth?

Can’t they do better, develop better machines, improve protocol?

Verbally the cardiologist wanted to check for myocardial ischemia or ventricular hypertrophy. The latter can come from being overly athletic in which case it is ok or it is simply that the heart if gettting old. Back in the last century I had strong athletic tendencies.

He has propsed a so-called cardio stress test. They asked me if I could pedal. Maybe enough to raise the demand on the heart…we shall see.

Going left to right the power output by the human hamster wheel rider increases by 50 watt quanta B-C. This data shows the depression of an ST ECG trace as incresing demand is placed upon the heart.

“Reversible ST-segment depression is the characteristic finding associated with exercise-induced, demand-driven ischemia in patients with significant coronary obstruction but no flow limitation at rest.”

The jury suggests that this methodology could tend the “diagnosis” either towards or away from ischemia or blood supply insufficiency. The guess was that my aging heart was just as bit too big and aged. The holy trinity of fat, fags and booze have given me their sacred blessing.

If I am losing blood during the operation the heart will pump that little bit harder.

All the articles suggest that when a stress test is done there is a medic present who is cardio-trained in case the stress test causes a heart attack…

It was mooted that an appointment for this stress test may also not be easy to come by. The pre-op anaesthesia meeting is scheduled about 1 month out before the operation.

If the ST depression is unexplained, will they go ahead or will they insist upon more data?

There is a potential fly in the ointment.

We have found that in general the French are more keen on lastminute.com than we are…I foresee a mad clustering of yet more medical appointments early autumn…

The Holy Trinity – Fat Fags & Booze

—————————————————-

Brixton Prison, Jebb Avenue London S.W. 2 Inglan

it was de miggle a di rush hour
hevrybody jus a hustle and a bustle
to go home fi dem evenin shower
mi an Jim stan up waitin pon a bus
not causin no fuss

when all of a sudden a police van pull up
out jump tree policemen
de whole a dem carryin baton
dem walk straight up to me and Jim
one a dem hold on to Jim
seh dem tekin him in
Jim tell him fi leggo a him
for him nah do nutt’n
and ‘im nah t’ief, not even a but’n
Jim start to wriggle
de police start to giggle

Sonny’s Lettah – Linton Kwesi Johnson

——————————————————

Isn’t it funny that when you wait a long time for a bus at the bus stop near Jebb Avenue on Brixton Hill, there are none then all of a sudden three arrive at once?

Every weekday morning for around five years I waited at that bus stop.

Last Friday I had a radio-nuclide bone scan, Tuesday I had an ECG and comprehensive cardio ultrasound, tomorrow I will have overnight monitoring for sleep apnoea, Monday I will start taking industrial grade laxatives with a colonoscopy due Tuesday afternoon and next Friday I am due a CT scan to check for diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis (DISH).

What a fun-filled and action-packed time I have.  That is quite a lot to cram in. That is a lot of buses.

—-

—-

Tomorrow I will get fitted for various monitoring including cardio. Later, they may go one stage further and do a hospital admission with full electroencephalography (EEG).

Given hip pain, enlarged prostate and hot weather, I am not sure they will get a good data set.

I don’t know what gizmo I am getting tomorrow. BUT if there is an EEG it could easily generate an anomaly which they may struggle to explain. I know from before and self-test that I can flat-line a fast Fourier transform frontal lobe EEG within the S:N ratio. If this happens in a sleep study it might raise questions or get ignored. I would be an anomaly.

The hospital version has EEG. It may never happen.

As a researcher one is trained to look out for anything unusual. I have a low parathyroid hormone level which seems anomalous. It makes my research bells go ting. It does not seem so important to others.

It seems to me that the consensus is coming around to the idea that the root cause of many of my ailments is being ascribed to the Holy Trinity, fat, fags and booze. My high iron levels will get adjusted during any hip operation by blood loss, in the first instance.

In terms of the Holy Trinity I only have fat left to renounce.

Whenever I watch a medical video, say on a part of the endocrine system, I think to myself that is a whole lot of variables which you are asserting to be interrelated yet you only have very few data points. Is that not a bit of a stretch?

I suspect that I would have been a shit medical student, too many questions. I would struggle with the exams.

In a fortnight’s time I should have a few more pieces of information, including my putative diagnosis of DISH.

Looking at the bus timetable there may be a wait……after a fun-filled and action-packed week.

Touch wood, cross fingers etc.