Thursday 2nd April 2020

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Thursday 2nd April 2020

07:04 BST

Yesterday started with a thick frost, but by the afternoon the temperature was up to 9° C - just ! There was sufficient sunshine in the morning, starting with pure sunshine, but ending as sunny spells, to give the day a slightly cheerful feel...or if not "cheerful", then "not quite as depressing than it could have been".

Today promises to be a mostly gloomy day. It is gloomy now, and this first version of the forecast makes it seem like it will stay this way, to varying degrees, until 4pm when a few sunny spells might appear. There is a very small, 6 to 8%, chance of rain this afternoon, but it feels very unlikely. On the plus side it the temperature should rise to 13° C this afternoon. During a sunny spell that could feel OK, and it may be aided by the light wind coming from the west (it is that wind carrying the moist air that will be causing the clouds). Tomorrow is predicted to be a couple of degrees cooler, and the whole day is probably going to be grey and gloomy under yet more cloud - although with less chance of rain than today.

I started yesterday with my blood glucose really high. It was caused by two things - the popsicle I ate as a snack, or treat, or maybe just because it was there, and the large amount of chips I ate as part of my fish and chips dinner. I needed to plan my day to reduce that sugar overload. The weather just did not inspire me to go for a long walk, and worse still, I seem to have got out of practice for walking. A long walk was just not going to happen. The other option was to try and fast as much as possible. That is not always an easy thing to do, but I must have planted some sort of seed in my subconscious, because with the benefit of hindsight I can look back and realise that is what I managed to to.

I did give in to some lunch, and it was not exactly healthy, but maybe it had some useful characteristics that seemed to make it fulfilling enough to kill any desire for any snacking in the afternoon. It was the first think I had eaten all day, and it was so called "grilled wings". So called because that is how they are shown on the menu, but as I have discovered over time, that is how many kebab shops described what are more like battered fried chicken wings. Occasionally it is possible to get chicken wings that really are just grilled on a griddle, and so are low fat, and can be considered healthy for ordinary purposes.

One of the things I did yesterday was "lung stretching exercises". I was once again suffering from what felt like a slight wheeziness when breathing. This is a potential symptom of coronavirus, and indeed the very worst symptom. I wondered how bad it could be, and in a strange way, was it real ? In the normal course of events I did not have much laundry to do, but one project for the day was to repair a hole in the pocket of a pair of jeans. This I did, although how long the repair will last is subject to speculation. With another pair of jeans now in circulation, I felt safe to wash the pair I have been using for too long without washing them.

I confess I don't casually wash pairs of jeans. Even in the days when I had a washing machine I was terrified that they would shrink, and I would no longer be able to do them up. I found that out the hard way a few times. Hand washing jeans probably does not cause so much shrinkage, and at the moment, with my weight very slowly decreasing again, a bit of shrinkage is nothing to fear - plus many of my current selection of jeans date back to a time when I weighed a fair bit more.

The jeans I washed were the major item, but I did wash a bit of underwear, and also a t-shirt. Hand washing a pair of jeans, or more specifically wringing them out between washes, rinses, and finally after fabric conditioner, is hard work - hard enough to raise my breathing rate a lot, as well as exercising some arm muscles to the point of near pain. It was the raised breathing rate that was most interesting. Any sensation of any form of restriction vanished, and my breathing felt perfectly normal. That was probably one in the eye for coronavirus !

I had a little rest once that laundry was hung up to dry, but I had a sort of urge to do a bit more. There was one overdue job, and that was to fit my new mattress topper - the one I bought on my last visit to Aldi when it was operating as a normal store. That mattress topper, and a crate of 12 bottles of Corona beer was my last major shop, and I did it on the 22nd march if I recall correctly.

Stripping my bed, and removing the two old mattress toppers that had become all wrinkled and lumpy, once again increased my breathing rate a bit. Putting it all back together, including fighting the duvet back into a clean cover, kept my breathing rate higher than at rest. It was a long way from gasping, but enough to make me still feel my breathing was perfectly normal and unrestricted. It was not much later until that changed.

Having re-made my bed with the new mattress topper, I had the two old and knackered toppers to dispose of. When new they come tightly rolled up, and don't take up that much space. Trying to roll one up that tight without a large space, and maybe some tools, is not easy. I didn't make a very neat job of it, but eventually I managed to fight it into a smallish bundle held together with gaffer tape. It was small enough to go in the wheelie bin.

It was with a feeling of triumph that I took it downstairs so I could take it out to the wheelie bin. This was the afternoon, and the air temperature should have been around 9° C, i.e. not that cold, but one lungful of the cool air, and I felt wheezy again. Wheezy actually sounds like too strong a term. I wasn't wheezing as such, but I was feeling the air passing down my windpipe, just the top of my windpipe really, in a way that I would not normally feel. If this really was coronavirus then at this point it's worst affect is to make me feel mildly tetchy. It is going to have to try a lot harder if it wants me to feel it is the deadly disease that has paralysed so many with fear. Of course at this point I am acutely aware of the phrase "pride comes before fall". It may well still get me yet before all this is over.

Before I forget, that was one other little job I did yesterday that was both insignificant, but part of a long term cumulative effort. For a few days recently I was very sensitive to cold despite never managing to measure any sort of fever temperature during time. Yesterday (and maybe the day before) I found the coolness (perhaps around 15° C) of the kitchen and back room to be acceptable for short periods of time with no negative effects. So I resumed spending a few minutes doing a bit more tidying up every time I walked through the back room. As I think I probably mentioned the last time I did this, I am now at the point where only some hard work will really make a big difference, but even these small jobs lead up to the next big one.

By 6pm it was time to turn on the TV and make sure I only watched Star Trek, and to steer well clear of any news programmes. It was also time for dinner. My original intention was to have both kebabs I had chilled in the fridge after having them delivered the night before. I was going to carefully scrape the meat out, and heat it up before eating it with the still cold salad. I didn't ! I just poured on some extra hot chilli sauce, and ate one kebab cold. It was the chicken shish kebab, and still tasted very nice when cold. It didn't seem at all greasy - which is the whole point of having shish kebab during my never ending diet. Just the one seemed sufficient, and that means I have one more for dinner tonight. All of a sudden the expense of a takeaway does not seem so extravagant at what is between about £7 and £8 a meal.

After watching a couple of Star Treks, an episode and a bit of M*A*S*H, and finally an episode of Have I Got A Bit More News For You, I began to get the urge to test my new mattress topper (and clean linen) on my bed. I thought I would read a few more pages, perhaps even a short chapter of the book I am reading, before getting a blissful sleep. I was wrong. It seems I had grown used to all the lumps of the old and wrinkled mattress toppers, and I found the bed sort of uncomfortable. I noted the same thing for the first few nights I spent in a hospital bed last August.

I did get some sleep, but I couldn't call it blissful. As well as no friendly lumps (!) it was one of those nights where it felt a bit too warm under the duvet, and too cold without it. It may have been responsible for some rather peculiar dreams. In this case I use the word peculiar because they were the sort of dreams that only seem to last seconds, and they didn't seem to be part of a longer narrative. The first concerned being in a pub. The only bit I can remember was laying on the floor, under a table, cutting a couple of slits in the carpet with a Stanley knife. The purpose was ultimately to help more of us sit around the table, but quite how it was to achieve this is unknown. The only other thing to add was that the governor of the pub knew about what I was doing, and was not upset by it. The last thing I remember him saying was "I think I have a better idea".

That dream seemed to happen in the early part of the night. As morning approached I did have some almost, but not quite linked dream. Most seemed to include trains, but only a few seconds of one has left any memory, and even that seems to be getting fainter as time passes by. I was on a slam door train, and part of the floor was missing. I could see some of the electrics that are usually hidden by the floor. In this case it was part of the braking circuit (although I have no idea why I thought that). I noticed one very heavy duty terminal looked like it had been running hot. I poured a bit of water on it from a bottle I was carrying. The next time the train braked a plume of steam came off the connection. It was sort of satisfying - probably because I had diagnosed the situation correctly - but that steam was the end of the dream.

This morning I am happy to say that my blood glucose has come down to a much better level. Dropping another single digit would be really good, but for now it is fine. All my other measurements were good. One interesting thing that more measurements will confirm, is that my under the tongue temperature starts quite low in the morning, and by bedtime it is up to what is normally said to be "normal". I have noted this before, but only in very vague terms. Now I am keeping a record I hope to have some more definite proof of this.

My blood pressure has continued to be generally low, but in the last two days my readings have matched the sort of numbers I was getting a month ago rather better. The only figure that has got worse, but only by a bit, is my weight. I am not surprised that the pile of chips I had the night before last has left some legacy. It is only a small amount, and if I can eat today like I ate yesterday, I may resume my slow downward trend. Dinner should be the final lamb shish kebab. Being lamb it may not be quite so nice when cold, but I don't think I can be bothered to try and heat up just the meat. Now I just need to find something very benign for lunch. Skipping lunch would be good if I had sufficient distraction, but I don't think that will work today.

As usual I won't really know how I feel until I have done something more than sitting here typing. However, I think I feel generally OK, or to put it another way, I seem to have no indicators that would suggest I may not be up to doing this, that or another. This morning, once I have had a shower, I will test my legs. I want to go and get some shopping, although as yet I haven't decided whether to try and do a proper shop in Aldi, or just get a few more bottles of Diet coke, plus anything that seems handy, from the Tesco Express.

Later on I have another test of stamina - washing my old bed bed linen. The duvet cover is a big job, and I'll do that on another day by itself, but I can do the bottom sheet and pillow cases today. I might throw in a small hand towel too. Other than that I might do, or not do anything.