Yesterday was another rather splendid summers day. There was almost non stop sunshine, and the temperature reached 22° C according to my thermometers.
       

  Today has started out bright and sunny again, but it may not last long according to The Met Office. They say the last sunny spells could be no later than 11am. The BBC says sunny spells almost all day, but do add drizzle starting at 11pm. Today's temperature could reach 24° C, but maybe only for a single hour, and also after all the sunshine has finished. Tomorrow could see light cloud for most of the day, but an occasional ray of sunshine might get through for a while, The temperature tomorrow may only reach 21° C, but that should still feel warm, and if the humidity is high, as I suspect it may be, it could feel a little sticky.

   Yesterday was yet another day that started off well, and ended badly. The good start was the nice bright sunshine. After a shower it inspired me to go out and get some shopping, and it was a double shopping expedition with stuff bought from two places !

  The first place I went to was Savers. Top of my essential list was to get some more hand cream. I always have had a tendency for the back of my hands to dry out. Some soaps cause it more than others. I used to suffer from really bad chapped hands in winter when my age was still in single digits. In later years it has been less of a problem, and not really notable, but as my hands age, and the skin loses it's self repair mechanism, I judge it important again to keep my hand soft and moisturised. Perhaps I should do something for my face too, but age lines don't seem to hurt.

  While I was in Savers I also topped up my stock of some vitamin pills, and shower gel. I didn't need any detergents or bleach/toilet cleaner this time, but I did get a couple of packets of cheese flavoured (by some stretch of the imagination) rice crackers when I noticed them on the shelves. Savers doesn't stock many food items, and I sometimes wonder if what they do stock is just a source of snacks for a manager or something.

  After shopping in Savers it is traditional that I cross the way to go into Poundstretcher, but I broke with tradition to go into Iceland instead. I was particularly looking to see if they did any alleged low sugar ice cream. It is possible they did, but it was in a small area away from the ice cream fridges, and seem to be a sort of health food area with a bias towards "protein". I bought two small tubs of ice cream from there, and it looked like the sugar content on them was quite low compared to most ice cream. I didn't really look for what odd muck may have been in them. I hope they still taste good.

  One thing I thought Iceland once did was pre-made salads, but all I could find yesterday was all the main ingredients to make a basic salad packaged together. That was not what I was after, and I didn't buy one. I saw a couple of shelves of stuff that was marked as "3 for £5", and I was suckered in to buying three packs of filled slices (like square pasties). The last temptation I saw, and gave into, was tubes of flavoured, squeezy cream cheese. Tesco only seems to stock the basic squeezy tubes of cream cheese, but does occasionally get chive flavour. Yesterday I got jalapeño and chorizo flavours (two tubes of each).

  I only had a single shopping bag to put all my purchases in, and it was heavy enough that I would swap it from hand to hand a few times on the way back home. I arrived home feeling a bit sweaty - not helped by wearing a black t-shirt in what turned out to be strong sunshine - but otherwise OK. Maybe the weight of the shopping bag forced me to walk a little slower than usual, and it was just enough to stop any angina pains starting, but I can usually do that journey to the shops and back with out any more than a hint of angina beginning to start.

  It was almost 1pm when I got home, and after putting all the stuff away, I considered it time for lunch. As I mentioned yesterday, I would have liked to have fasted through the middle of the day because I was worried that my weight was slightly climbing - probably because I had discovered there was food I would normally shun that did not increase my blood glucose readings. The trouble is that some of that food was did have a modestly high calorie count.

  The trouble with yesterday is that it involved afternoon drinking, and so fasting during the day would just increase, or quicken the onset of getting a wee bit pissed ! The cure was to fill my stomach with one packet (of 2) beef and onion slices. I expected them to be quite greasy, and maybe they would have seemed to be so if I had heated them in the prescribed way, but I had them cold, and they seemed quite dry like that. I then finished off the last fifth of the tub of ice cream I had in the freezer (and hance why I wanted to buy more in Iceland).

  I think that stomach filling did worked, and although most of the beers I drank in the afternoon were not very strong, I did seem to feel unusually sober at the end of the session. The boozing was still a couple of hours away when I finished my lunch, and I could have squeezed in one fairly important job, but didn't. I had a lie down, and read a few pages from my current book, and I closed my eyes for maybe half an hour or more. It didn't seem to feel like snoozing, but I guess I must have.

  I'll come back to the job I should, or at least could have done in that couple of hours, when I write about this morning further down the page. What I will note now is that when I got off my bed, and stood up I had the distinct feeling of some mild heartburn. I say distinct feeling, but it could also have been the very first twinges of the onset of angina pains. Either seemed unlikely, and possibly it was just some aching from my operation scar (some of it internal, and possible from ribs or sternum). That should have been unlikely too. What I do know is that it soon faded once I started walking about the house (including up and down the stairs).

  Earlier in the day I sent Michael a couple of messages trying to get him to join us for a drink. he did eventually respond to say he would like to join us, but his dementia suffering wife had recently been moved from hospital to a care home, and I think he was trying to spend all day there like he did at the hospital. Jodie arrived a little before 3.30pm, and she was complaining of a hangover again, and also that she was going on to a gig in Camden later, and so would not be drinking a lot. In the end I think she just had two cans of fruit ciders, plus a few glasses of water.

  At 3.30pm Michael had not arrived. He is usually very punctual, and it seemed it would be another Thursday when he would not join us. A whole hour and a bit passed when he sent me a text message asking if we were still drinking. I replied yes, and he replied to that to say he would join us in about 20 minutes - which he did. It was good to see him, and to catch up with all his news.

  As he said in his text message, his wife is now in a care home, and it is only about 20 minutes away (by bus).  It seems that while she was in hospital she tried to get out of bed slipped, and fractured her shoulder. Michael expected he to be kept in hospital until the facture was fully healed, but I think the days when a fracture patient was kept in hospital are long gone, and now only exist in old "Carry On" films. I have know people with broken legs to be discharged straight from A&E after having a cast put on the leg.

  There wasn't much more news from Michael, but that didn't stop him talking. He rarely gets the chance to talk to anyone recently, apart from basic "business" type chat, but he made up for it yesterday afternoon. Jodie left to head up to town at about 6pm, but Michael stayed until he had finished his beer, and then I treated him to "one for the road" - a very small tot of my £50 a bottle Irish, Redbreast, whiskey. Sadly he thought it was just "ordinary".

  Michael left in plenty of time for me to have my dinner just before 7pm. It was supposed to be a light meal, and it was indeed a modestly small meal. The main course was just boiled new potatoes (with a sprinkle of olive oil, plus a pinch of dried mint after they were cooked). I was originally going to have them by themselves, but I gave them a good squeezing of jalapeño flavoured cream cheese for some extra flavour, For a dessert I had half a dozen very thin, "no added sugar" chocolate covered oat biscuits.

  I think I was feeling pretty good, albeit rather tired, when I turned the TV off after watching QI at 10pm. I brusged my teeth, and went straight to bed. Within 3 minutes of turning on my side to go to sleep, I started to get horrible heartburn. It proved very difficult to control it. Part of the reason for what I thought was a fairly bland dinner, was to avoid heartburn (that I seem to get far too easily these days).

  I guess it was a lot of quite fizzy beer that was part of the problem. It also felt like I had been inflated like a beach ball. I was doing some prolific farting, and no matter how many time I went to the toilet (actually only twice) I could not seem to need to pass any solid matter, but I had plenty of quite high power wind. I was also burping a lot, and one burt even left a sort of bilious taste behind. It felt like I was in a bad way.

  I do wonder if it was more than heartburn because I was also getting a lot of pain from my right elbow. That elbow has given no trouble at all since early spring, but last night it was really quite painful. The odd thing is though it did seem to be centred on my elbow, it did not seem to just that as the source of the pain. It was a bit more diffuse than that, and sometimes it felt like when angina pains have crept up the chest into the neck and started going down the arms. I'm sire it had nothing to do with angina, at least I am sure that that I am probably sure !

  I eventually started to sleep at about 2am. It was still not good sleep, and I woke up once or twice with my pillow wet with sweat. It was warmer then recently last night, but it wasn't that warm, and so I am not sure why I seemed to sweat so much. I don't think it was high blood glucose, and another indicator of that was I didn't seem to need to wake up to pee any more than usual, and possibly less.

  I had over an extra hour in bed this morning, and I slept for most of it. That, and the time it has taken to get this far in the narrative means that I seemed to have forgotten the one dream I had that seemed worth remembering and describing. Oh well, I doubt it was important, and probably not even amusing. I didn't feel that bad when I got up, but better would have been nicer. At least I didn't have any constipation troubles. I was just about out of intestinal gas at that point, but I still went to the toilet (number twos !) with quite a whoosh !

  After the sweaty night I think I expected my blood glucose readings to be a lot higher this morning, but it seems that are slowly returning towards what was, and hopefully will still be, my new normal. The Contour meter read 8.0mmol/l, and that is almost good. The GlucoRX meter read a little higher at 8.2mmol/l. The Sinocare meter was actually in the light green at 7.9mmol/l. That is only a fraction under the Contour meter, but is good because it has crossed that threshold into the light green area. I just wish I could get a few more wonderful "dark green" readings (between 6 and 7mmol/l).

  I feel almost OK at the moment, but I also feel I am on the edge. With the sky now clouded over enough to lose the sunshine, I don't feel like I want to go out exploring (to the limit of my angina pains), although the forecast says the temperature should continue to rise. Actually my thermometers say it has already reach 22° C, and strange as it may seem, that agrees nicely with the forecast. Just one, possibly two degrees to go before it reaches the maximum today. Maybe it does start to feel a bit humid under this now partly grey sky.

  There is one job I have to do before I do anything else. Yesterday, after drying myself after a shower, I noticed one corner of the towel was starting to smell very slightly stale. As soon as I was dry I filled one of my big buckets with detergent, with a capfull of Dettol in it, and left the towel to soak. The original, and maybe with hindsight, stupid idea was to finish washing the towel yesterday, but now it has become the first, and most important, and maybe the only important task of the day. Another task that I can feel melting away even now as to try and fast until tonight, but now I am thinking I ought to have a slightly larger lunch, and ideally the smallest and lightest dinner I can manage - maybe just a can of soup. The idea is to try and not have any heartburn tonight, and get a great night's sleep.

  One other bit of news which came up in the middle of a brief exchange of messages with Jo "Woodstock" Corteen, is that my name will be on the door for August's Petts Wood Calling - in other words a back stage pass. I had told her that despite this angina limiting me a lot, there were a few special gigs I was determined to get to, and Petts Wood Calling was one of them. I also mentioned that she would probably see me sitting down a lot more than usual !


 





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