06:03 BST

  After a dry start, that even had a short sunny spell or two, yesterday was generally a wet day. Most of the time it was just light rain, and I am unsure if I remember anything that might deserve to be called heavy rain. The afternoon, and also mid evening both had short peaks at 15° C, but more of the day was just 14° C.   Today is going to be very wet if the forecast turns out to be correct. There might even be a thundery shower, but that might just be the BBC getting carried away again (they like dropping the occasional false prediction of a thunderstorm). The whole of the middle of the day may see a high of 14° C, and the rest of the day just 13° C. Tomorrow will be mostly dull, but mid to late afternoon may see an occasional sunny spell. The whole day, except 3pm, when there could be light rain, will be dry...maybe....

  Yesterday seemed to be a fair day. With a fair probability that I have managed to order a couple of GTN sprays (which hopefully will be confirmed today) I no longer seemed to feel miserable, and I was looking forward to some beer drinking in the late afternoon - even if that did have a bad effect on my health (mainly my weight).

  My day effectively started with washing my hair, and having a shower. I did both with no problem, and felt good for having done so, and good for feeling all nice and clean. Before that I had finished writing yesterday's piece, and I suppose that was actually the true start of my day. Of course before writing I was doing my health measurements, which I wrote about yesterday morning. I seem to have written all that in the wrong time direction. Oh well, never mind.

  I was not feeling all that good yesterday thanks to another night where I had been awake for hours with, very loosely speaking, a stomach upset. I felt tired, and I was still not sure my stomach upset was really over. After my shower and shampoo I had as lie down before I did any more. I can't seem to recall if I snoozed much, or even at all, but I think I probably snoozed for some time, and maybe the rest of the time I was staring at the ceiling, or reading my book.

  Eventually I had to get up and do some stuff. That mostly meant doing a big backlog of washing up in the kitchen. I got quite uncomfortable back ache standing at the sink, but I gritted my teeth, and got everything done - including the glasses for the later beer drinking session. I should have hoovered the dining room floor, and clean some beer stains off the dining room table. I did neither, but I did give the kitchen work surfaces a wipe down because I knew Jodie would be chopping vegetables up, or something similar when she arrived.

  I can't seem to remember if it was before or after polishing the freshly washed glasses that I had some lunch. I also can't seem to remember exactly what I had for lunch. I think it was mainly just a couple of small packets of baked potato crisp like things, and a couple of Aldi's hot pepperami sticks. It was not an ideal lunch, but it was nice. I know that the next thing I did was to go back to my PC and wait for Jodie to arrive.

  I started drinking before she arrived when I found I wanted to re-acquaint my self with some strong (8.5%) Orangeboom lager. It was from a tray of 24 cans I had ordered ages ago when I decided to investigate some very strong lagers. I don't think I really liked it, and so after a couple of years I still have a dozen cans left. I still don't like it, and it is now a few months past it's best before date. It did have a tinny taste, and maybe it was that which upset my guts again.

  When Jodie arrived she was not in a talkative mood - as usual. That does make things a bit boring. One thing she did have to say was that it was possibly the last day of the beer festival in The Catford Bridge Tavern. I didn't need reminding because I was already wearing the t-shirt I had bought at a beer festival there a year or two previously, There were two reasons I did not want to go there.

  Jodie's plan was that we would drink a few beers here, and then go to The Catford Bridge Tavern where we would meet Alan, and have more beers. The first reason for feeling less than enthusiastic was that it was raining. By itself it was only a trivial reason, but I also had a better reason - I was not feeling good. My 2am stomach upset had left me feeling a bit precarious. The beers at the beer festival tend to be mostly unpleasant, but you never know the worst until you have tried them (in half pints or even in one third pints if they were doing that this year).

  I did not fancy pouring duff beer on my dodgy guts, and so I declined to go. Jodie still wanted to go, and besides which she had arranged to meet Alan there. It should have meant an early finish drinking here, but I don't think it was that early. I had drunk some fairly strong beers, and I felt I had had enough by the time Jodie left to walk to the pub. After finish my last glass of beer, my interest turned to dinner.

  I had decided I would have two little pots of ramen and noodles (or does ramen imply noodles ?). One was teriyaki flavour and the other coconut and chilli. Unlike instant noodles that are ready prepared, and have more vegetables in them. They are sold frozen, and need 5 or 6 minutes in the microwave. They are quite small, and not quite as nice as I hoped. I topped them off with some ice cream.

  I managed to find some stuff on TV to watch last night, and that kept me semi amused until about 10pm. I then went to bed, but once I laid down I began to feel uncomfortable. I was doing some slightly acid burps, and so I took a couple of Rennies tablets. I also started to pass some wind. I may have got a bot of sleep, maybe at least an hour, but once again I had to get up to make several visits to the toilet while also taking more indigestion remedies. I also had a forbidden spray of GTN as a sort of check to see if it was more than just heartburn. That spray did give some relief, and so it was also some sort of blood circulation problem.

  I have no idea how many hours of sleep I lost before I felt comfortable enough to get some real sleep, but I am not sure than even my real sleep was all that good. I had quite a long seeming dream, that I think I somehow forced myself to wake up from because it seemed to be going nowhere. I got back to sleep again, but then woke up at about 6am. That felt too early despite this morning being a slight rush - I have had to get ready to get to my appointment with the nurse at 10am. In fact I am going to have to stop writing now, and pick this up when I am back from the surgery.......

....... I'm now back from the surgery, and I have had some elevenses in lieu of breakfast !

  As every morning these days, the first thing I did when I got up, and seemed to have gone to the toilet enough, was to weigh myself. It was a bit of a shock, and I waited until I had been to the toilet again before getting on the scales again. My shockingly high weight was at least due in part to being full of poo (or full of shit as some might say). The first, and second time on the toilet generated poo that was only one step removed from diarrhoea.

   It seems I most definitely did have some sort of stomach upset, however... I remarked to the nurse that I had the impression that Mounjaro tended to "amplify" any digestive upset because it works to alter the digestive process. The nurse agreed that she did get similar reports from others who she has prescribed Mounjaro to. Even after seeming to empty myself I still seem to have put on 1.1kg, and it has put my weight loss right back to March - and undoing all the work I put in to lose weight my own way.

  There was better news about my blood glucose measurements. From low to high it was 6.5, 6.6, and 6.7 mmol/l. That is not as good as the day before when two readings in the fives, but it is still pretty good. I think I have a cunning plan to improve on this even more.  It is a shame my blood pressure was a bit high this morning, but 134/58 is not that bad, and is considered almost normal.

  I didn't need to wash my hair again, but I did have a shower this morning - rather earlier than I usually seem to have one (but very late compared to the days when I used to have a shower soon after 5am in the days when I was getting the 6.33am train to work, before I retired. Once I was clean and dried I got dressed ready to go out, and then I sat down and started writing today's piece. After a while, I think it was getting on for an hour I had to stop to go to the surgery.

  I rushed to the surgery because one last minute visit to the toilet, where I did do a pee, and not the poo I thought I would do, made me a bit late. I arrived just one minute late according to the sign in screen, but I still had a 10 minute wait before I got called to the nurse in examination room 15. The first time I saw her, maybe a couple of years ago, I didn't like her, but either I am doing the right thing, or her attitude has softened.

  She was very pleased the way Mounjaro has completely tamed my blood glucose level, but obviously not so pleased with my weight gain. I had to confess that I realised I had allow myself to believe the medicine was magic, and I didn't need to do anything. I also said that I knew that was wrong, and I had the proof. The nurse was quite supportive of that idea, and did say it happened to many of her patients.  I said I knew I had to get back to my method of dieting, and mostly only use  Mounjaro for blood glucose control.

   The trouble is that at this time of the year when it is cold, wet and gloomy it is hard to force yourself to go hungry, or at least it is hard for me. back when the nurse first suggested Mounjaro I told her I would like to carry on using my own methods for a while longer, but I would almost certainly want to fall back on Mounjaro in Autumn. That is what happened, but it now seems I am going to have to put most of the effort in myself.

  The nurse agreed with that. I had taken a printout out of my weight for every morning of the current year, and like all my spreadsheets I colour code the results. It makes it easy to see I was making very slow, but steady progress before I went on Mounjaro, and since then it has gone to pot. That was not the end of my consultation.

  We discussed the implications of the Cardiologist's ban on my use of GTN spray. The nurse said she could not really comment on what a Cardiologist said, but at the same time she did agree that not being able to GTN spray would limit my mobility enough to make any recommendation about increased, or indeed any exercise was going to be impossible. (I was suffering a fair amount after rushing the short distance, around a quarter of a mile, to the surgery. I must admit it was not as bad as expected, but I could not have walked a lot more without at least stopping for a minute or two.

  There were two more things the nurse did before I went home. One was to get an Otoscope to have a look in my ears. She said one seemed clear, but the other did have some wax in it, but not enough to block hearing. She wondered if my problem might be an inner ear infection, and suggested I try and see a GP if I have further trouble. The other thing she did was to offer to give me my 'Flu jab. I was going to ask her about it, but she made the offer, which I accepted, before I could ask.

  One final thing was a prescription for the strength of Mounjaro. This is standard procedure, and I think there are up to 6 strengths to choose from, but everyone starts at the lowest dose. It is possible the weight loss may kick in at a higher dose. The Pharmacy does not keep a regular stock of Mounjaro, which I anticipated, and I have to go there tomorrow afternoon when I should be able to pick it up. The only thing I can't remember is whether I finish the last of the first strength, or go straight on to the next strength up. I also take my 4th dose tomorrow, and the injector says it contains only 4 doses. Maybe it will be empty after tomorrows jab, but it looks like there is more than one dose in the thing. We'll see.

  I feel sort of odd even now, and maybe some of it is a hangover from yesterday's booze, or maybe it is just from the stomach bug I seemed to have. Maybe it is just the result of missing sleep. Before I start applying my full dieting regime I am going to look forward to some sort of hot lunch, and a snooze or two today. I can't quite imagine I will do anything more today, but maybe I could wash a few t-shirts or something. After going to and from the surgery in the rain (and it was semi heavy on the way home) I don't fancy going out anywhere today.