09:31 GMT

  It must have rained during the night judging by the puddles when I first peaked through the curtains. As I write this it looks like light rain outside. Rain is forecast for all daylight hours today, although it is only light rain or drizzle. The afternoon should see 14° C, and if it were bright and sunny that would feel good. Nearly all of tomorrow may be 12° C, but a few hours in the afternoon may see 13° C. Once again it will be a day of light rain or drizzle.

  Yesterday was a day when the bad overwhelmed the good to the extent that I find that I can't seem to remember any good bits - although I am sure there were some good bits. Maybe the good bit were just that I seemed to manage to be careful enough about my eating that I didn't put on any weight, and my blood glucose was not too bad this morning.

  There was one thing that occupied most of my attention yesterday, and it was waiting for a delivery from Amazon. It was two packs of test strips for my GlucoRX blood test meter, and as such was not terribly important because I have two very good blood glucose meters with plenty of test strips for them. I still did not want to miss the delivery, and mainly because I would have to do all that waiting all over again the next day (or fish the packet out from a damp corner of the front garden, behind the wheelie bins).

  Amazon's web site said the delivery van left the depot at 10:45am. That is quite early for Amazon, and I had high hopes my delivery would be early afternoon. That just increased the tension, and made me feel more pissed off when the afternoon passed with no delivery. It was actually 6:45pm when the delivery happened - well after dark. I try my best to look on the bright side because I have had deliveries as late as just past 9pm, but I still felt annoyed, and maybe stressed as well.

  I don't think that stress was real enough to cause one of yesterday's main problems - a pain in the chest. It seemed to be coming from my heart, and I made the assumption it was my faulty heart valve causing the problem, and maybe it was deteriorating further. Pain maybe too strong a word, and ache might be more appropriate. It is a sensitive area for me, in the sense that I have had a few heart attacks in the past, and now have the faulty heart valve.

  There is still a possibility that it is not heart pain but heartburn. I haven't managed to prove it either way. One clue is that I think it was yesterday morning when I did a big burp that was very close to bringing up a bit of sick. It was very acid, and it is an ongoing problem of using Mounjaro (the alleged wonder slimming drug). One effect of it is that it make food remain in the stomach for longer.

  That is supposed to make you feel "full" and so desire less food. That idea fails for me. Sometimes the food can start to ferment and you get eggy tasting burps. Sometimes you just burp up nothing, and more rarely you burp up stomach acid. That acid burns the the "food pipe" and causes a pain very similar to angina, although I thought I had learned the difference between them.

  I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, but I think it was something fairly light because I was aware my stomach had not emptied of breakfast by then. Breakfast was a double helping of instant noodles, and they were a bit spicy. There is a lot of yesterday that I blanked from my memory because so little was going on - maybe not enough to form any memories. With very foggy hindsight, it may have been the case that my chest ache started or became worse after lunch.

  I spent all afternoon on high alert, which is probably not good for me. I did some reading - either from book or from the internet, but I didn't have my usual afternoon nap, or any other naps. That made my a bit tetchy, and that didn't help either. I think it was after I had eaten my dinner than things looked up a bit.

   My dinner was two Panini rolls with sausages in them. They were rather nice, but I did wonder if I had made a silly mistake. The sausages were grilled and so not dripping with fat, but they had fat in them, and in the evening that can be a recipe for heartburn, or maybe in last night's case, to prolong heartburn. I think I hoped that a few spoonfuls of plain ice cream might somehow help. Evidently it didn't.

  With my Amazon order in my grubby hand I was free to relax, and I would have done if it didn't mean some TV channel hoping trying to find some suitable entertainment. I watched some good and bad episodes of The Simpsons, and then I found a brand new episode of Have I Got News For You on BBC1. I just realised I am describing the night before last night. My brain is truly frazzled. I am fairly sure I did watch either an edition of Have I Got news For You, or QI.

  I think I am very certain that I was in bed before 10pm, but I don't think I stayed in bed. Turning the light out meant I had no stimulation except for myself. It had the effect of amplifying my chest ache. I started worrying that it might get suddenly worse (which could have happened) and I would end up dialling 999 and getting an ambulance ride into A&E. That could be a short cut to getting a faster cure for my heart valve problem, but is not ethical, and worse still was that I never did get tohave a shower yesterday, and I was probably very stinky. I didn't want to go into hospital with having a shower and washing my hair !

  I got up again, and took a couple of Ibuprofen tablets as painkillers, and chewed on some antacid tablets. I think the latter did help, but not as well as hoped. After a while I thought that the small improvement was enough to make me want to go back to bed. I am unsure what time that was, but at a guess I'll say it was 11pm. It may have taken 20 or 25 minutes, but I did get to sleep, and once asleep I seemed to sleep quite well.

  I do remember enough of one dream to describe it in brief. In the dream I seemed to be with, as an observer, rather than a member of a criminal mob. They had decided they were going to attack and Indian restaurant, but I don't think I was ever aware why. One of the member of the mob was a huge man who looked like he could walk through a locked door without noticing it was there. I am sure he was inspired by something I had seen on TV earlier.

  When we got to the Indian restaurant the front door was closed, and the staff were sitting down eating their dinner. The dream got very vague from that point. I think I thought that what I was going to witness was a right punch up, but it would turn out all the Indian waiters were all experts in martial arts, and would end up dancing ! I have never seen more than a few samples of "Bollywood" movies on TV, but I had seen enough that I knew they didn't appeal to me. I think that having predicted the outcome I decided I would prefer to wake up instead of watching a Bollywood dance routine.

  I think I went for a pee after waking up, and I noted that my chest ache seemed so mild it was ignorable, but once I laid down to try and sleep in the dark it seemed to get worse. That kept me awake for a bit. It seems like I did not get all the restful sleep I needed. At about 7am I woke up as if to get up. I did get up and went for a pee, and I was happy to have a fairly decent poo as well.

  I weighed myself and it seemed I had put on at leas 100gm. I then checked my blood glucose. It was not as good as would be nice, but an average of 6.83mmol/l was satisfactory enough. I usually don't check my blood pressure until after breakfast, but I checked it out of curiosity. It was something like 132/68. That is still described as "high-normal" on my blood pressure meter. The more significant thing is that I seemed to be relaxed enough to find I was falling asleep.

  After that I decided I would go back to bed. I evidently did need extra sleep because it was gone 9am when I woke up again. I needed a pee, and that was handy because when I weighed myself again I found my weight was exactly the same as yesterday morning. It was still higher than I would have liked, but at least yesterday was a nice drop on the day before yesterday. I also checked my blood pressure again, and I "officially" recorded 132/62 - once again high-normal (and also what my doctor, or one of them, said was actually the sort of figure they would expect.

  As I write this I still have some quite feint chest ache/pain. I decided not to have breakfast, but a bit later gave in and had half a small handful of peanuts to munch on. A single bowl of instant noodles may have been better for me. One useful think I noticed is that my chest ache does not seem to get worse if I do anything that might make the heart work harder. It seems to be worse when relaxing, and it is probably just a silly, and baseless idea, but that may suggest it is stomach acid causing fairly mild (at the moment heartburn.

  One plan I had for today was to do what I was going to do yesterday, some shopping in Savers and Poundstretcher. I couldn't do it yesterday while waiting for my delivery, but I could today. I must admit that with my chest ache/heartburn, I don't feel terribly inclined to go out - particularly in the rain. I might give it a miss until tomorrow. One thing I must do today is to have the shower I wanted to have yesterday. It is a lot more important today because this afternoon's entertainment may be a visit from Jodie, and some exotic beer tasting.

  Looking further to the future, next Tuesday may be another difficult day. I recently dragged a bottle of Lambs Navy Rum from the back of a dusty shelf, and enjoyed several tots from it - enough to finish the bottle. Yesterday I had teh totally crazy idea of ordering more from Amazon. I ordered one bottle of Navy Rum, one bottle of Lambs spiced rum, and one bottle of Lambs Black Spiced Rum.  Amazon predict they will be delivered this coming Tuesday. I predict another day of waiting around getting cross because there is no information until about the last hour.








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