Well That Didn't Go According to Plan...

Sometimes you start with the best of intentions, and then it all goes to hell.
 
So I saw my GP yesterday and it was the young, with-it one, rather than the elderly, baffled by her computer one. And everything went great, I got the referral for my shoulder issues that I wanted, I got the agreement we needed to try again with the wheelchair assessment, she checked my blood pressure which was okay (which considering stress etc is really good), and then said, 'Oh, and you've not had a blood test in a while, so here's the form, and it's a fasting test, so nothing after 7PM'. Oh, great.

So I got home, by which point it was gone 5PM, and, not actually having had anything to eat yet at that point - bad night, 4 hours sleep from 8AM til Midday, decided that if I wanted to do the blood test on Tuesday I'd better have something to eat right then. So I threw a pizza and some garlic bread in the oven,  and they were yummy, but given time to get organised, heat the oven etc I was pushing that 7PM deadline, and had to rush the meal, which shortly after manifested itself as indigestion.

And then I fell asleep, and slept until midnight. Now I'm not about to turn my nose up at 4 or 5 hours of clearly needed sleep, but sleeping on top of indigestion meant I woke up with not just indigestion, but indigestion and backache. This is a bad combination for me and rarely ends well. So I found my heat pad and a book, a couple of ibuprofen and half a bottle of wine and settled down to try and wait it out.

About 3AM it was clear the backache was gaining on me, so I abandoned the heat pad for a hot bath, and when the bath wasn't enough a pounding shower directed right at the knot of pain growing at the back of my ribs. And then the inevitable happened and I finished the night by vomiting everything up into the toilet.

That broke the back (ha!) of the pain, but it was pretty much 8AM before I got to sleep again, and I slept through until 2PM. So now it's 4PM Tuesday, I've had bugger all to eat since whenever I last ate on Sunday and I've got an 'I need to be fed, but gently' stomach ache (fortunately no back-ache) and I'd guess it's going to take a couple of meals before I'm back to normal. So I guess chances of the fasting blood test happening Wednesday are pretty slight.

Why is it never simple?

And I've still got the blood test and the competitive sport of 'find the vein' (I've literally had nurses queueing up for a try in the past) to look forward to.

December Dazed and Confused

I'm not proposing to do the full December Days things as I'm likely to be offline at my folks in Durham from potentially as early as next week (I can use my old keyboard Kindle to reply to other people's posts while there,  but it can't handle creating a new post - grr) and once I'm up there I probably won't get back home until early January.

With that said, if anyone has anything they'd like to suggest me writing about, feel free.  

Antipathetical Anniversary

Just realised that Sunday was six years to the day from being forced kicking and screaming* out of the doors at Evil Aerospace Inc. Wow, that seems like a lot. And yet in someways it really doesn't. 

I'm not happy my career ended that way, it robbed the good parts of it of something they can never get back.

I'm glad I fought, it was something I needed to do, and I'm a better person for it.

Fighting for my needs also made me better at fighting for the needs of others.

I'm still so disappointed in some of the people who were in my management chain. Some of them were clearly arseholes, and the most problematic of all was open in his disablism (unless we were on record), but some of these people had a history of fighting for other minorities. What happened to them? When did doing what was right take second place to covering the back of an open disablist? To denying evidence that was clear for anyone to see? To holding opinions that were outright illogical ('we don't believe you're disabled, but you'd better have my executive chair because I know your back is so bad you won't get through the meeting without it')?

On the other hand, I'd probably have needed to stop working relatively soon after that, and I'm not certain I'd have been able to do that on my own, so maybe a tiny hint of utterly unintended usefulness in there.

* I actually went quietly on the day, having put the day off for longer than anyone believed possible, then turned the union's lawyers on them ;)