Tales from the Tigerfort

Update, sorry, I meant update. It is almost back to normal functioning now, but I don't (sadly) have any cyberpunky extras like a built in telephoto lens or infra-red vision. My pupil is round again and dilating normally, and the related pain seems to be gone as well. The steroid drops make my vision a bit dodgy - focussing just isn't quite right for the first couple of hours after each one - but I'm dropping to four doses per day from tomorrow, which should make it a bit easier to do things that require proper binocular vision.

Once more, we say hurrah for modern medicine and the NHS!

It seems to be a month or so since I last posted, making a mockery once more of the once-a-week target. Currently (not literally currently, it's Sunday morning! But much of last week and also of next week), the fort is full of people drilling holes in walls, pulling up floorboards, and replacing the previous owners' unique artisan wiring with stuff that complies with safety regs and doesn't give me nightmares. stripey_cat's social anxiety handles this sort of thing about as well as you might expect. (I may be the teensiest bit strung-out myself, one way and another.)

In the meantime, I've now had my second appointment with the audiologist. Second and last, in fact; I've been officially discharged from the clinic, to (I think) mutual satisfaction. The tinnitus hasn't changed at all over the intervening period, but I'm now able to cope with it much better than I was. Little things (some of which I'd meant to try anyway), but a big cumulative difference.

It seems to be a couple of months since I last managed a weekly journal entry. Again. Oops. Mostly I think that's a question of letting the good be the enemy of writing anything at all, but there has actually been an element of doing stuff and getting genuinely exhausted. Which is actually a good thing (even if making me exhausted is currently not as difficult as would be ideal).

The leg-brace continues to make my life much easier. I'm still limited in a range of ways, but I can do so much more than I could a year ago, and it really feels like freedom. The consequent reduction in stress levels does rather seem to be helping with other things, too.

Not unrelated to my regaining the ability to actually do things, the idea of moving down to the southwest has rather rapidly gone from "nice idea" through pln to "we've had a couple of market appraisals of this house and looked at a few possible places in Cornwall". My target had been to get our house onto the market this week, which sadly isn't quite going to happen. But our storage unit is filling up nicely, and the house looks a lot more spacious with half the stuff removed from it. I'm sometimes finding it tricky to pace myself properly, but mostly I seem to be managing that alright, and the satisfaction (and relief) of making the house visibly tidier every day is immense.

My most recent post (back on the 25th of March) seems to have done something fairly fatal to my target of one per week. Oops.

I think the long gap actually is partly the fault of that post - it's an attempt at a serious subject, and it needs work (it isn't even finished, for goodness' sake), and I suffered from "but I ought to sort that out before starting anything else...".

One or two other things have happened here in the last ten weeks, though, which have contributed to the radio silence:

• I switched ISP. Sort-of twice, but that's another matter for another post


• My mother suffered a bad attack of sciatica, and stripey_cat and I decamped over to her house to look after her and the cats for a couple of weeks. This was a slight strain on everyone's nerves, but we all seem to have coped.


• Unfortunately, that meant that the following couple of weeks were spent recovering from that, rather than getting the house as ready as possible for my current condition.


• My knee operation finally happened (last Thursday). So I'm currently rather less mobile than I was a week ago, but hoping to be showing substantial improvement. It already hurts less than it did, which is good, although how much of that is directly due to the surgery and how much is that I've probably spent a total of less than five minutes per day standing up since the operation I couldn't say.

I'm going to make a serious effort to increase my posting frequency, preferably with the aid of some book-related stuff. And there should be a modest rant about ISPs - or, rather, about one particular ISP - coming up in the next day or two.

It seems to be a month since I last posted. Sigh. I kept meaning to, and then I kept letting the good be the enemy of getting started.

I did get my in-person triage for the knee, which basically consisted of a consultant physio observing that it looked pretty bad and was obviously affecting me quite a bit and it would probably be a good thing to get on and do something about it. Then it turned out that they don't have a bit of paper from my GP confirming that I've been told I can go to any hospital I like and nonetheless inexplicably chosen the nearest and most convenient one[1]. The hospital has therefore sent a letter to my GP, because they need such a bit of paper before they're allowed to treat me - the primacy of patient choice and all that. They're not allowed to take any kind of statement from me to that effect, because reasons; I don't need to sign it or see it or anything, and indeed wouldn't know that it existed if only it did exist.

[1]because after all, I might want to make a much longer and more difficult journey in order to get treatment for my serious mobility problem. The fact that the Nuffield is a world-famous research centre specialising in this kind of thing just adds some icing to the cake.


As a side-effect of feeling bad about not posting, I've not been reading anything here for the last week or so, either; I'll try to catch up, and might even try to post useful comments.

I seem to have only posted twice in the last three-and-a-bit months. Oops. Nonetheless, we ait'n't dead.

What's happened here in the meantime? Well, not very much, really. I finally got my knee scanned in early December, and am now awaiting a triage appointment with the relevant surgical department (torn cartilage and cysts that may be pressing on things). In the meantime I continue to sit around too much, eat too much, not get enough exercise, and have concerns about my slowly-but-steadily rising weight and blood pressure.

Resolutions-wise, I obviously didn't manage weekly postings in November or December. I also still didn't post my new-book-lists for 2011 or 2012 (to which I can now add 2013). However, I didn't buy any second-hand books, either, so at least that one went pretty well. I'm planning to try and retain that habit, and return to weekly posting, this year. I'm also going to make an attempt to get back up to reading two new books each week (I managed 55 in 2013, well down from the previous couple of years). While I'm about it, I'll continue to try to ensure that an acceptable proportion of those books have female authors. (Of 2013's 55, 27 had female solo-authors, two were co-written by a husband and wife team, and there was one mostly-male anthology with a couple of stories by women in it; near enough exactly half.)