Wow, summer is here – 36deg today, and the first day I’m using the air-con on cooling this summer. And another hooray, Christmas Day is forecast to be mild, about 30-31degC. I found a good graph on the web yesterday:

What happened in 2018?! From then on, the maxes skyrocketed. Weird.

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Good news! My abdominal pain has mostly gone away.

Last Saturday, although the pain patches were working extremely well, I was sick of the hand tremors and feeling woozy and unsteady. So I pulled the patch off and thought, “I’ll try putting up with the pain, and hope the side effects go away.”

OK, not much happened for 24hrs, then 36hrs, then 48hrs. No pain! The pain stayed away. I thought this might happen. I’d even talked to the GP about it last week. “The body often fixes itself.”

Well, at 72hrs later, so far so good. I’m still getting twinges and small sharp pains, but I can easily stand them.

So yesterday, Monday, I had to attend Joondalup Hospital to be assessed for anaesthesia for the scheduled nerve block operation on Thursday 5 January. I told the anaesthetist about the remission and she phoned the pain specialist. The judgement was that we’ll go through the rigorous assessment process anyway, and I’ll phone on Tuesday 3 Jan or Wed 4 Jan to decide whether to go ahead with the op. I’ve said the idea of the operation makes me nervous and I don’t want to have it if I don’t need it, so we’ll leave it at that. Fine with me.

What a thorough, rigorous, complex assessment this was. First, about an hour with on-line filling out the hospital’s form. Then when I got to the hospital, another hour with a nurse going through every detail of the on-line form, plus another three or four hospital forms, checking, double checking, asking questions. Then blood pressure (135/93, btw), an ecg, the usual pulse and oxygen saturation. Then finger prick and blood sugar level. This showed 4.1 mmol/ml. That’s low for me, nearing hypoglycemia level, although I felt OK. The nurse asked if I had my kit to deal with this. Luckily, I had a packet of jellybeans for this very situation, so she insisted that I start munching on them. That got me up to 4.8 about 20 mins later. She was very pleased with me for that. Top marks for carrying these beans. That’s nice.

The fact was that I felt so wobbly when I got up at about 9am, and after my shower, having to hurriedly fill out the on-line form, that I never got around to breakfast. My appointment was at 1pm so I drove there, skipping lunch too, and had to walk to the rooms feeling very weak and wobbly. No wonder my blood sugar was low. The nurse insisted on getting me a couple of biscuits to go after the jelly beans, so that was nice.

Then after another 30 min wait and a couple of very nice conversations with other patients, I got in to see the anaesthetist. Gee, I would never have guessed her position and status – she looked a bit dumpy (overweight) and spoke and moved slowly. Not what I thought an anaesthetist would be like. However, we got through the interview OK and then it was all over, around 3.30pm. Two and a half hours, wow.

She did tell me to absolutely stop taking one of my diabetes meds, Jardiamet. It is dangerous for anaesthesia, she said. OK, all good. So that was it.

I was still feeling weak and wobbly so it was a hard walk back to the carpark. My left leg seems to want to collapse under me. It doesn’t, but it’s not good. Also, when I weighed this morning, I lost 1kg yesterday. Not surprising.

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