Splints update

Ha time for more mobile shenanigans with autocorrelation and format issues.

So last time I was going to my local friendly hospital for fitting.

I managed not to get lost and to be an hour early.

The service was efficient and friendly, measuring involved being cast. Apparently I can't have purple as it's only for children. Boo for being an adult.

They'll be ready end of January. Yay bionic legs.

Unnecessarily nervous.

So today is my early Christmas present of orthotics fitting. It's at nine am at my local hospital so I'm up early to make sure my feet are as presentable as possible before they get looked at and measured.

I'm really nervous for some reason, and I'm not sure why. Naughty me hasn't been to physio in two weeks due to manflu and I only went back to work on Saturday and that took it out of me. I still have no appetite or proper taste. Pigs in blankets for breakfast tasted awful.

I'll update later, maybe with a photo if the orthotics are off the shelf but I really must ring physio to get back on schedule with that.

Also I've lost a cap on my front tooth, so I look more like a hobo with beard and a curved front tooth. My dreams of being Santa are slipping away.

Talk laters 

Entirely fair

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10152484390566636&id=13312631635

The link leads to the story about EastEnders actress Kiruna Stamell who successfully sued the post office for not making the reasonable adjustment of having movable teathered pin machines and humiliating her by building steps with cardboard boxes. 

Ok, hands up, at first when I spied the headline I thought: but all those pin machines are mobile and what not and I simply don't test that theory because I might end up swinging it around like a lightsaber making bing noises and then the men in blue come and I have to quietly leave. (Where's my armed response unit? usual gets a laugh and a shove).

Apparently not all pin machines are built equal. It's only a shame that a good idea that should be standard isn't, but what I suspect happened was a company rep from pin machine co came out and quoted the basic price but then gave a little talk about reasonable adjustments and how for only £XXX.XX more they could make them fully opposable and the Post Office bod baulked, thought it was a gimmicky sell with a story and quickly ushered the rep out the door. 

It's a shame it took a court case to highlight it, but it shows how simple a reasonable adjustment could be. Lower counter top, moving pin machines, ramps instead of or as well as steps. The thing about reasonable adjustments is they cannot be outlandish and the company, if they really are cruel, can claim that due to impact on profits or staff levels etc the adjustment isn't reasonable. This of course can trigger further court cases etc.

I'm a little sorry that the Post Office didn't make this more of a PR exercise, and not try to fight it. Fighting disabled people about being unreasonable does no one any favours.

Anyway, good on her.

What IS love?

So, as any regular reader may have noted (as it is most likely my parents), I have managed to hold together a fairly succesful relationship that even my manager feels is doing me wonders (that one has her head screwed on right). 

I'm not going to lie now and say I understand the complete ins and outs of women and relationships. Previous relationships have just ticked by until the girl decides she's had enough and that things aren't progressing the way she would like, and she ends it. At that point I just find another girl and repeat the cycle, not thinking of how it affects the girl or how a friendship should develop.

It was noted in my original diagnosis report that I understand the concept of friends, that theoretically I know how friendship should work, but that I was unable to put that into practice or to develop friendships beyond rudimentary basics. That's not to say I don't have friends, just sometimes it takes a special person to understand that for me maybe friendship is more of a transaction rather than anything more complex, we hang out, we swap stories, we do stuff. For this post, I am simply taking the concept further to include romantic relationships.

Sure, I understand the concept of romance too. Boy meets girl, boy fails to understand girl, boy convinces girl they should be together, babies ensue. Something along those lines, interspersed with romantic moments  and gift giving. I dunno, it's all murky and odd.

It probably doesn't help that I view love as a chemical imbalance, designed to let us couple together to create life and continue the species. Yes, that is a terribly cold way to view it, but it's the point of all romantic relationships, to generate the circumstances to allow the next generation to be created. Oh, we humans think we are all higher purpose, gifted with intelligence and as Carl Sagan put it, we are free from the reptile brain to change ourselves, think of the possiblities. Frankly, that may all be true, and we can all wax lyrical from Shakespeare's sonnets to Philip Larkin (oh cut me some slack, he captured me as a youth with his liberal use of curse words), but really, at the end of it all, we simply create and propagate the next generation, which is the basic drive of life. Dung beetles roll up wads of poop, Emperor penguins freeze to death and turtles flee down beaches in this need to create.

Honestly are human concepts like love and romance really anything more than constructs and chemicals to drive us further?

My partner gave her notice on her apartment and job last month, intent on moving closer to me and my job. This morning, I asked her what she was going to do with her bed. A simple question and she said she would sell it. I suppose it only hit me then the enormity of whats he was doing. She was moving her entire life, packing it all together, to move closer to me and to support a job that I am currently excelling at.

It prompted a conservation in the car, to the airport, where she was dropping me off (because sensitive coversations and topics should always be handled when time is short), about her depth of feeling for me and her conviction in moving.

How do you tell a girl you don't love her? 

Not in the i don't love you but type of I don't love you, but in the i don't have love. That "you'll just know" feeling. The million ways poets and amatures and love struck idiots describe the inner feeling. I just don't have it. Never have. Oh I can FAKE it, but I don't feel it. 

So then my partner asks why I use the words "I love you" when most likely what I feel isn't what she feels and that the words are just meaningless filler.

Simple answer? Convention. 

Ease of communicating an idea. It's what language is for, the simple and effective means of communicating an idea or feeling. Oh sure millions try to twist language into gaudy unnecessary drivel, using allegory and metaphor to express simple concepts to make themselves and others feel smarter. The needless deciphering of these nonsense statements simply hads to the difficulty and complexity of modern society. No one ever suffered from making a blunt speech. (Oh they may have suffered from the consequences but that is what one gets for saying things nobody else wants to hear, there is a time and a place to tell someone exactly what you think of them and that is usually when you are beyond range of reprisal). 

I love you means I don't have to explain myself to any casual eavesdroppers. Society knows the weight of those words and while it rings hollow in both my and my partners ears it saves me having to create some new phrase like you are the one I hate least (thank you Finland) or I tolerate you the most. The concept ingrained in my i love you is you get me, I make sense to you, even when I'm curled in a ball in bed in the middle of the day trying to shut out the surrounding world.

Of course, in a rushed car journey is maybe not the best time to say I don't actually love you but I still want to spend my life with you. My partner simply traded her love for my trust and fedeltiy, which if anyone reading knows me, despite all my faults in social understanding, I am a complete womaniser. Case in point while Christmas shopping, I made four separate female cashiers in four separate shops genuinely laugh with my charm and flattery. Oh I can do the first part no problem, it's the longer term grind that I seem unable to keep up, either with the persona of a good boyfriend (yes, my partner has seen behind that, and yes I have managed to make her doubt what she saw by being honest)  

Physio

So I had my second round of physio yesterday. I've a lovely student called Sarah who seems out to cause me help and harm in equal measure. They totally deserve the title pyhsioterrorist. So last weeks post was more a disappointing test of mobile phone blogger (misspellings and an aimless post prove it was junk and only for live blog the agony). 

So first round of physio focused on the usual assessment, supposed information gather forms that are actually revenue capture methods and some basic sit to stand work, which I can't do at home because all my chairs and sofa are lounge types that don't make you sit like your back in school.

Also due to forgetfulness (read laziness) I am having physio twice a week to try to get some progress. 

This week, after last weeks easy lure, started with some pelvic thrust motions that where only faintly embarrassing while sitting but became hilarious when Sarah got me on the bed and felt my pelvic muscles while I did the pelvic thrusts into the air. The motion is to help me stand without having to swing my arms, but all I could think was "don't fart" as that really would have lowered the tone. Why is it when in such delicate positions your lower bowels decide its music time? I am however a master of my bowels (for the moment) and wind did not come to pass. 

The next trick was to suck in my gut to tense my abdo muscles. This is to give me central balance for walking and involved me sucking in and up on my gut (I'm fairly svelt in that position). This has the disaster that my diaphragm couldn't expand, causing me to hold my breath. Sarah decided this was the point to remind me to breath. Lady physio, I would love to, but currently you're crushing my gut into my lungs and I can't do two things at once anyway. Oh good, I need to because I should be tensing those muscles while I walk. I thought it was made clear in the Magna Carta or something that men can do no more than one task at once. I am though reliably informed by a friend who does dance that this pelvic muscle give gents moves in the bedroom (ladies). Of course, it would help if I could breath on my way to said bedroom.

Finally we did some calf streches to stop the uncontrolled judder my legs suffer when I lower my heal to the ground. I wasn't previously aware of the horrific pain that could be cause when a physio digs their fingers into the top branches of a calf muscle and pull either direction while you lower you leg but I shall be writing to The Hague to see if the Geneva convention says anything about this vile torture. Not ashamed that at this point Sarah may have heard the crack she was a terrorist more than once, but only after I corrected her hand grip to match her supervising physio. The fact I managed to walk home is perhaps a miracle.

Oman side note, everyone I tell I'm getting orthotics makes an ouch sound and gives me sympathy. One girl asked it they would be screwed into my legs. I hope not, I like my legs how they are. Also, no word on if I will have them for Christmas, I'll be feeling all kinds of festive with those things bending my feet into position........

Irrational hatred.

Maybe the internet has ruined me, like how everything is suddenly the male genitals, no matter how much imagination I have tho project onto it (those smiley emoticons take some work), but some days staying inside with my cold unfeeling appliances is still prefareable to being outside with humans.

It's a cold day here, typical northern hemisphere winter, with clear sky's and that festive cheer we're supposed to feel months before the years biggest anticlimax. It is also a Sunday, so while traffic heading into town is number to number, the local shops parking lots (there's three) are devoid of cars. Without the clutter of cars, it becomes immediatly apparent that there isn't even road side trees to try and break up the stark modern landscape and there must be twenty square foot (if not more) of cold bare Tarmac. 

I'm a big fan of nature, not as this thing that we go and stand in for an afternoon before returning to our boxes or something that can be tided neatly into a square with animals that know their space and not invade our space. For me nature is something we exclude, believing it is easily forgotten until we grow it in parks and gardens, showing our might by controlling it and shape it to our whims. Concret curtains should never hide simple natural beauty. It's like we are slapping make up over a girls face to tell her that without shadow and blush she is ugly. 

The simple truth is that nature doesn't need humans, rather humans need it. Nature invades our neat spaces, breaks windows to flourish and cracks mans imitation ground at spread. Standing in the first of these lots, I was struck by the sheer waste, sure people park but even when full the lots are half empty, more reminiscent of waste land than anything managed or controlled, either by nature or humans. 

It speaks to the shortsightedness of humans. We live for such short times that we grab what we can while we can. We have gone from shaping nature, controlling it, in 18th century royal gardens to running rough shod over it, destroying it beyond reason and tipping the balance from humans being battered to nature taking the beating. We mercilessly strip the ground for rescources, destroy jungles that produce oxygen that keeps the earth a life habitable planet, and play petty politics to gain a resource that is worthless without the very thing we destroy, after all money has no buying power if food is unable to grow or water is poisoned.

Big business and people with money are only concerned with money, the gathering of it, the theft of it from others. They, and we, stand on others to gain what we want. The gap is widening all the time between the have and the have nots, and I am lucky that I am one of the haves (in spades). I run my life like a business, I maximise my profit while trying to minimise my output. It is simple evolutionary drive, we don't see what we have, only that which we don't have. When we where hunting wooly mammoths, this was a useful survival need, something that pushed us to our next hunt when we had a full belly. Now, while it is ingrained into us the same way we see Jesus in toast because we are pattern driven, we are free of the lizard brain and can recognise the basic drive and over come it. This is where today's irrational hatred comes from, my local shop is doing a food drive for a food bank. Ok fair it's a good way for said local shop to make extra money running up to Christmas, but I am also a little dismayed to hear that not only is the drive not doing well, but people are asking if the food in the box is free. My partner suggests that this is because the box is badly labeled but even so.  

Many people and governments have recognised we need to dial back the nature destruction, with incentives for Eco homes and solar panels. My energy provider has green options where a levee can be paid for trees, my work manager has suggested we out together a suggestion for buying a plot and growing a forest, something I haven't had time to do, and from enquires to the forestry commission, you need good money to sponsor a forest. It's a pet project I would love to do, a plot of land and a forest, not for profit but just to put back what we take. The idea that the volcano that in 2010 belched carbon into the atmosphere helped the environment by grounding flights that would do more carbon damage is just insane, volcanos not being known for their subtly (ask your local Pompeii resident). 

As they Michael Jackson song says, we should start with the person in the mirror, charity starts at home. This is why I find band aid 30, or whatever it's being called, galling and worse that singers who didn't take part are being forced to defend themselves. First off, if multimillionaire singers are that worried about poverty let them give away their own money, secondly Africa is not one big poverty hole for us to pour money in so that we can feel better about ourselves while we sit in the warmth with our fidges that shop for us and our phones with GPS in case we get lost on the way to the bathroom (and wind up on the seventh plain of hell), and thirdly (yes I'm going after U2 here) in a countries time of need the proud to be Irish band fled to become tax exiles. While gap year students are much maligned for stealing local jobs, sending money with no focus is just as bad. Audits of the first live aid money shows a lot just lined dictators pockets and shored up corrupt juntas. 

I was feeling slightly hopeful halfway through that, but it ends on a him not, so forget this, I'm going back to bed.

First day

So today is important. First off I have just downloaded the blogger app on my new smart phone. Hopefully it won't give me any surprises like revealing my secret identity to the world at large (although most of my readers are my family and it's hard being anonymous to them).
Second, and the reason I download the app, is today is my first nhs physio appointment since my cerebral palsy diagnosis. The wait of over half a year is not really their fault, I am too well apparently for impatient (in both meanings) treatment and I'm guessing there's a long waiting list to am seen as an out patient.
Just to prove how much paper work is involved this is the appointment that my practice nurse (general practice doctors nurse) made for me about a month ago. I received a letter telling me I would be discharged from outpatient physio as I had not attended the original appointment made for me, the letter for which I had not received.
Anyway enough complaining about letters.

I have a long, complex history with physio. Until diagnosis every physio I saw was at a disadvantage. After diagnosis, I saw a private physio. Guess how Much that worked?

The upside to four physio assessments before today is I know my limits. The downside is I still get surprises.

surprise! I need splints.

Sigh.