yonmei

12:11 pm: UK to US: The Truth About the NHS!
Signed the petition, added a comment:

My grandfather lived long enough for me to remember him because an NHS surgeon performed a quadruple bypass on his heart when I was two. My dad is still alive and well (and able to see and to bake his own bread) at the age of 82 because NHS surgeons performed operations on his wrist, his eyes, and his heart, in the past five years. I've had regular visits to my GP and to consultants over the past two or three years to establish why I felt like I had a perpetual cold in the head: turned out to be a dust allergy, for which I get regular medication and pay £104 a year for all my prescriptions. I would have been functionally blind since I was 7 if not for NHS eye-tests and free NHS specs till I was 16: I pay for my lenses now I'm working full-time, but when I was a student or looking for work I could get free lenses when I needed a replacement prescription. The NHS keeps me healthy, keeps me sighted, keeps me free: the US corporate control of healthcare is not only evil, it's inefficient and stupid.

Update: Wow. I think the petition went up this morning and there were over 10,000 signatures by the time I signed it: at 17:11 today there are
29,740 30,369 signatures.



Tags: evil american politics, evil americans advertising against nhs, family stuff, my health, nose of a nose

10:35 pm: House and #welovethenhs
Of House, I missed "Big Baby" and "The Greater Good", because in the load of stuff I had to get done before I left for Montreal, setting the video to record House never made it far enough up the list.

I just watched "Unfaithful" and "The Softer Side", on Sky's Saturday night repeat, so: can House fans tell me if I need to seek out and watch the two I missed, or didn't it matter?

At something after midnight this morning, having dutifully stayed awake in order to bring my sleeping patterns back to UK-normal, I fell over something and hit my wrist on something. It hurt and I felt stupid and I got into bed and glanced at my wrist and saw that where I had hit it was a blue oval that seemed to be swelling perceptibly as I watched.

So I rang NHS24 in a bit of a panic and talked to someone helpful who said, more or less, that if I could move my hand about without agony and I wasn't on warfarin, then probably I was OK to go to sleep and take it to A&E the next morning. (The nearest A&E department, thanks to some excruciatingly stupid decisions made by the Lothians NHS Trust in the 1990s, is miles and miles away and the only way to get there and back at 1am is by an excruciatingly expensive taxi: also I had at this point had no sleep for nearly 36 hours and the thought of another delay to going to sleep was actually nightmarish.)

I slept: I woke at 1pm. Still tired. Both cats asleep on me. It took me over two hours to get dressed and get out of the house, and then my neighbor wanted to talk to me about the new washing line: it was nearly five when I actually got to A&E (it's a 45-minute bus ride on the 21, though at least the 21 takes me all the way) and my wrist felt so much better I actually felt a bit of an idiot for walking through the door labelled EMERGENCY, though I would have felt like a bigger one if I'd just gone home again.

I got seen after only 15 minutes or so waiting, and got dismissed in less than five, with instructions to take a couple of days off work if I found typing difficult. I am experimenting. So far it's OK. Of course I just took the last of my paracetamol-with-codeine. Yes, I have a massive bruise on my right wrist; no, apparently nothing is wrong but bruising. Which is, you know, good to know, even at the cost of a 90-minute bus ride and my bus fare.

I got home about seven, having this time remembered I needed fresh fruit and milk (the item 9 on yesterday's list I kept forgetting about) when I was passing Scotmid, which was still open, though Tattie Shaws would have closed. (Somehow, I never felt like going for a walk in the rain yesterday.)

Wolf is no longer sulking. Bob is awfully clingy.

Tags: house md, i watch tv obsessively, my health

11:11 am: Cute little water dragon!


(plus four little dragons with less than 2 days before they turn into cute little headstones...)

Having the weirdest period ever, by the way. Also, George W. Bush isn't President of the US any more! And the show trials at Guantanamo Bay have been shut down for 120 days - hopefully forever. And there's a section on civil rights on the new WhiteHouse.gov website which is more than half about LGBT issues.

...on the other hand, Global Gag Rule, still gaggy.

Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, evil american politics, my health

12:41 pm: This cold has now been dragging on unpleasantly
...since Tuesday. In fact, since Monday night, really. I mean right now I'm at the hacking-up-unpleasant-organic-matter stage. But then I was at that stage yesterday.

Ought I to cancel birthday party tomorrow? It is, I think, cancelable - or at least, probably the pub where I booked the room will be OK about pushing it off another week or so, if I ring them up and cough/hack madly at them. And as the whole thing was organised via Facebook/email it turns into a reasonably easy thing to change dates on. Mainly I'm just pissed I'm not going to enjoy it all that much. Also it seems a little unreasonable, if I'm going to be feeling like crap. Also, I suppose, guilt-tripping over work. Argh, mostly.

Tags: birthday, my health

02:30 pm: *cough* *hack* *spit*
*iz brain-ded*

New verb: retweeting.

Poll #3032 Twitter twitter twit twit twee
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Do you twitter?

Yonmei is home with her cold.

Tags: ankle hurts me, dragon eggs need clicky, dragons, my health

09:20 am: Ugh.
also: dragon eggs.




Tags: dragon eggs need clicky, my health

09:42 pm: Not the best of birthdays
My parents rang me to wish me a happy birthday. Also, to ask me how to fix their Internet connection. Sympathetic as I am, the best advice I can offer is to ring their supplier's helpline - it's what I'd do.



My ankle feels Lots Better, though I was out today for two and a half hours (one hour of which I spent sitting in Valvona and Crolla's cafe with my foot up, drinking Single Estate Afternoon Tea and eating a fruit tart which I felt would do for a birthday cake). I missed the weekly fruit'n'veg coop due to not getting out of the house till after 11am, but was charmed to find, meeting a neighbour I hadn't spoken to for a week, that the street's grapevine had already passed on that I had had an accident and was temporarily disabled. As it does.

My cold also feels better: at least, I am not shaking with cold. Am still feeling brain-ded, though. Oh god, I do/do not want to take tomorrow off work as well.

Tags: ankle hurts me, dragon eggs need clicky, my health

11:41 am: I just had an offer for the next 25 years...
That is, I got a letter yesterday inviting me to be part of the UK Biobank project.

"UK Biobank aims to study how the health of 500 000 people, currently aged 40-69, from all around the UK is affected by their lifestyle, environment, and genes." It's an NHS project intended to provide a large amount of information about the whole population to discover why some people develop particular diseases and others don't. (I probably have a genetic predisposition to late-onset diabetes, and possibly to cervical cancer, for example: but my lifestyle makes it highly unlikely that I'll develop cervical cancer, and I've been forming a lifestyle that hopefully means I won't develop diabetes when I'm older, or if I do, I'll be able to manage it without too much ill effect: also I should like to avoid developing osteoparosis, which women on my mother's side of the family have been prone to.)

I have an appointment for the end of February, which I've yet to confirm, but I'm probably going to. The main reason for not confirming it, as far as I can see from the available information not produced by the NHS, would be a concern that there are not acceptable safeguards in place against having the donated genetic material patented at some future date. They take blood and urine samples at the assessment appointment, and while you can withdraw from the study at any time, it's not clear from the material they've provided if you can withdraw your samples from the study. Something I should ask about.

Anyway, it should be interesting. The 90-minute assessment interview apparently includes measurements of blood pressure, pulse rate, body fat, grip strength, bone density, and lung function, and you receive "the key results" - though they point out it won't be a health check. I shall also be interested to discover if they ask about sexual orientation.

Tags: just my life really, my health, the big nhs project, wow i am self-obsessed