September is usually a transitional month for UK weather as we move from summer heat and sunshine into autumnal cooler, wetter weather. But in this year of exceptional weather globally, the catastrophic flooding in Libya this month being the latest example, I read that the UK has just experienced its joint warmest September on record. Throughout this summer, though, Nottingham’s weather has seemed, to me, to have remained remarkably unremarkable! Finally though, we had some hot weather at the beginning of the month. It must have been hot because Doreen, who is always cold, was seen without a jumper on!
Regular readers might have noticed a bit of a change of style in last month’s blog – not a single mention of sport! I’d had one or two friendly comments about my monthly sports report so I decided not to mention sport at all, for one month anyway. My resolve would have been challenged if England’s women had won their football World Cup final but, sadly for them, it was not to be. This month, though, we have seen Europe’s women golfers retain the Solheim Cup v the USA, while the men’s team beat the Americans convincingly to win back the Ryder Cup. Add to that US Open Tennis, and the start of the Rugby World Cup, not to mention football and cricket, and it has been quite a month. Sports report over!
There isn’t much to say on the MND front. No progress yet on wheelchairs unfortunately. We did have a bit of a shock when a letter arrived saying my next MND clinic would be at the hospital rather than by video call. Even if the wheelchair situation is resolved by then, the effort of getting to and from the hospital, for what is usually just a discussion on progress, is unthinkable. Without an adequate wheelchair I would need an ambulance both ways. Fortunately it turned out to be an ‘administrative error’!
Physically, my condition has changed very little. My head continues to become floppier, which is a real pain in the neck (literally)! What is most remarkable, though, is that 5½ years after diagnosis, my speech remains unaffected, and I can still eat and drink almost normally. While I consider myself very lucky in that respect, it does have its down side. I was weighed again last week and have put on 17.4 kg in the last year! My last two weight checks showed that I’d lost 2 kg between March and May. I was dubious about that result at the time but now I’m sure it was a mistake. Bridget, the MND nurse who weighed me, tried to reassure me that much of the weight gain is probably due to water retention, but nearly 3 stones/4 gallons of extra water sloshing around inside me is very hard to believe. My medical team is never worried by weight gain; it’s weight loss that bothers them.
In my May 2022 blog (no.53) I wrote that we had a new fish for our garden pond as company for our one surviving fish. All the others had, we believe, been taken by a heron, but the survivor had grown too big. The new fish was a bit smaller but was chosen to be inconspicuous, the top half being almost entirely black. I wrote that, “I anticipated [Doreen] would struggle to see the new fish,” but not that, “… the day after its release, she would insist that it had gone, taken already by the heron! That would be either very bad luck, or imply an exceptionally good heron intelligence network!” But as weeks and then months passed, with no sighting of the new fish, I began to accept that maybe this time she could be right! And then, early this month, our 8 yr-old grandson, Magnus, spotted it! Fiona thought Magnus might be playing a prank but she went to look and, yes, there it was. Even Doreen saw it!! Another fishy miracle?