WOYWW 483

It’s been a busy week for me again this week, at the conference all weekend. At least the venue is only 5 mins away by car and my hubby was happy to drop me over, and he joined us for a couple of meals. It all went very well and everyone seemed to like my singing, which I was pleased about. It was lovely to meet up with friends old and new, and I met some very interesting people. We had some fascinating talks, including one by a missionary couple from Brazil – he explained that his parents had met and fallen in love and married without knowing some crucial facts about each other – that he was a Nazi and she was a Jew! As you can imagine, he had a rather confusing time growing up in that household.

Not much more progress made on the current UFO – I made a couple more flowers and that’s about it!

Cooking

This week’s bread: challah for the conference, and more sourdough.

This time I made the sourdough with half white bread flour and a quarter each whole wheat and whole rye. I do like the flavour of the rye but it seems to make the dough more difficult to handle. It worked pretty well but I don’t think it’s risen quite as much as the previous loaf. It tastes pretty good, though! Unfortunately it cracked a bit on top and I’m not sure why that should have happened.

Yesterday morning, being confronted with a huge amount of apple that my hubby had peeled and chopped, I made a big pot of apple chutney which will probably keep us going for months! The recipe says to leave it for 6 weeks to mature but I’ve had a little taste and it tastes fine. Later on it will probably be more blended. I didn’t have enough of most of the ingredients in the recipe so I adapted it and just bunged in a whole lot of extra stuff!

There was also another tall narrow pot but I gave this to my friend who spent yesterday afternoon with me. I didn’t have quite enough to fill the jar at the front.

Kitties

Perfect symmetry?

Last night we lost Ruby. We thought she might have got out when my friend was leaving but we called in the garden and my hubby went out with a torch, but couldn’t find her. We searched high and low in the house and there was no sign. Lily seemed to be a bit twitched, not knowing where her sister was. I was looking again in the bedroom and my hubby called me, and there she was, without a care in the world, sitting on the stairs! We haven’t a clue where she’d got to.

It reminded me of the time when Dad was in his dementia home, and he’d lost his glasses (he used to lose things for a pastime) and my hubby and the staff looked everywhere, to no avail. Eventually my hubby managed to find his spare pair amongst some of his other stuff we had here at home, and took them in, only to find Dad sitting as happy as Larry, wearing the lost pair! When my hubby asked him about them, he not only couldn’t tell him where he’d found them, but couldn’t even remember losing them in the first place! We had a good laugh about that. Dad took it all in very good part and just went on in his usual confused way!

Health Update

When I saw my surgeon over a fortnight ago he said I was to go back on the rivaroxaban again (anticoagulant). I’d been on it for a while after one of my routine oncology CT scans revealed numerous small pulmonary emboli, but I stopped it after my operation in March, and after I finished the course of post-op fragmin injections (shorter-acting anticoagulant), I wasn’t on anything. I’d asked the GP about it and she said she’d heard from my surgeon that I wasn’t to go back on the rivaroxaban until he’d seen me, but of course that appointment was a lot longer coming than I’d hoped, so the months were going by and I was getting a bit concerned. When I saw him he just said I should start them again – why he couldn’t just have said that to the GP I don’t know, because he didn’t seem to need to discuss it with me. Anyway, after that, again I didn’t hear anything so we checked at the pharmacy to see if a prescription had come up, which it hadn’t, so I phoned the surgery and arranged a telephone appointment with the GP that happened on Monday. She immediately agreed to deal with it and the prescription was ready for collection first thing on Tuesday, which was great. I’ve got to make an appointment with the practice nurse in a fortnight’s time to have my kidney function checked now I’m back on them again.

It was good that I was able to speak to the GP because over the weekend something else came up. I think it was because I was sitting for so long at the conference but not with my feet up. I have a varicose vein on my left leg and on Sunday evening after the end of the conference I noticed I had a small tender lump near my ankle, and on Monday I had two more up my leg, and it has become very painful when I stand on it. I told the GP that I was worried I might have a thrombosis and told her about the varicose vein, and the fact I’d been pretty immobile for a few days. She said that a DVT would produce generalised swelling of the leg and not small local lumps, and that this was thrombophlebitis. Going back on the rivaroxaban should solve the problem pretty quickly, but if I was concerned, I should come to the surgery and get it looked at. She said that because it was superficial, there wasn’t nearly as high a risk as with a DVT and that they usually disappeared on their own, so I was reassured. Sitting with my legs up, I’m not really aware of it but it hurts like crazy as soon as I put my feet down and stand up! Always something, isn’t there…

As the days go on, I am more and more convinced that my hernia has returned. I still haven’t got a CT scan appointment… I’m keeping a close eye on things and hoping I don’t get another obstruction.

I’m hoping that the next few days will be relatively quiet so that I can rest a bit after being so busy lately. One day I might even get into my studio (if I can actually clamber over all the junk in there) and tidy up and maybe even do something creative in there!