BLOGGING ON!

"Well", as Sam Gamgee says, "I'm back?"

I had intended to begin the first blog after Shutdown Day by asking whether any one else shut down and, if so, what did you do with all those extra hours reclaimed from computerdom?

But it all seems so long ago that it’s hardly worth the effort.

I must say, I hadn’t expected that titling a post ‘Blogging Off!’ would have turned out to be quite so prophetic…

But there I was in the small hours of Saturday morning with a violent stabbing pain in my chest and having great difficulty in breathing. Eventually the pain passed off but by Saturday morning when I had a tingling in my left hand and a feeling like a tight belt around my chest I decided to ring 999 (the emergency telephone number in the UK) and ask for help…

After that it was the ambulance trip hooked up to various machines followed by eight-and-a-half hours of examinations by A&E doctors and then medical-team doctors, ECG tests every hour or so, blood tests, chest x-rays and the eventually decision to keep me in for further observation and more tests…


The concern: was it a heart attack or, perhaps, a clot on the lung? More doctors, registrars and professors ordered injections of drugs and extractions of blood followed by a Doppler Scan and a CT Scan which involved inhaling radioactive air and being injected with radioactive gallium so that I now respond noisily to any Geiger counters I come across!

Then yesterday afternoon, after four days and three nights in Kings College Hospital (which is, I have to say, a really good place in which to be ill!) came the much-desired release and the return home knowing that I am pretty much positively OK - but with still some more tests and a referal to cardiac specialist at a future date.

I emerged from my hospitalisation with some benefits from the enforced rest (such as much lower blood-pressure) and a reinforced belief that the nursing profession are woefully underpaid for a demanding, exhausting and often messily unglamorous job.

Anyway, very many thanks for all the expressions of concern on and off the blog. And now, here we go again…