October health update

The colder weather has seen the pain reduce but my feet are still sore and it doesn’t take a long car journey before I start getting searing spasms. The left one is favourite but they happen in my right one, too, although just not as often. I’m forcing myself to wear slippers around the house although they make my feet more sore than if they were bare. Unfortunately they also get very cold without some form of protection and also (if you read this blog), you will see we’ve had scorpions and hornets about. They aren’t life-threatening (the scorpions are very small – not the sort you find in the desert) but it would give a very nasty sting (about equivalent to a bee’s I would guess).

The problem lies with my paunch. For some reason my belly sagged and just got bigger and bigger. I can hear the brainless ones out there saying ‘don’t eat so much, then’. It isn’t a case of food intake, it’s a case of water retention. That’s why I weigh more than a typically fat person of my size would do. At over 250kg, I guess my time on this planet is very limited which is why I’m hoping to raise cash from my websites to pay for some form of help.

Unfortunately, the only thing the doctors want to do is an ‘intervento’. This is a gastric bypass or roux-en-y operation. It is designed to reduce appetite by making the stomach smaller so that it ‘fills up’ more quickly. Yes, but I only eat twice a day and I don’t drink, eat fatty foods, take sugar, eat sweets, smoke etc. One young lad (who clearly needs both a brain and glasses) called me ‘Fat American Boy’ (not bad for someone who is half-way to their 49th birthday! The relevance being that the American diet is seen as being the root-cause of anyone who is overweight.

You get branded with the dreaded word ‘obese’ – it even sounds offensive. An obese person (in the eyes of the world) is someone who eats inappropiate foods to excess, presumably in the full knowledge of the damage this is causing. Consequently, you are not only ‘obese’, you are also mentally defective and have the same status as someone who regularly attempts (and fails) at suicide. That is why I object to the word. I am neither suicidal nor mentally defective.

The problem started when I had to tie myself to the desk. Our company was having problems after an ex-director helped himself to cash as well as throwing away many clients. Our staff turned a blind eye, too. I had to work double and even triple-shifts (along with my wife) to save ourselves from going bankrupt. We succeeded but my health failed. The doctors did nothing and the condition deteriorated.

I now have to find a cure – somehow. It will take a lot of money (my guess is around £50,000 or $100,000) and I will lose at least 6 months of my life in a centre somewhere. My doctors won’t give me any help and I can’t see any cash being forthcoming so I’m going to have to make the money online which is exactly the wrong thing to do for my circulation problems!

Going it alone

I had my last treatment for my lymphedema in Ancona on Monday. Damaris came with me so that she could do the clever stuff and talk in Italian but, when it came down to it, I’d guessed most of it.

Basically I see the whole thing as an equation. I have to endure three hours in the back of an ambulance, sitting sideways on, not wearing a seat belt in the proper manner, being thrown around all over the place while the various drivers refuse to accept they are not on a ’shout’, I am only going for an appointment and it is not life and death. That is the minus side. On the positive side, I get some treatment but it is not very ‘vigorous’ as Damaris would call it. They just lightly touch the soles of my feet with electrodes (which came apart on Friday and I had to fix) and then wrap my legs in bandages which are so tight around the instep that I am in agony the rest of the day.

The final straw came when Damaris spoke to the doctor. At the beginning he had been very supportive and different from the other quacks I had seen over the years. On Monday it was back to situation normal. First thing he said was that my problem is that I spend all day in bed. How does he know that? All he knows is that I’ve been getting up at around 7am to get the ambulance every day for just over a week and that I told him at the outset that I got my edemas from sitting too long at a computer working for the company. Where did this ‘lying in bed’ bit come from?

The second thing he said was that he had been discussing my weight with the person who supplies shoes. Perhaps he could have broadcast it on the radio or had a chat with the kitchen staff, too. He knew how sensitive I am over it – that was not necessary.

Finally, I am to blame wherever the hospital has failed. For example the radiographer who wouldn’t let me use his table to lie on was because I refused to use it. Ah, that makes more sense now.

I can’t work with people like this. He clearly cannot be trusted and his judgement is terminally impaired by prejudice. ‘Fat and lazy’ are inseparable as always. Why not ’stupid’ too?

What my wife did notice was that her meeting with him was interrupted for a long time while he discussed an exotic venue for a forthcoming medical ’symposium’ with a rep. Shit always smells like shit ultimately.

So, that’s it – alone again, naturally as the song went. I’m now having to find an alternative as I can’t continue carrying around this amount of weight with this level of pain. As I see it, the only thing I can do is to save up enough money to get into a clinic somewhere. I’ve no idea what it will cost – I know it will need to be for at least 6 months so I’m guessing £40,000 to £50,000 but it could well be more. I need to sell a lot of advertising space which means a lot of writing which means a lot of sitting at the desk which means my edemae will get worse before they can get better. It’s a race against time.

I have to keep stopping because of the pain. The soles of both feet are constantly burning up with heat. From time to time and without any warning or precursor, a searing pain will shoot through them and I will cry out with the agony. Because of that, I have to keep lying on the sofa every hour or so. That said, the swelling and the pain is usually less in winter and, according to the weather forecast, the temperature will plummet and a storm will start (I can hear the rumblings of one now as I write this).

First trip to Ancona

Today I went to Ancona Hospital for an appointment with a Lymphodema specialist. Ancona is about 2 hours up the road and this is too far for Damaris to drive with her spine problems as they are. With that in mind, we had arranged for a White Cross (volunteer) ambulance crew to drive us there.

Before that, though, we had to rush over to the kennels where we put the dogs on occasions like this. The temperature here is over 30C at the moment and it would have been hell for them to have sat in our car in the hospital car park for a couple of hours (as we thought, there turned out to be no shade). Even with all the windows and the sun-roof wide open it would have been an oven and grossly irresponsible of us.

Damaris wanted to leave them in the house but I was concerned about when we might arrive back. I was worried they might keep me in. Therefore, the kennels at 7am, it was.

We got up at 5am, left at 6am and arrived at the kennels near Bevagna at 6.45am. Mauro, the owner, met us and took them in.

We got back to the house at 7.30am and the ambulance arrived at 8am. As I suspected, I was too big to fit in the back of the estate car that they were proposing. A full-size ambulance was sent for from Foligno – 30 minutes away. Damaris decided to put our appointment back – just as well.

We eventually left at just after 9am and were perched on the edge of the bed. As the ambulance lurched down the side of the mountain that we live on, we were thrown from side to side and nearly onto the floor. The main road was not a whole lot better and the driver insisted on shooting traffic lights etc as if we were a ‘life and death’ emergency rather than me going for an appointment with a specialist.

Eventually we got to the hospital and I was transferred to a bed (the wheelchairs are too small and I can’t walk far enough to get anywhere). Lying on my bed in the lift, a blonde-haired doctor turned to my wife and said, “Quanti kili – lui?” (How much does he weigh?) I freaked and told him he was ill-educated with definite cretinous tendencies. He just sneered at me and we would have come to blows had not the other doctor and our ambulance driver (who was pushing me) made it clear that he had gone over the line.

Then it was Damaris’ turn. She handed over the paperwork that the Italians crave and then they gave her another form which asked her for information she’d already given on one of the forms we’d already handed in but they refused to give it back to her to copy it from.

Fortunately the experience with the doctor was not so bad. He insisted on speaking English – one of only a handful of people we’ve met who admit to knowing any. Most just giggle and go, “No Eeengleese”

At last, someone who actually believed that the bulges in my body are fluid-related and not down to an excess of spotted dick or fish and chips. He asked me about the pain and the searing burning sensation in my feet. He then gave me four jabs – 2 in my side (quite painless) and 2 in my feet (absolute agony). The chemical was cortisone and he told us that it would take two days for it to have an effect (at the time of writing my feet are still very sore). In return for the pain relief this would bring, I was to start walking a bit further and thus attack the circulation problem from that direction.

I am to return next week when he will start drainage of the fluid and repair of the skin. I am down to go to Foligno hospital for back x-rays so that he can see if there is anything he can do there, too. I asked him and it turns out that he is the resident scoliosis specialist and so Damaris is going to get him to give her a look over, too.

The journey back was a bit more comfortable as we swapped positions. We also both slept in the sunshine, having got up so early.

We picked the dogs up off of Mauro in the early evening and he refused to accept payment. Unfortunately he can’t do this on a regular basis for us as he will be away for 2 weeks in early September so we will have to find another dog-sitter.