Bad few months pt. 2

Anna came home from the cardiac surgery in one piece and made remarkably good progress. After a week or two, she was walking almost a mile a day and we were looking forward to getting away in the summer and catching up with ourselves. But since then there has been nothing but bad news.

First was a pulmonary embolism, which thankfully was only small, but meant that Anna had to have Heperin injections for a while (that was fun - the darts I played in my youth came in useful) and then she went onto Warfarin. Meanwhile, all exercise had to stop, which meant that the progress she was making recovering from Health Disaster 1 was halted by Health Disaster 2. All through this, she had been experiencing severe pain in her back. She has a bad back in any case, so we assumed that it was a result of lying flat out during the operation. But when it didn't get any better - in fact, got much worse - we had it investigated. It seems that she had suffered a 'wedge fracture' of one of her vertebrae. Over the next few weeks, more of them collapsed, so that eventually she had four vertebrae which had crumbled. Luckily, the spinal cord was not affected, but she is now in a large spinal brace, which is extremely uncomfortable but at least relieves the pain enough to let her sleep. So that was Health Disaster 3.

Superstition says that things always come in threes, so we are hoping that this is the end of the troubles for the time being. Anna is now slowly improving, and although we have cancelled plans for a holiday in the near future, it looks as though getting away will be possible before too long.

On top of all this, the trailbike has had one thing after another go wrong with it. As I am not super-rich, I have had to do the diagnosis and repairs myself. As soon as I get one thing fixed, it runs for a week and then something else goes wrong. I'll probably talk about this in another post some time. The other bike has had its problems too, but fortunately, it has always been running when the trailbike was not, so I have at least had transport.

At the end of May, my boss called me in and told me that, as part of the company's cost reduction plans, I was being reduced to a three-day week. While a bit more time to spend with Anna (and get things like shopping done) was very welcome, the cut in pay and holiday entitlement was a bit of a blow. I was told that this arrangement was only temporary, but it is looking more and more as if it will be permanent. So I'll have to add 'looking for a new job' to all the other things.

This is a new blog, and I felt the need to put down all the stuff that had been happening recently. There. It's done. I hope no-one reading this (I ought to say 'either of us') thinks it's a plea for sympathy. It isn't. I take life on the chin, and I am quite content with whatever fate deals out for me. But it does save a lot of explanation later if I dump all the crap down here, early on, where the interested can refer to it if they are very bored.

Life moves on, and so do I. On to more interesting stuff in the next post, I hope.