A Happy Mr Harpo strolled off to donate blood at the
Red Cross, as he tends to do on occasion. I have my
screening and haemoglobin test (the nurse said my haemoglobin
was “very good” which is wonderfully pleasing.
Indeed they usually say something like that whenever they see my
haemoglobin levels. I feel it is one of my best features).
So Our Hero Mr Harpo lies down on their padded table listening
to the nursing staff joking about a girl who had just fainted
and made a hole in the wall with her head as she fell — people
are always fainting, they get two or three a week but they
hadn't had anybody making a hole in the wall before and they
were being quite witty about it.
So Mr Nurse takes my blood pressure and inserts the needle and they have a machine there that the weighs the blood as it comes out and measures the rate at which the blood is leaving the arm and mine was coming out really slowly so the nurse was moving the needle around trying to get the vein properly and nothing he tried worked. Usually a regular donation of 450ml takes ten minutes or a little longer. After more than twenty minutes my uncooperative circulatory system had given up only about 250ml and the nurse decided to call it a day and was doing his little manipulations with test tubes and moving around my needle again.
My arm was quite blue because of the cold and the tourniquet and suddenly my arm started gushing this almost black blood — all quite dramatic — and I had three nurses holding things and being witty at me: the staff there at the donation are a particularly jovial crew. So OK I apparently had a blood clot which was why the donation was so slow and caused this problem for the nurse. My nurse had to go into the other arm to get his tests (extra test tubes from each donor to test for all the bloodborne diseases which means that as of my previous donation I officially don't have hepatitis which is certainly a relief).
So now at the end of the process I have a bandage around each elbow and I sit down at a table in a different part of the room where they give you a bite to eat and a cup of coffee and I'm looking at the wall which has a humorous little head-sized hole in it and I can't bend either of my arms because of the bandages so I'm trying to drink orange juice and my Earl Grey like some bizarro goof, stretching my neck and bending over strangely — so the whole experience was rather amusing.
¶ 7:10 pm 7 comments
- Trying to get some PHP to do DNS delegatation
- Eating badly
- Massaging client numbers for a report to the board
- Watching Deadwood series three
- Preparing the annual report for the cricket club
- Catching up with a friend or two at the Gin Palace
- Cricket stats scripting in Jython
- Riding the pushy
- Rehearsing for our band's gig. (Do come and see us and please say hi)
- Sleeping late
- Dreaming about holidays in Europe
I was serious. Everybody here is warmly encouraged to drop in on our gig if you're nearby — I'd be thrilled to meet any of the hard-core bloggers. I was also serious about the Gin Palace: every time I walk through that door I take three years from my life. Death by Long Island Iced Tea *shudder*
¶ 5:30 pm 6 comments
Channel 31's Fishcam, that great Melbourne institution, has been cancelled.
If anybody didn't catch it, the show merely consisted of a camera placed in front of a fishtank and was used as overnight filler when regular programming ended for the day. It ran for over a decade and gathered a sort of cult status.
The quote being run in today's press is from station manager Greg Dee: “The station felt that after 13 years the show had started to flounder”
They must have had a whale of a time coming up with that one, they would have been falling all over the plaice. I can see how they've been angling to have the show axed. I say station management have lost their sole.
A show in that much trouble could only be saved by an act of cod.
¶ 1:50 pm 7 comments
I suffer from an eye condition and as a result I have
progressively lost vision in my left eye.
For the last 12-18 months I have been effectively monocular which is fine, really. My other eye works a treat and my Quality Of Life has not been much affected.
The main problems I've had have been when playing sport. My favoured summer pastime involves judging the flight of a ball hurled at you from 20m away and with only one eye it is much harder to determine the pace of it. Another facet of the game involves trying to get some part of your body behind a ball travelling at speeds that would be illegal on any highway in the country — over turf that hasn't seen a drop of rain since 2004 — I have found this harder with only half the average number of eyes.
Last year, my brother organised for me to take an introductory flying lesson. It was unbelievably awesome. The instructor gave me a lecture about the mechanism of flight and the controls on the aircraft and then we did a pre-flight check of the light aircraft and then we jumped in and he said “here's your throttle. Push it up. Here's the yoke. Pull it back when your speed is above this,” and I pushed it up and pulled it back and I had taken an aircraft off the ground. It was the coolest. We flew around a beautiful valley east of Melbourne on a perfect, still morning: the Sugarloaf dam to the north, the Dandenongs to the south. I was doing turns and climbing and diving. The feeling of being in control while flying through the air! was an utter treat. I, as you may gather, loved the flight. I urge everybody who reads this to find a flying school at your nearest airfield and try it.
To progress from the introductory lesson to get a pilot's license requires a physical certificate and the doctor could not give me one because of my eye. Bugger.
Surgery will be in May. This morning my ophthalmologist, who has been closely following my progress, was pleased to announce that my cataract was now “quite a bad one” which I thought was fantastic. No puny, wimpy-ass cataracts for me. I will get that removed and, get this, I get to have an intraocular lens implant! How groovy does that sound! Glee!
¶ 1:00 pm 6 comments
