Drugs have worked, so that’s good – the infection cleared again, along with restoration of okay’ness.

My ops are confirmed as being Aug 23rd and sept 2nd.
Gulp – I thought there’d be a long delay, as I hadn’t had word from the hospital – but now, all of a sudden, they’re on.

The first one will involve being sliced open the whole length of my back, and my bent spine being realigned, and the second one an entry from my side, to install a ‘ cage’ around two disintegrating vertebrae. Both operations are in LONDON BRIDGE HOSPITAL, 27 TOOLEY ST where I was 3 years ago, after a flight back from Toulon – my one and only flight in a small private-type jet, though in a bed and full of needles, wires and tubes.

I don’t think I’ll leave hospital until October, so it’ll be a long, long internment.

Hopefully it will prove worthwhile.

The last words of Steve Jobs –

I have come to the pinnacle of success in business.
In the eyes of others, my life has been the symbol of success.
However, apart from work, I have little joy. Finally, my wealth is simply a fact to which I am accustomed.
At this time, lying on the hospital bed and remembering all my life, I realize that all the accolades and riches of which I was once so proud, have become insignificant with my imminent death.
In the dark, when I look at green lights, of the equipment for artificial respiration and feel the buzz of their mechanical sounds, I can feel the breath of my approaching death looming over me.
Only now do I understand that once you accumulate enough money for the rest of your life, you have to pursue objectives that are not related to wealth.
It should be something more important:
For example, stories of love, art, dreams of my childhood.
No, stop pursuing wealth, it can only make a person into a twisted being, just like me.
God has made us one way, we can feel the love in the heart of each of us, and not illusions built by fame or money, like I made in my life, I cannot take them with me.
I can only take with me the memories that were strengthened by love.
This is the true wealth that will follow you; will accompany you, he will give strength and light to go ahead.
Love can travel thousands of miles and so life has no limits. Move to where you want to go. Strive to reach the goals you want to achieve. Everything is in your heart and in your hands.
What is the world’s most expensive bed? The hospital bed.
You, if you have money, you can hire someone to drive your car, but you cannot hire someone to take your illness that is killing you.
Material things lost can be found. But one thing you can never find when you lose: life.
Whatever stage of life where we are right now, at the end we will have to face the day when the curtain falls.
Please treasure your family love, love for your spouse, love for your friends…
Treat everyone well and stay friendly with your neighbours.

For about the last 9 days, I’ve had a break from almost continuous spasms. They seemed to stop after I’d taken different antibiotics ( from my usual ones ) for the UTI I had at the time. When the spasming stopped I also began to sleep properly – for the first time in many months. Coincident with this was an awareness that I was just not ‘down’ all of the time, either. Things didn’t seem to be bothering me too much, I seemed just to be more content (which was both mystifying and a surprise).

Today, almost out of the blue, I started to feel down again, I became aware that I was missing doing normal things, and just couldn’t listen to people talking about doing things that involved being able to walk ( most things then, really ).

An hour or so later I realised from the cloudiness and sediment in my urine that I had what appears to be another UTI.

It would seem to be a logical conclusion that my depression is most certainly influenced, or even brought about, by the level of internal infection/ infestation that I have at any one time.
I’ve resumed taking the same antibiotic as last time, and will see what happens to my infection and mindset.

Russian Olympic pole vaulter champion says “she doesn’t know what all the fuss is about”.

Today whilst blowing up the tyre of my trike chair, obviously whilst in my normal chair ( I can’t do it otherwise ) I lost track of where I was, tipped back off a kerb, crashed back against a roughly finished concrete wall – tearing lots of skin off my hand and arm – and finished upside down in an area of soil.

I don’t care about the physical injuries, the cuts will mend before too long, but the feeling of absolute helplessness is what stays with me. Had help not been at hand, in the form of Dani, Lily and Amber on this occasion, I’d never have been able to help myself. Just being on an incline, my head lower than my body, having no abdominal muscle use, and nothing to hold onto to pull on, means I cannot move at all. I’d have lain there forever.
I know that that eventuality is unlikely, in this crowded world, but that get-out doesn’t help – the knowledge of my own vulnerability is so crushing to me when so starkly apparent.

I finally finished that book – the one about the first murder on a British railway.

The man that was convicted, and then hanged, was a German working as a tailor in Victorian London.

The discomfort that existed in the city, after his conviction, was huge. He was a man of previously excellent character who was at the mercy of forces beyond his control ( the press and the judicial system of the age ) He’d been found guilty by the press long before he appeared in court, and whilst there was condemned by the testimonies of a few people with ulterior motives ( financial in the main but also prejudice )

After the sentence was given – death by hanging – the very press that had sought to see him hang, switched sides, having realised their quite possible error.

The court process did not oblige the Crown to release information that they held which could have shown the accused in a better light ( and saved him ) He was not allowed, either, to give any evidence at all in his own defence during the trial, so was totally at the mercy of a few possibly unscrupulous characters, and judged on their dubious ‘ evidence ‘.

Fifty thousand people gathered to see him hang, many, many of them unconvinced that justice was being done. No appeal was allowed despite many misgivings that came to light after the verdict. To have faced the gallows before a crowd that huge, knowing that he was innocent, must have been mental torture for him, his only solace being his belief that God knew the truth and would let him into Paradise.

Who knows how many miscarriages of justice there were back then, not rectifiable after a death sentence – one of the reasons why corporal punishment was halted ( though in Britain not until 99 years later, in 1964 ) At least now people live to get a second chance.

Whilst not anywhere near as terminal, I recall being involved in a dismissal of someone from their job, for theft. The person was dismissed on the seemingly very credible statement of another ( trusted ) person. What possible motive can there have been for that person to have lied? A couple of years later, that trusted individual was caught on camera stealing, and turned out to have been stealing for a significant time, and in large amounts. The motive for her to have incriminated the other person was to distract attention from herself – she had been the culprit in that crime too.
Being wise after the event was too late. The person dismissed two years earlier never had justice, and I really don’t know how that went on to affect that innocent victim.

What I did come to realise though is that those protesting innocence vehemently, really ought be taken seriously, as all is far from necessarily as it seems. People with no obvious motive can distort the truth very easily for their own gain, and do so no matter how condemning for another.

I played crazy golf 2 days ago – with Dani and the girls, and 2 of their friends.
I wasn’t a golfer pre injury, I’d had a go 3 times but it just didn’t do it for me. If something wasn’t physically tiring, then I just couldn’t get excited about it.
And it took so, so, so long….

Anyway, having no balance, and from a chair, I had to play one handed and with a half sized club, and half the time from from a very odd angle, not being able to position the chair in the best place.

It was a surprise to me that I won, then, and then won again when we played again.
I put it down to the poor golfing quality of the opposition ( sorry, girls ) rather than any skill on my behalf.

When I try to analyse my own judgemental conclusions, I am fully aware that I was never really happy with any physical performance of mine, except for the one – winning the 1000 mile canoe race, and for that only my performance over the last 3 days, not the first 3.
If I was never satisfied before, when very physically able, it’s very unlikely that I will be now, isn’t it, now that I’m 10% as able?

It’s Lily’s birthday today.

Amber’s loving entry in her card, pictured below.

For the record, Lily doesn’t have a fat ass.

I met a man today, a friend of a friend, who, through business, had quite a lot of contact with Micheal Schumacher, legendary F1 champion and now in a PVS – persistent vegetative state.
I’m assuming he has it on good authority when he told me that MS has Locked in Syndrome – that his mind is fully active and perhaps fully functional, but that all connections between his brain and his bodily control are lost. He is locked in, an active mind imprisoned in a skull, possibly deprived of sight and hearing too, not knowing or understanding where he is, how he got there, and without any hope of ever knowing. Perhaps he can receive visual signals and/ or the processing of sound, so has some inkling ( or full awareness ) of where and how he is, but they don’t know. Without any means of communication, he can’t tell them.

When he retired from racing, he always had to get his adrenaline fix, and took up motorcycle racing and sky diving – they could guage his frustration ( at a given time ) at not being able to race F1, by the frequency that he jumped out of planes.

You might say it was inevitable that he’d end up dead. I think it very certain that he’d rather be dead than be how he is now. He’ll be kept alive, by machines, until he somehow expires of some other complication,there is a miracle cure or the machines are switched off. He himself has no say, despite probably everyone knowing what his choice would be.

He won’t look like MS any more – his athletic body will have wasted away, and may now be twisted. Without tone, his face won’t be the same, and his hair may have fallen out. He may be unrecognisable as who he was.

I truly hope to God that he is not fully conscious of his situation, and is not living inside his prison in abject eternal despair.

The spasms didn’t lessen at night, last night, they bloody carried on all the night through and then all day today.
I’m now in pain, pain that seems to emanate from somewhere in my spine, I think the degenerated joint, one third of the way up my back. Each time I feel the pain, my legs jerk, so I think that I’ve probably been in pain for ages without feeling it and now it’s bad enough to feel it, despite it coming from an area that is below my spinal cord break.
The second operation that I have planned, a week after the first on August 23rd, should address the painful joint, shoring it up within an artificial cage around my spine.
Until then, I expect this new addition to my problems to continue.

My buddy, Rob, just emailed to say that he swallowed a wasp today, though not on purpose, and it stang him on the way down, that being its’ last act.

In some countries they catch mosquitos by the swarm and then compress them into mosquitos burgers, after adding a few herbs.
Apparently highly nutritious..