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Primary Eye-care Acute Referral Scheme

Two weeks ago, towards the end of the first equipment trial, I started getting weird blue flashes in the corner of my left eye, accompanied by very blurred vision. At first, I thought it was the onset of another migraine – I’ve been getting a steady stream of them recently – but the pain never materialised, and the vision problems didn’t really settle down. Unusual. This Monday I happened to be in town directly opposite my opticians when I was getting my hair cut, so I thought I’d better pop in and see whether I was due for an eye test soon, and if not whether they would bring it forward.

To my surprise, they said that they didn’t think it was appropriate to bring forward my scheduled test, but instead offered me an emergency appointment later that day under the PEARS system – Primary Eye-care Acute Referral Scheme. However, they told me that the tests they wanted to do on me involved putting dilating drops into my eyes, so I’d be unable to drive afterwards. That didn’t suit me, as I had plenty of plans for the day, all of which involved driving home. So I negotiated an appointment for Wednesday morning, which gave me time to organise a taxi, but which the opticians weren’t particularly happy about. They wanted to make it clear that they’d done their duty by offering me a PEARS appointment within 24 hours, and on my head be it if I insisted on a later date. I pointed out that I’d been putting up with disturbed vision for nearly a fortnight by then, and was happy to take the risk.

On Wednesday I got a taxi into Malvern for the appointment, and chatted to the optician while I was waiting for the eye-drops to take effect. Apparently, PEARS is a fairly new initiative by the NHS, originally designed to save them money, but one that really seems to be a win-win. Each PEARS appointment at a local optician costs the NHS approximately £40, compared with £120 for a hospital appointment. Patients can either be referred to their optician by their GP, or can self-refer by walking in off the street as I did. Approximately two-thirds of patient can have their cases satisfactorily resolved at the opticians, which is much quicker and more convenient for them than having to make a trip to hospital. Those that do have to be referred onwards to a hospital consultant benefit from less demand for those appointments, and hence a quicker overall response time. And the hospital benefits from having eye-care professionals providing a triage service for them, so get fewer trivial cases cluttering up their surgeries.

Unfortunately, although my optician could find nothing wrong with my eyes other than “floaters”, she couldn’t rule out a retinal tear. Because I am extremely short-sighted, I’m at much increased risk of those compared to the wider population, and so I was one of the one-third who get referred on to a follow-up hospital appointment. I got a taxi back from the opticians on Wednesday lunchtime, and as I put my key in the lock I could hear the phone ringing. It was a hospital nurse saying they wanted to see me straight after lunch on Friday, and that I’d be unable to drive afterwards.

I was seriously unhappy about this development. Firstly, the appointment was at Kidderminster Hospital, which is very inconveniently a good hour north of me, but more seriously a place that gives me the screaming ab-dabs to even think about. It was there that Christopher was first given the news that he had oesophageal cancer, I went into deep shock sitting on the seats in the Reception area, and things went downhill from there. Secondly, I have a long-standing and deep-seated phobia about anything to do with eyes, and medical procedures to do with them massively freak me out. So all in all, an appointment at the Ophthalmology department of Kidderminster Hospital is the stuff of nightmares.

Nevertheless, there was no point ignoring the possibility that there was something wrong. So I phoned my trusty taxi company, whom I use regularly, and arranged for a driver to pick me up from home on Friday lunchtime, drive me to Kidderminster Hospital, wait for me there for however long the appointment took, and drive me home again afterwards. They were very accommodating, and it turned out that the reason for that was that the elderly chap who is my regular taxi driver was recovering from a detached retina, and had been treated at Kidderminster himself. I’m not sure I’m happy at the thought of a taxi driver with a detached retina!

Fortunately, it all went very well. The consultant was very understanding with my phobia. I managed to allow her to do most of the examination, which was enough for her to be confident that I didn’t have a retinal tear, or any other major problems, and I was discharged with a clean bill of health. I was however told that if it happened again I wasn’t to wait two weeks before seeking help, but to go to my opticians as a matter of urgency.

My pupils were so massively dilated from the eye drops they’d used, and the day was so sunny, that the drive home was pretty unpleasant and I spent most of the time with my eyes tightly closed. I wished I’d had the foresight to take some dark sunglasses with me! I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening at home, sitting in the semi-darkness in my living room with the curtains drawn, peering at the tennis on the TV and waiting for my vision to return to normal. That’s not how I would have chosen to spend the last day of my weeks leave! But at least I can be reassured there’s nothing seriously wrong, I’m still safe to drive, and the floaters in my vision are nothing to worry about.

06 07 2013 icyjumbo status Comments (1) Permalink

Another tradesman comes to call…..

Since I was away on business for all of June, Saturdays excepted, I have easily managed to beat our friend Carol’s challenge of ten tradesman-free days. But of course, I was merely postponing the issue – there’s always something in the house or garden that needs dealing with.

This time, the thing that was demanding attention was my burglar alarm. It’s been playing up recently, particularly when there is a power cut – which happens surprisingly regularly. The alarm is mains powered and has a battery back-up, which is meant to last 12 hours or more, so longer than the vast majority of our power cuts. But my neighbour has reported that even a shortish power cut has led to the alarm going off in the middle of the day. She’s a stalwart of the local Neighbourhood Watch, and I’m very grateful that she keeps an eye on the house when I’m out, but it’s really not acceptable for me to be annoying her with false alarms. So I promised her that I’d get the alarm serviced while I was on leave this week.

We had the alarm installed initially a few years after we moved in, and had it augmented with new sensors a few years ago when we had the extension built. I’d assumed that involved a major service and overhaul, but apparently not. According to the engineer who serviced it this week, the system was still running on its original battery, dating from 2000. He said that the batteries they use tend to lose about 10% of their charge each year, and that it is recommended to replace them every five years or so. After thirteen years, the battery was technically “knackered”. Indeed, when he shook it, it rattled, showing a complete breakdown of the cells.

Other than a knackered battery, which he replaced, he gave my alarm system a clean bill of health. So I’m hopeful that I won’t be annoying my neighbours with false alarms after the next inevitable power cuts.

05 07 2013 icyjumbo house Comments (2) Permalink

A bit of “Me Time”

I’ve taken the week off work to recharge my batteries after spending all of June away on business. I’m spending some of the time watching Wimbledon on the TV, and much of the rest catching up with chores, as it’s amazing how they stack up when one’s away for a month. However, I decided to devote all of Tuesday to some high quality “Me time”.

I contacted Eastnor Pottery, and arranged with them to spend the day there working on my pots. One of the pottery staff, Gemma, was there, and the owner’s wife, Sarah, popped around at lunch time and said hello. I don’t normally get much of an opportunity to chat with either of them, so that was nice. I sat in the corner and gradually worked my way through the huge pile of pots and lids that I threw last time I was there, neatening them up, and finding ones that matched together to make a good fit. From a starting point of ten pots and ten lids, I whittled it down to three pairs that I was happy to take forward to the next stage. So I decorated those with coloured slips, and put all of the other seven sets back into the reclaim bin. Pottery is a very “green” activity – clay can be endlessly recycled up to the point that it gets fired, so I don’t feel guilty about throwing large numbers of pots that I’ve no intention of firing.

I got home mid-afternoon, feeling somewhat stiff. But that was not a problem, as I had a back, neck and shoulder massage booked for late afternoon. That was really relaxing, and got rid of a large number of knots in my shoulders that I’d been carrying for several weeks. All in all, it was a very enjoyable and productive day.

03 07 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on A bit of “Me Time” Permalink

iPad Angst

It’s coming up for three years since Christopher died, and on the whole, I’m managing to get on with my life reasonably well. But there are some things that are harder to deal with than others, and for some reason his iPad falls into that category, along with his computers. I think my hang-up with the iPad stems from him having bought it when he was ill – he was so pleased with it and used it throughout his stays in the hospital and hospice. Plus I had real problems transferring it over into my name after he died – it seems that iPads only really like to have one owner. And I really don’t find iTunes at all intuitive – I think it’s got the most appalling user interface which puts me off every time I try to do something with it.

I didn’t actually manage to complete transferring the iPad over to me – it was still synced with his desktop machine, and was therefore loaded with his music and photos. I kept putting off dealing with it – it was one issue I really wasn’t ready to face up to. Which would have been fine except that last time I tried to boot up his desktop, it blue-screen-of-death-ed on me and refused to boot. Which left me unable to sync or back up the iPad, as it seems that it can only be synced with one computer at a time. That in itself wasn’t a major problem, but I was still stuck on iOS version 4, and more and more of my apps were getting outdated and needed upgrading to work. The final straw was when the BBC iPlayer demanded to be upgraded, required iOS 5, and refused to give me the chance to decline the upgrade. I was really pissed off – that’s one of the apps I use most, and do much of my TV viewing on it. And now they had effectively disenfranchised me. I wrote a stinking email to the BBC Helpdesk, saying that they should have made the upgrade optional not mandatory, and that I couldn’t upgrade to iOS 5 as I had no access to my late husband’s PC. I got a sympathetic but unhelpful message back from them, but I was still faced with the problem that the iPad was getting rapidly less usable and more unstable.

So today, since I had the day off work and time to concentrate, I decided to finally do something about it. That required me to register the iPad with iTunes on my own laptop, sync all the apps I’d bought, do as full a back-up as I could get iTunes to allow me to do, upgrade to iOS 5 (which in itself took over an hour and a half), restore the device from the backup, reload the apps, upgrade them all to iOS 5 versions, and then sync it to my laptop. It took all afternoon and lots of “Are you really sure you want to do this?” error messages. But finally I got there. I’ve lost all Christopher’s music, but that’s not a huge problem as I’ve got all the original CDs so can re-rip them if I choose. Instead I’ve loaded a selection of loud rock music that I’ve also got on my iPod. I also lost all his photos which would have been a real shame except that I was able to find most of them on a back-up drive, and have been able to restore reasonable selection of them. I’ve also lost my mailbox contents, but thankfully the email itself still works as that would have been a huge problem, as I still have no idea what his mailer password was.

So all in all it’s been a very positive afternoon’s work – distinctly fraught at times, but at last I have full control of the iPad – it’s finally mine, not his. That’s actually quite a significant step forward……

01 07 2013 icyjumbo invective
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A week at Fawlty Towers

After three weeks away in Wiltshire preparing for the first equipment trial, I was contracted to spend the last week in June running another equipment trial for my other customer, this time at our Hampshire HQ. The actual work was much easier than the first trial – I’ve been working on this project for two years, the kit and experimental procedures are pretty mature, and we’re a tight-knit team who work very well together. But the downside was that I had to spend a week at Fawlty Towers. And that was very wearing.

The contrast between the two hotels could not have been greater. In the first, the staff were extremely helpful and couldn’t do enough for us. One of the waiters even did my ironing for me one week! There was a maintenance man on permanent call, and any little problems with one’s room were put right that same day.

At Fawlty Towers, the staff seemed completely uninterested in their guests, and the maintenance standards were pretty shocking. Almost literally – one of my colleagues who was also staying there during the trial pulled a plug out of a socket in his room, and the socket came away from the wall! He’s an engineer too, and got very annoyed about multiple blatant violations of the IEE Wiring Regulations. The head waiter greeted me by name on the first night (I’ve clearly spent far too long there!), but then proceeded to charge my meal to a complete stranger in a random room. And in order to get to my room after dark I needed a torch, as it was on the far side of the conference suite which was not lit at night! Fortunately I keep a mini-maglite torch in my work bag in case of emergencies……. It’s such a shame – it ought to be a really nice hotel, but every day there was evidence of staff not caring, or not paying attention to details, or not thinking about things from the point of view of their guests.

So all in all, it’s good to be home. I’m absolutely shattered – four weeks living out of a suitcase from Sunday to Friday has been very tiring, and I’ve been working extremely hard. I’ve done a huge Waitrose shop to restock the fridge and larder, and I’m going to take next week off on leave to catch up on my sleep and recharge my batteries.

30 06 2013 icyjumbo Day out Comments Off on A week at Fawlty Towers Permalink

Thursday nights out on the town

Thursday nights were designated as the night to hit the town, to a tapas bar or a Chinese restaurant, or whatever. Usually that was a preliminary to the gang then moving on to sample the local bars and nightlife, but I simply wasn’t up for that. I was working some stupidly long hours (by my current standards anyway – I was still doing far less than the 12 hour days of many of the techies) so was far too tired to cope with a late night. If I joined the gang, it was for dinner only, followed by an early night. 

One week the Thursday night out was a curry evening. I don’t eat curry – I really can’t stand it, so was preparing to give it a miss. However, the trials manager talked me into joining the party by saying that he wouldn’t eat curry or chilli either, but that the restaurant served a range of delicious and non-spicy food too. The clincher though that sold it to me was that on Thursday nights there was a magician who performed close-up magic tricks at the tables. Some of the group had gone the previous week, and had been raving about the tricks ever since. I was pleasantly surprised – the waiter pointed me at some very tasty but completely non-spicy dishes, the smell of curry wasn’t too overpowering, and the table-top magic was really very good indeed. Mostly card tricks, but done with great dexterity, even with a dozen highly sceptical scientists watching the magician’s every move and trying to guess how the tricks were done. We were particularly impressed when he turned a pack of cards into a block of perspex, while one of the team had a firm grip of it. 

All in all, the three weeks spent working away from home on that equipment trial were surprisingly enjoyable. The work was tough, but there was a really good team spirit, and there was a lot of hilarity over dinner each night. We even had a birthday party one evening, complete with balloons and chocolate cake, since one of the engineers was unfortunate enough to be celebrating his birthday during the trial. 

28 06 2013 Gillian Day out
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Wednesday night is film night

I spent the first three weeks of this month away on business doing systems integration and testing for a major equipment trial at a customer site. Usually, when I’m working at that site I stay at a hotel at a service area on a nearby trunk road. That’s very convenient to get to work in the mornings, and is just fine for one or two nights, but gets very limiting for a longer stays. Other than a Harvester, the only alternatives to the hotel restaurant within walking distance are a Kentucky Fried Chicken and a McDonalds.

Since there was about a dozen of us, staying from Sunday night to Friday morning for three weeks (or more for some of the team), we wanted more options and more flexibility, particularly over food. The trials manager came to a very good arrangement with a family-run hotel (not part of a big chain) in the nearest town. It was more awkward to battle through the rush-hour traffic to get to work, but they gave us a good deal on the price and were very flexible. We’re good reliable business for them, so it was worth their while making life as pleasant for us as possible.

The trials manager came to an understanding with the chef, who said that he’d go “off menu” and that, provided we gave a few days notice, and we signed up in advance so that he knew the numbers, he’d cook us whatever we wanted. That suited us just fine, and we soon settled into a routine. On Sunday night we walked into town to a nearby Italian restaurant. Monday and Tuesday nights we pre-ordered dinner for around a dozen of us in the hotel – fish and chips one night, cottage pie another, then bangers and mash, and finally a mixed grill. Nothing fancy, but good quality filling food, much needed after a long day working flat out.

Wednesday night was designated as film night – we took over the residents’ lounge, erected a projector and screen, and watched a DVD. Since the vast majority of the team were male, we were never going to sit down to a RomCom – the choice was always action movies or thrillers. So the first week we had pizzas in front of the latest Tom Cruise movie, Jack Reacher. The second week it was chicken and chips to go with the Bruce Willis vehicle, A Good Day to Die Hard. I can’t say that I’d have actively chosen to watch either of the films, but it was a good way to pass an evening in a hotel. I’m not sure that the Bruce Willis film was meant to be a comedy, but it was so blatant in its disregard for the laws of Physics that it had our gang of scientists and engineers howling with laughter. The Tom Cruise was a thriller/who-dunnit, but unfortunately I had to take a phone call in the middle and missed a vital plot twist, so am still not sure exactly how the innocent man got framed…..

25 06 2013 icyjumbo Day out
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Christopher’s Tree in springtime

Christopher's tree in springtime

Last autumn Christopher’s stepfather, Peter, had the inspired idea of dedicating a tree to him at his local Woodland Trust. It’s a field maple, which should be hardy and able to cope with the worst the weather can throw at it. But it’s been a particularly long and bitterly cold winter, and young saplings can be vulnerable. Last time I was visiting my parents, my mother asked me how the tree was getting on, and that she did hope it had survived the winter ok.

So I asked Peter if he would mind visiting the tree and taking a photo of it so that we could see how it’s doing. He was kind enough to do so, and reports that it is “a very healthy young field maple”. And indeed, it does appear to be thriving, which is good to see.

20 06 2013 Gillian Photo
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Banks of wild garlic

I live on the side of a hill, with common land all around me. Sounds idyllic. But at this time of year there is a definite down-side to rural life. It’s wild garlic season, and there are huge clumps of it on the banks and verges surrounding the house. It looks quite pretty, with little white flowers. But boy does it stink! The first thing that hits me as I open the front door is the distinctive pong of garlic, and it seems to be worse after a rain shower – of which there have been a lot lately. I suppose I ought to embrace the opportunity offered, and cook with it. Foraged food seems to be all the fashion at the moment. But I think that would be a step too far. It’s bad enough having to put up with the smell at home, without exuding it from my pores as well!

16 06 2013 icyjumbo food
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Should have been more patient

Signs of purple on my aubretia

I mentioned a while back how disappointed I was with my aubretia – it was looking very sad and underwhelming compared to the purple spreads on the walls I pass regularly on my way to customer sites. But I think I wasn’t sufficiently taking into consideration the fact that I live on the top of a hill, and my growing season is regularly several weeks behind the rest of Malvern, let alone that of sunnier places well to the south of me.

Anyway, a month after I complained about the poor state of my aubretia, I looked out of the bathroom window and caught a distinct haze of purple out of the corner of my eye. OK, it’s still not as spectacular as I would like, but as my father points out, it’s on a north-facing wall and I need to be realistic in my expectations!

12 06 2013 Gillian garden Comments (1) Permalink