Another week has gone by - thank God!

If I have any regular readers, you will note that I have been less forthcoming with my comments lately.  There's a very good reason for this, or as I would have typed a week ago " h   's a      good  eason fo   his", basically, the old laptop had a keyboard explosion, 8 keys had lost their buttons.  I struggled on, even to the length of borrowing a plug-in keyboard, but, have you tried using a keyboard on top of a keyboard?

So, when MrsT's laptop decided to start issuing blue smoke, I went a-begging of the paternal parent.  Two laptops later and we're back on-line.

So now I have to try and get used to, not just a new keyboard layout, but a new operating system, Windows 8!  So far, I have only found use for one or two things on the so-called "Metro" screen, the Google shortcut I added is weird, the twitter and facebook shortcuts are so "Retro", I feel as if it were back in the first few months of facebook going global.

Internet Explorer 10 keeps crashing, and I thought they would have had the glitches sorted already!  So, the most used shortcut from the "Metro" screen is the "Desktop".  But those users of the earlier Windows system will know and love the "Start" Button, the first point of call for closing the computer down, has gone! Still, Microsoft have given a simple way of turning off the computer from any screen.

Half of my programs that I used to use are 32 bit, so won't run on a 64 bit machine!  Why MS didn't allow for this beggars belief.  We're in a global recession, not enough time for the Software houses to get their act in gear to provide 64 bit versions of all their systems and not enough money to buy it if they had!

Still "Nil carborundum illegittimi" as the pig Latin phrase goes.

So, we have the ultimate in sporting weekends, mid-way through (yawn) Wimbledon, the British Grand Prix of Formula One Motor-Racing, the second Rugby test for the British Lions and the start of the Tour de France.  I'm surprised the Cricket world hasn't got a big match on!

With a little bit of a fight for the remote, I got the TV onto the start of the cycling and the Mrs sitting there on her sofa looks up and says "Ooh, is that an easyJet team?", "No dear," I said trying not to be too patronising as all the participants in her choice all wear all white, "that's the Basque cycling team sponsored by a phone company, Euskatel-Euskadi!"

Pity that the Basques are so proud of their region that they won't let an airline that doesn't serve their area aid sponsoring their cycling team.  Or Blogger, the people that host this blog, their "corporate" colour is orange too.

Cycling is a strange sport, the female of the species is as fierce as the male, we saw that last year at the Olympic Games.  If we're lucky we see it if ITV4 show the National Championships as they did last week.  It's a heck of a sport, and you have to be an amazingly fit person to do it, my hat is off to every sport cyclist.

It amazes me when footballers scream for millions of pounds wages per year when they will play two or three matches a week.  The 198 cyclists facing the 3,404 kilometres (2115mi 259.65yd) over the next 23 days with only two days rest and will be in the saddle for about 90 hours.  Each stage (other than the time trials) will be about 200km (124.274miles) long and at the end of seven of them there will be (hopefully) a sprint finish with speeds reaching 60 km/h (38 mph) on the flat, on a pushbike!!!

I know I ask many people to appreciate what it's like for disabled people, but can you imagine riding a bicycle for six hours and then being able to push it to nearly forty miles an hour?  After driving that distance, I want to lie down and have a rest, (OK at the moment, I want to do that after 20 minutes), but when I was younger and fitter, I would have.

So, what's the rest of what's happening? I'm still preparing for round two of my DLA appeal, I'm still waiting for the ESA appeal and it's now a year since the Atos Assessment. 

Life, the Pain and the Medication!

As a follower of the Diary of a Benefit Scrounger - Sue Marsh's views on life I read with a growing awareness that her blog And Drugs Don't Work They Just Make Things Worse mirrored my life. 

I am fairly fortunate that my GP understands how much I respect the lack of control that some medication gives, the fact that some of the medication he has me on is OK for some parts of my life, but doesn't quite help out at the times I need it to.  Yes, my GP has agreed to let me control some of my medication with the clear knowledge and understanding that I do respect the maximum daily dose. 

Through this, I have now been able to adapt my medication levels to the extent that I can manage to cope with my voluntary job on a Tuesday. This is a good thing.

The negative side to being able to cope with Tuesday is to lose Wednesday.  I don't do Wednesdays very well, it takes until about 2 p.m. for the near overdose of Tramadol on the Tuesday to clear out of my head enough for me to feel safe driving (I just pray I don't get a drug test when driving on Wednesdays). 

In addition to the loss of Wednesdays and the fuzzy headedness is the disbelief of my wife.  Yep, she that must be obeyed can not get her head around the fact that I can cope on Tuesday but not through the rest of the week.

The other really annoying thing about pain, that thing that I have tickling away at my nerve endings even now as I sit here feeling no pain, thanks to the meds, is describing it.  Every Health Care Professional wants to know how much pain I'm in on a scale of one to ten.  I don't know, I seem to remember the pain I had when my knee dislocated as being the worst I can remember.  Now this being the most, it should be a ten.  Now I have to think where my pain level is compared to that?  At times it seems more as it lasts longer. 

Is it as bad as hitting my thumb with a hammer (about a four)?  Is it as bad as breaking a rib (about a seven)?  Is it as bad as slicing my arm open when falling through a plastic gutter (6)? Is it as bad as ... ? That's my interpretations, what is someone else's?

I can understand 30°C temperature, I've felt it.  I've felt it in the south of Spain, I've felt it in the South of France (well in the Pyrenees), I've felt it in the south of England.  Three places where the temperature at ground level was the same.  Oh no it isn't!  In Spain, it's warm.  In France it was tolerable.  In the UK, however, it's stifling, to hot to breathe.

We can measure temperature, we can measure blood pressure, we can count the number of pulses in a minute. We can do all these things, and do them accurately and repeatedly.  So why can't we measure pain accurately?