Tag: food

Recovering from a heart bypass. The physical and mental challenges.

Having a coronary artery bypass isn’t much fun and comes with challenges. Four years later I thought I’d describe some more of my experiences.

In my previous blog post, I described the adventure of having a heart attack and the five coronary artery bypass grafts that resulted. That procedure saved my life and actually restored my quality of life and fitness, within six months, to about the level of five years before. Today I’m as fit as I’ve ever been as an adult. So everything’s fine, right? Well, it’s a bit more complicated.

Let’s not mess about here, having a heart attack is a traumatic and terrifying experience. So is having a major operation with a risk factor measured in percentages. My risk of death was given as a bit under 2%. Which doesn’t sound too bad, but if you were told one in fifty planes crashed fatally, you’d perhaps be rather scared about flying, right?

With an event like this you come face to face with your mortality. The evening before the operation, Romana brought our chidren to see me. I hugged them hard before they left, but I also wanted them to know I was OK. No tears. But in a way I felt oddly calm. I knew my chances were better with the operation than without. But without the operation I was almost certain to be alive at the end of the next day. You have a fear horizon.

That’s… hard. For me I went into a different mental state. I always imagine it’s that mindset that a meditating Buddhist monk might go into. I was calm and collected. I thoroughly expected, when I was told about the need for a bypass, that I’d be a gibbering mess on the day. Yet most people I met facing this situation seemed to be the same. We know our choices are limited and this is our best chance. So off we go. But let’s not pretend that it also doesn’t scare and scar you. We may seem brave. We may be brave. But what choice do we have?

The ascendance from survival

You can read about my waking up on that previous post, if you like. I’m mentioning it here because it marks the start of the new life. A life which is separated into the before, the after, and the now. The initial week you focus on moving, and managing the pain. There’s a lot of support available, the nurses are wonderful, people visit you. The odd one might nearly faint when they see nearly a metre of stitches.

You go home. My in-laws were staying and helped keep the house bustling during the day, which was honestly a help. We can’t communicate well as they don’t speak a lot of English, but they were always there with cups of tea and help with cooking – stuff that’s still difficult in the first few weeks home.

The operation then changes you. Different people react differently to these events, so I can only really talk about how I felt, and how I still feel at times. Please indulge me, or feel free to ignore me! I do this sort of writing because it’s good therapy for me. It gets those feelings out. Other people have other ways. I’ll try and break up the feelings into types, and describe how they pan out over the four years from the event. I’ve not sought out a diagnosis for any of the following, or treatment, so bear that in mind.

Anxiety

Let’s start with the big one and most common for survivors that I’ve dealt with. The fear. The feeling that every twinge is the start of the end, every bit of shortness of breath is the start of new heart trouble because maybe a graft is failing or new plaques are being deposited. Thing is, having had your sternum pulled apart hard, your pericardium sliced open, your arteries and veins harvested… well, it’s pretty natural you’re going to have all sorts of aches and pains and periods of struggle. You notice everything new. Can’t help it.

So we live in this state of increasingly intermittent rather than constant anxiety. It does get better too. I hold on to that. After a year the panicky moments are every couple of weeks. After four years, they’re every month or two. Still there though. I’d been doing some new exercises with weights. The next day my chest was aching and I had a moment where I thought it was a heart attack before I remembered I’d been working out my chest muscles.

Other things come in to play with anxiety also. I suffered a frozen shoulder following the operation, and that is painful and annoying. It eased off six months later, but you find yourself worrying that you’ll never have a pain free day again. And no, you can’t take ibuprofen if you’re on blood thinners despite it being the usual go-to drug for pain relief for things like this. Ah well.

And sometimes I’ll be puffed out because I have asthma, but I’m never sure… worsening asthma marked the decline of my heart health. Is this asthma or is it my heart? Take the inhalers and see if it improves and when it does you do feel this mental relief kicking in!

Depression

This is a very normal reaction to these events. Sometimes you can work through it, sometimes you can’t. I’m pretty certain I had a period of mild depression as a consequence. I still relapse and seem to have a bout of a week or two every now and again in this weird, empty space – I’m either too sensitive, or struggling to enjoy anything or do anything that is outside of routine. Then I’ll have a period where I’m super focussed and really get stuff done. When I’m in it I kind of resent hearing “let’s meet this week” or “there’s a birthday party for one of the boys’ friends this week and they’ve asked us to go along.” I always say yes. But I don’t want to. I want to be left alone. Half my current life I don’t want to talk to people, listen to them or do anything with them. But I do it, because it’s better for me than being alone, even if I prefer being alone. Mad eh?

I still sometimes like and need to be alone though. Last night it was relatively warm, Romana was studying a presentation she had to give, I’d done my chores, kids were in bed, and I curled up on the bench in the garden, with the cushions, and headphones on listening to some good music for an hour and not even glancing at my phone (which was now in do not disturb mode), and it was honestly one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in a while.

Anger & self pity

I’ve put these two together here. There’s that “woe is me!” feeling which feels like the other side of the coin which is “you’re so f*cking happy and healthy and yet you drink and smoke and don’t exercise and do everything wrong! Feck off!”

These aren’t helpful emotions. But they exist and they’re real. And need acknowledging. And this tendency to anger means that when people get under your skin you have to decide whether they’re actually a positive impact on your life or not. I had a friend who was perfectly lovely and supportive in many ways, but the 2019 general election was coming up. She was very Momentum in politics even if it doesn’t quite chime with her middle class lifestyle, but that’s fine. The problem, the big moment, came when I’d posted something on Facebook about the Lib Dems who I support. She described Jo Swinson as “that vile woman.” And I flipped out. Had a go at her, blocked her, and that was that. She wasn’t the only person I did that to either.

I don’t miss these people I cut out, really. They had toxic personalities to me at that moment in time, and you know what you don’t need when you’re recovering from a major life event? People who are toxic. To you. They might be perfectly lovely people overall. People don’t get into Momentum or the Lib Dems or even the Conservatives, generally, in order to make the world worse. Sometimes they do, but that’s not usually the intention for most people. But those people can be terribly toxic to you. And I’m still recovering, so I don’t have the capacity to cope with that substantial difference of opinion.

I’ve got this! syndrome

Here’s an interesting one, and there’s probably a proper psychological term for it. But I just describe it as “I’ve got this! syndrome.”

A belief that I can deal with all of this. That all I have to do is eat perfectly, exercise perfectly, behave perfectly, care for myself perfectly, take the medication perfectly, be a perfect husband, be a perfect boss, be a perfect dad, a perfect patient, and everything will be fine.

Which is, quite frankly, delusional. There are no perfect people. Myself included.

This knowledge, sadly, doesn’t seem to stop me. I go through phases where I decide I’m going to run faster and further than ever before. Then I realise that in doing that, I’m skipping quality time with the kids, not doing laundry or jobs around the house… or I go camping with the kids and feel that I ate badly and didn’t do my run for the weekend… or I switch to alcohol free beer and then realise that actually it’s still full of simple carbs… or I think sod it, have the chocolate, but now I have to run extra hard, only to find that the extra hard running leaves me sore and exhausted the next day.

It’s probably PTSD

I guess this is that post-traumatic stress problem that people talk of.

So why don’t I get help?

Because I’m functioning, frankly. I’m not so depressed that I can’t get by. I’m not so anxious that nothing happens in my life. My kids are happy. I think my wife is happy. I think my colleagues are mostly happy. But each little setback, even if nothing to do with my health, sets me on a path of questioning and trying to work out how to be better, stronger, smarter, more organised, more caring, more focussed, better at caring for myself, better… better… better. Because that’s how I get over this and make the most of the 5-30 years I probably have left.

About that 5-30 years

All things being well, there’s no real reason why someone who’s had a bypass like me, following a heart attack (myocardial infarction) with relatively little damage to the heart shouldn’t live another 30 years. Maybe more. An active and full life. I’ve come across people in amazing shape, aged nearly eighty, thirty years on. They look amazing.

But I also see some people pass away. Some of my grafts were from veins and they’re just not so tough and have a high chance of failing after ten years. I could get really unlucky and they could block and cause trouble in a bad way. Which could kill me.

Who knows, eh? I certainly don’t. Nobody does. I just keep taking the pills and hope for the best. Speaking of which:

Now the good stuff: The weird disappearance of my xanthelasma

So, xanthelasma are interesting. I had a couple of these. Here’s a before and after shot:

Excuse the ropey shots used – I never set out to document the disappearance of these things, but there you go. I had them, now I don’t.

Xanthelasma are made of cholesterol, and are, in fact, an indicator of risk of cardiovascular problems. The fact they’ve gone is actually reassuring. I can see that my cholesterol levels in my blood, from blood tests, are about half what they used to be. This is potentially great news. I’m hoping it keeps me safe.

Turns out that it’s possible that strong statin therapy so dramatically reduces cholesterol in the body that these things can disappear.

Blood pressure’s not bad too

With blood pressure, we all know that high blood pressure is bad for the arteries. It damages them, and is linked to stiffening as well.

In this case you can see that I’d started logging my blood pressure in the top part of this chart in early 2019, half a year before my heart attack. Then I kind of lost interest. It was a bit high-ish but not so high as to be of any real concern. I didn’t worry too much.

But the heart attack came! I started logging everything as soon as I came home, and you can see how I did it very regularly by the density of data points. Sometimes I was measuring two or three times a day.

You can track it along until March 2020, when I came off beta-blockers. You can see that the blood pressure readings became a little more varied, with more readings above 120/80 – my target is to keep below that. The trend didn’t really change, but over 2021 I’ve noticed that if I’m over 120/80 it’s by a very small amount. Most typically I see readings around 110/70 which is exactly where I want it to be. Ever since then it’s been much the same, but I’ve zoomed in to show how my desire to measure my blood pressure quite suddenly tailed off. Because I felt a lot better. You get the odd spike, but they often go with a bit of relaxation.

Ten key things I do to try and help recover from the bypass

So now for a little list of the things I try to do to help myself. They don’t always work:

  1. Exercise. I’m told this is the single best thing I can do. So I try and do at least three solid bouts of exercise which substantially raise my heartbeat each week. I also now try and incorporate some more strength exercise – sit ups, press ups, pull ups, etc. So long as my shoulders don’t hurt too much.
  2. Cut out toxic people and walk away from disputes. I always stood my ground in a dispute in order to ensure a negotiated settlement was the end, or the other person would give up. Now, sometimes, I just think “nah, sod it. I don’t need the argument, and I don’t need these people. Step away.” I still need to be better at this, but watch out for it.
  3. Eat reasonably well. Still like some treats though. I’m largely vegan, so I avoid dairy. I really enjoy a peanut bar with a bit of chocolate as a bit of a treat. But the rest of the time it’s wholegrains, plenty of protein, not too many simple carbs, no sugar in coffee, no sugary fizzy pop, no alcohol, no deep fried food, no cheesy food.
  4. On the point of no alcohol, I still allow myself the odd glass. On very very rare occasions I’ve been known to have two glasses of wine. Needs to be a good reason though. Because alcohol is bad for you. Yes, even red wine. I could link to studies, but if you don’t believe me you’ll find the outdated studies that say it’s good for you, and if you do believe me… well, you don’t need further evidence do you?
  5. Break work into chunks. I sometimes use a visual countdown timer, just to get things started. I allocate myself twenty minutes to at least start a task, and see what I can achieve in that time.
  6. Self-care. If I can, I take time to myself. If it’s been gloomy I’ll allow myself six minutes on a sunbed (with sunblock on the scars) to give me a little boost. Not very often, but seems to lift me. Other things can include getting a haircut, going for a walk, or treating myself to something enjoyable.
  7. The pills. Oh the pills. I take them carefully and religiously! Very occasionally I forget one, but it’s rare. They keep me alive. I also supplement with magnesium (it’s a mild calcium channel blocker and can help with relaxing) and some other multivitamins as feels appropriate.
  8. Appreciate the people around me. They matter. They give me the support and grounding that I need.
  9. Try not to think too much about work. You’re either working, or not working. It’s OK to not be busy when working and to be thinking. Don’t work eight hours, then think about work for another five hours, never quite present with other people.
  10. Have things to actively look forward to. Your things, not the things you’re supposed to do. A mild bit of selfishness is OK – in fact it’s healthy. Just don’t make it pathological. If you’re spending more time playing golf than with you’re family you should probably tweak things or deal with why you prefer that to family. But enjoy yourself. Give yourself space for pleasure.

So that’s it. I just saw my word count and 2800+ words is far too many, really. If you’ve made it this far without merely scanning, then well done you! Take care 💖

Have you had a bypass operation? How did you recover? What tips do you have?

Interesting times in the world of software

About a decade ago, I was at a conference and talking to a fellow developer (I still call myself one, even though I don’t code so much these days) when he giddily told me about the funding he’d got for building a new piece of software he was hoping would make it big. It was a two year project and he’d got £100k funding. I asked if it was just him… and no, he had a colleague. So £100k, for two people, for two years? £100k didn’t sound a lot… £25k/yr each, basically. Or what you can earn in a much simpler tech support role. I decided not to say anything and leave the poor guy in peace, although this sort of work seemed a lot like gambling to me.

Today, things are different although there’s still a sniff of gamble about it overall. If you’re a developer it’s relatively easy to find a highly capitalised employer that’s positively dripping with money who will pay you £60k-£90k a year. Potentially quite a bit more. This reminds me of the late nineties dotcom boom. In 1997 I myself quit my safe but somewhat dull job at a multinational to become a freelancer, doubling my income almost immediately, and quadrupling it another year later. The new work was, in some ways, more interesting. It was also a lot more stressful, bad for my health, and definitely wasn’t the most exciting coding work. But it paid. I honestly don’t blame developers who decide to do what I did 25 years ago. It set me up. I think it was also a large part of why I had a heart attack in 2019… living out of hotels for a decade wasn’t healthy, and cheese became far too much a food staple for me as a vegetarian. However, the money was very good and it helped set me up. When you’re poor, it’s very hard to catch up and a good income was necessary for a while.

I bring this up because today I’m not ‘just a developer’ but actually run a web development company that specialises in websites and custom software for clients. And things are happening today that are reminiscent of the dotcom boom on the late nineties. 25 years have passed, but people don’t really change nearly as much as you may think.

The dotcom & Millennium Bug era

The late nineties were a period of post-recession growth and capital release. Banks had been deregulated, money was being created in the way it can be, and we were riding high on increasing productivity. Life felt good. And when money is created it can be invested.

There’s only one little problem in that. Sometimes, people get giddy and start splashing the money out too readily. The boom of the late nineties and early noughties, and the deregulation that encouraged it around the world, eventually led to the financial crisis of 2008. I’m a bit of a cautious soul, so even though I had plenty of income, I resisted borrowing too much to get a bigger house. In some ways I was foolish, because I could now be living mortgage free in the house I have now. But I figured that not having a big mortgage would afford me some other freedoms and I could use my money elsewhere. Mostly I just invested my money in solid companies. Friends, however, were telling me to invest in dotcoms. But I looked at the fundamentals. One example was a firm called Vocalis. They did, basically, telephone voice services software. Small team, and had some crazy valuation that was effectively equivalent of £20m per member of the staff. I rightly reckoned that was mad. My friend went ahead and pumped money in, and I mocked him. For a while I looked a fool. The value of the shares rose and rose.

Right now, there are loads of speculation bubbles. At the café at work I was trying to explain Bitcoin’s fundamental problems to our barista, when our receptionist came over excitedly wanting to know more. Both seemed interested in getting involved. That means the crash is likely imminent. They’re both lovely people, but in the economic chain, they’re nowhere near the top, which means that the speculation bubble is reaching it’s limits.

“If shoe shine boys are giving stock tips, then it’s time to get out of the market.” – Joe Kennedy, 1929 as the stock market was about to crash and lead to the Great Depression

So the dotcom boom and Millennium Bug led to a boom in demand for developers. New software was being created to replace supposedly outdated software that couldn’t be fixed (narrator: “It could”) and salaries were rocketing. I took advantage of that boom. I also knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t. My day rate as a PeopleSoft developer went from £200 a day in 1997 to £600 in 2002. It could have been higher. Cisco did an amazing job of raising funds in that era and I remember they kept offering me more and more to go to work for them in the Netherlands. But I didn’t really want to go to work there. I never really chased the money, so that’s about where I peaked. But I remember people with the right skills, experience and self confidence were on as much as £1k a day. That’s getting towards £2k a day at today’s prices. Some skills seen as super hard and rare could command double that. Most people didn’t, of course, make nearly that much, and some people preferred a job with reasonable hours and close to their families – a very valid and decent decision. But I was single with no ties.

There are a lot more developers around today – good incomes have brought many people into the trade. I meet people who called me a nerd in the eighties and now they’re working in IT. It’s a bit weird.

Today’s situation

Now it’s a bit weird. Rates still aren’t at the dotcom level, once adjusted for inflation, but they’re close. You can do very well in tech. But in my little firm we pay typically around £40k for a developer, plus various benefits, kit, resources etc, meaning you’d need to make around £70k as a freelancer to equal it. At least the way I calculate things and always did. I nearly swapped my £600 a day for £60k a year and kind of regret not doing that.

But why have the rates risen? Well, there are a few hot areas, and they can be summarised as AI, analytics, mass market apps, and blockchain. I’ll discuss each briefly:

AI

This is a hot one – the idea we can replace rooms full of people doing dull and not very high value work (from the perspective of the company) such as service desks with AI bots is very attractive. It won’t work though. Most “supposedly AI” bots are just following decision trees and the only bit of AI is in parsing the meaning out of a sentence in a very tightly defined context. AI is useful today for categorisation problems – e.g. looking at a picture and deciding “this is a cat” or “this is a threatening comment”. It’s not brilliant at the job, but I like that an AI can work out which pictures are of my Mum, for example, even if it misses about a third of them… it still makes my life easier. A bit. But what an AI can’t do is right a decent blog post. Sorry, it can’t. They’re awful at it. There’s loads of AI generated content out there and it feels obviously fake. The main job of these AI generated blog posts is to trick other AIs (Google, Bing etc) into categorising a website as useful. And because AI’s make toddlers look worldly wise, they can be easily fooled… and that means you can’t trust them with anything of real importance. Like your business decisions.

But, it’s a hot keyword, and naive venture capitalists like the idea. So in comes the money.

Analytics

Tracking and stalking customers across the internet is very attractive for advertisers believing that doing so makes them seem more interesting to consumers. I’m not convinced. People often find it creepy. They feel like they’re constantly stalked. They visit the website of, say, a printer supplier and they receive ads for a month for printers… but not only for that supplier, but for other printers because the tracking provider is cheerfully using your data as a supplier against you and selling that information to your rivals! I think advertisers are starting to cotton on, but are unsure of what to do… but I know there’s a lot more direct selling of adverts between publishers and advertisers than there used to be.

But, the siren call of analytics is strong, and people love a nice chart on which to justify a decision, so the more nice charts your system can create, the more people will pay to use it and try to gain an advantage over competitors. And advertising is huge, so in pumps the money. For now.

Mass market apps

Can you build the next Facebook, Instagram, or Slack? What’s the potential for an app that lets people read books from any publisher for a fixed monthly fee? How about an app that revolutionises food delivery? Interestingly, some apps are about replacing old and inefficient intermediaries and putting new ones in place. Uber is a nice way of hiring a minicab with flexible pricing that rewards drivers for being available at the right time. They don’t disintermediate, however. The customer is both the driver and the passenger. The new intermediary takes their share.

If you can replace old intermediaries you can make a lot of money. Imagine taking 0.5% of every single financial transaction, like Visa do? That’s a lot of money. Then you have intermediaries between the card firms, providers, and networks, such as Stripe… and then there are those replacing old ones, like Wise, for money transfers across borders.

What other things can be improved? Well, literally anything.

But most attempts to build these apps and the supporting infrastructure are doomed to never turn a profit.

Blockchain

Blockchain is a really interesting concept for a public ledger, using an interesting concept called proof of work to make it hard for any one person to try to dominate the network and win the consensus mechanism on new transactions. There are theoretical ideas out there to improve on this, but at the moment they remain just that and haven’t been proven.

And it’s a scam. Pure and simple. But it’s a hot topic. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Dogecoin and many others are actively speculated upon, as well as being used for the exchange of value – often in a hope to evade regulators. It appeals to the natural rebels amongst us because it’s outside of government control… and given that governments aren’t always a force for good, I get that.

Problem is, Blockchain breaks the rules of good software development… if you look at the big O notation for software, it has to follow certain rules or it will fail at some point and need to be re-engineered. Big O matters. I don’t have academic access to papers, and the internet is full of vested interests pretending that Blockchain scales just fine. I used to see the same in WordPress land, where people said the software scaled fine… but it doesn’t. In WordPress we get scale by putting a layer between WordPress and the internet to balance things out – the work the software itself does goes up in line with the number of people talking to WordPress. We can define that as O(n) so long as you know what you’re doing – that’s OK. We can live with that. But the consensus mechanism required for multi node agreement of transactions as required to track transactions will, by its nature, follow a curve that is likely to be somewhat greater than O(n^2) (each node does O(n) work in a linear fashion but the total work done on the network as each node is added therefore grows as O(n^2) plus a bit for network latency and overheads. Yet bitcoin transaction cost isn’t following that curve in spite of huge interest because, I reckon, most Bitcoin trades aren’t real.

Yes, that’s right. And what does that mean? It’s because wideboys, crooks and the overly-optimistic are involved. Given it is, by design, a pyramid scheme, it will have to fail at some point. But people are motivated to hide that, so there are Bitcoin tracker schemes, rather like gold purchase schemes, that never hold the asset in question. They will pump and pump values as hard as you like. And as long as there are new people coming in, like our receptionists wishes to, all is good.

And there are enormous amounts of money to be made. As in a goldrush, the people making real money are the shovel makers and traders. And they need developers. So for as long as there’s money to be made, coked up wide boys will be gurning their way through stressful meetings, fidgeting and anxious to cash in before it crashes out. You can earn a lot there. For a while.

OK, so thanks for the very long essay. What does it mean then?

Well, it means developers are really expensive right now. Small firms that do actual useful work and aren’t highly capitalised (like mine) can’t grow because we can’t suddenly charge our customers double for the work so that we can compete against these booms. It’s as if a very rich person has moved into your town and hired all the builders possible to create a huge mansion. They even approached builders working for firms and offered them double to come build that mansion. Soon builders are all swanning around town in Teslas and feeling pleased with themselves for being so cunning as to be in the building industry.

Same in software. Locally there’s a Tesla with a crypto referencing private number plate and a young, bearded and muscular techbro driving it. Fine, I’m not going to judge. He’s happy and making good money.

But if builders are all hired by the rich, the rest of us get priced out. Same in software. Small firms are going to find they can’t afford websites unless they just use some cheap web builder platform – it’ll give a less good solution, but it’ll do the job. Ish. And the firms that can afford will do that bit better. And better. And the gap will grow.

At my firm I’ve had to raise salaries, but we still struggle to clear a profit with the raised salaries. I’m fiscally conservative, so we’ve always had decent cash reserves. This lets us ride out the storm. From 1997 to 2002 dev rates went crazy. By 2005 they were back to normal again. We as a firm can’t handle eight years of this. But it’s not quite the same as back then – you can now hire developers globally and have them work remotely, if you really wish to, which can save some money and also help those countries out with extra foreign revenue. I, however, really like quality and good communications and I find that a geographically tight team works the best. It also makes it easier to hire new people into the trade. So, for now, I’m sitting tight. I won’t seek venture capital, or borrow. And if the worst comes to the worst, we’ll add AI to something that does basic statistical analysis, and blockchain to something with two computers in the network and hope someone out there fancies throwing us some money so we join the party. In the meantime, however, there’s still a healthy living to be made as a business doing useful things and avoiding the hot trends. I never set out to be rich, merely secure – I’ll ignore the rich mansions and do my own thing, creating good code for good people.

n.b. about the above – the above isn’t a paper. It’s a set of opinions designed to inform and illuminate about what’s happened. It relies on anecdotes. Don’t take it too seriously and don’t use it as the basis for what you want to do with software and investing in software. Or crypto. Do your own thing with the information you gather from multiple sources. Also remember that a lot of people say misleading things because it’s in their interests to do so, and that you shouldn’t trust a random blog or news source on the internet. Mine included.

I broke my heart in five places and got it fixed

A year ago, I was sitting, shorn of all body hair and waiting to go in for a five or six hour operation. I knew the next two weeks would be hell.

It’s hard to explain the odd calm that came over me as I sat there, waiting for the biggest operation of my life. I didn’t feel happy. I didn’t feel miserable. It wasn’t as if I’d been feeling terrible. I’d just had one bad morning two and a half weeks earlier where I felt rough, then more rough, then really really rough, then fine again.

It’s weird. You see heart attacks on TV and you get this idea of a mad bad event where you keel over, clutching your heart in agony. But it doesn’t really work like that. The night before I’d felt tired. In fact, for a few years I’d been feeling like hard exercise was a challenge. It took me an age to warm up for a sport, and then I’d be fine. But the first half hour was a chore. And if I’d eaten I was basically useless for an hour or so.

I put it down to age and asthma.

I wish I hadn’t. But thankfully, I got lucky, in a way.

So driving along to work I felt this tightness in my chest, a tiredness, and a general malaise. So I decided, as was sensible, to pick up some vitamin tablets on the way to work. That’s what you do when you’re tired. Take vitamins, and get plenty of sleep. That was my plan. But by the time I got to the counter, I felt even worse and decided to mention the chest tightness to the chemist. She very clearly said I should go to the walk-in centre and get checked out. Instead, of course, I decided I’d get it checked out at some more convenient moment. But by the time I got back to the car I realised I was very out of breath just walking slowly.

I was having a heart attack. I didn’t know it yet. I looked at my Fitbit on my wrist and it said my heart was doing a nice old 70 bpm. Normal enough for me. So why was I puffed out? Must be an asthma thing. But I decided that I would go to the walk-in centre after all. I drove, feeling increasingly out of sorts, parked quite badly, and shuffled in to reception.

A few hours later, I was hugging my wife in A&E at the Royal Liverpool Hospital. I was worried, but not terrified. The doctor dealing with me said “I’m concerned but not worried.” That was a relief. The diagnosis was swinging between heart attack and pericarditis. I was atypical. Relatively young, slim, non-smoker, evidently in reasonable health, and moderately active for someone desk-bound at work.

But they couldn’t satisfy themselves. The A&E cardiologist said I had to go in for observation. They observed me.

Observation is boring

I was sent up to a cardiac observation ward where there were a range of folk from really quite ill and very elderly to me. By then I was feeling fine, quite chirpy, and generally comfortable. My biggest complaint was that the ward was a bit noisy, with an elderly chap who was rather confused causing the most noise. But hey, I was alive, the food was tolerable, I had my Kindle and my phone. I started to obsessively read about the heart, interpreting ECGs and so on. It’s all quite fascinating. And complex. I won’t pretend a lot of it stuck. But now I knew the possibilities.

The rather wonderful Mr Fisher, my cardiologist at the hospital there, did a series of echocardiograms. He felt that I was 95% likely to have pericarditis, in which case a few tablets and I’d be right as rain within a couple of weeks. However, there was a 5% chance of something else, so he’d scheduled me for an angiogram at the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital. If they found something, they would be able to stent me there and then and I’d be on the path to recovery.

95% chance of some tablets and everything was fine? OK, I cried a little and started looking forward to the family holiday we had planned.

Angiograms feel weird

An angiogram is where a fine catheter is inserted up to the heart, then a substance that can be detected using x-rays is released into the heart. This allows the surgeon to get a visualisation of the heart. It’s really interesting. And a little unpleasant, but definitely not much more unpleasant than a longer dental visit. It is surgery of a sort, and done carelessly it can do damage, so they always have someone on standby ready to whiz your chest open and do some emergency surgery.

Thankfully it’s usually very safe. It just feels odd, sitting there with this big machine whizzing around you imaging your heart, a massive TV screen to your left, and a very precise talking and unambiguous surgeon on your right instructing his team. I was anxious. He noticed that, and he said “just give him the valium. Now”. At least I think it was valium. In some ways my memory is a bit fuzzy.

Because then, as he finished everything up, he explained that a stent wouldn’t be possible and I would need what is called a coronary artery bypass graft. Four, maybe five. I… didn’t like that news. I felt shocked, scared, and unhappy. I’d gone from probably just an annoying health scare to looking towards having my chest sliced open and my heart operated on.

How do you even operate on a heart? It’s not supposed to stop. Right? Stopped heart = dead. No?

The wait

So then you just wait. And wait. They wouldn’t let me leave the hospital. I was at risk of another heart attack, the blockage was so bad, and they needed my system to flush out the drugs I’d been given when I was suspected of a heart attack. Risks, apparently. It took two and a half weeks from admission to operation. Long enough to think about my mortality, prepare some things, and do weird things like have a company meeting in the middle of the ward to ensure everyone knew what to do, and how.

It was an interesting time. People came and went. I got to know some, and would chat to them as they faced their fears. Most people were older, most were as surprised as I was. What really surprised me is that the image most of us have of people waiting for a bypass wasn’t really fulfilled. Sure, you had the smokers and the fatties. But loads of us were relatively active, relatively slim people. Not that athletic, mostly, but in a line-up of people most likely to need a bypass, you wouldn’t have picked most of us.

Sometimes I’d chat with people facing the operation the next morning and they were, usually, very anxious and worried. Some said things like “well, if I die… I won’t know it. It’s my family I worry for.” Others joked about having their last cup of tea. There’s some morbid humour, but it felt like a release too. A way of expressing anxiety with a laugh.

But the fact so many of us weren’t people who’d neglected ourselves felt terribly unfair. I struggled to deal with that.

Could’ves and should’ves

One chap, about ninety years old and looking in remarkable health, was in for a new valve. He said without it he’d likely not survive the year. With it he had a good chance of another five years. Yes, there was a risk, but as he said “I’ve had a good life.” I guess by the time you reach your nineties you come to a realisation that you can’t really have that long left, no matter what you do.

I talked about my own misgivings. I’d been a bit plump in my twenties, and I enjoyed partying and chocolates. I’d also been a hard working type with little time to do lots of exercise. He smiled and said something like “Life’s full of could’ves and should’ves, but they really don’t matter. You have to deal with the present and make things as best you can for the future. The past has gone. Leave it be.”

He was so right.

Getting closer

As the date loomed I thought I’d get increasingly anxious, but it just stopped. I wasn’t aware of being pumped with chill-pills. I’d seen more frail people go off to operation, and I’d chatted with them as they recovered. It was clearly hard going for them, but they lived and they seemed in good spirits. It’s a very hard operation to go through, I knew that, but now it felt tangible. I also had visits from colleagues, friends and family, so each day I had something to look forward to.

I did do some morbid things. I wrote a note to my family, should I die. I have no skeletons in the closet, but wanted to ensure they knew where to find financial stuff. I knew that they knew that I loved them. I kept the schmaltzy stuff to a minimum. Just crack on. What needs to happen has to happen.

The day itself

Now, this is where it gets more interesting, really. First thing you have to do is shave off all body hair below the neck. You’re handed a quality hair trimmer, with a sterile trimming blade, and pointed to the bathroom. Bzzzzzz! It takes for ever! And those things bite! Once on the balls. I wasn’t really sure where to stop, and I couldn’t really do my back on my own, so I left that, assuming they knew that too.

My operation, schedule for the afternoon, meant no food or drink. I read a bit, chatted with Romana, and refused to say goodbye. I was coming back. I knew it. I was confident. I’d already met the surgeon, and he seemed confident, precise, and concise. I like that in a person. We talked a little about technicalities and how the procedure would be done one me, what arteries they were harvesting and from where. I’d also spoken to another surgeon who I assumed assisted. He poked me and checked how various bits of me worked. I had a breath test. I had a lot of tests. But the day of the operation itself was quiet, really.

So I knew the operation was going to be a beating heart one, without using a heart-lung bypass machine. The attachment of the grafts would be done using some weird sucker machine (maybe called an Octopus) that would stabilise my slowed down heart, but at no point would it be stopped. Amazing. Each stitch carried out between the beats of my heart on arteries just 1.5mm wide.

And then it comes. The porters arrive, you give everyone else on the ward a wave, they say good luck, and you go. All the stuff you have is bagged up and taken away. You don’t need it the next day, and if there are emergencies stuff can get lost, so it’s better if a friend or partner handles it.

Then you wait in a pre-operation room with clouds painted on the ceiling. It made me think of going to heaven, but it was better than white tiles, I guess. That was when I chatted with Romana, ensured she knew I loved her, again, and waited. And then they come for you. You say goodbye, and off you go to theatre.

There, the anaesthetist I’d met before, hooked me up to a skullcap for monitoring my brain, and started preparing me with those injection thingies. A theatre nurse chatted and joked with me. Clearly there to keep my mind off things and keep me calm. And the moment comes. The anaesthetic is injected and you’re switched off.

It really is like that. You don’t have any awareness.

I’m awake and alive!

Actually, I remember a vague moment of having something pulled out of my throat, being conscious, and then out of it again. According to Romana when I first woke I became agitated, so they sedated me again for a while. When I next woke I had a nurse talking to me, giving a button to press with instructions about how it delivered morphine and would ease my pain. I couldn’t overdose with it apparently.

I tried.

I clicked that button again and again! Not to deliberately kill myself or anything, but because it was so nice! However, it’s rate limited. Keep pressing and it just beeps. When it kicks in you feel this warmth, and the pain goes. It’s a very nice drug and I’m not surprised people get addicted.

Romana came in. I was… not really in the best place. I was in pain. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. I don’t even know if I have the order of events right.

Click. Oh, that lovely morphine button.

We chatted a little, but I remember very little. I had an oxygen mask, I was uncomfortable. I realised I had a urinary catheter in place, so I could stay still. She left, and I think I slept.

Intensive care is weird

One thing I never realised from films, is that intensive care really is just that. It’s actually, in this case, Post-Operative Critical Care. A nurse is stationed at the end of your bed and watches you constantly in the first night. At one point I remember being woken.

“David… can you breathe please?”

I took a gasp.

“You’re worrying me with your apnea,” she said.

I took a few breaths. I felt as OK as I could manage.

I could only see one other person on the ward, and he would wave at me and give me thumbs up. He couldn’t take his mask off. We waved and smiled at each other. I never saw him on the cardiac recovery ward, but he could have had different conditions – they do other kinds of surgery there beyond hearts.

The next day was a bit less painful. You get x-rayed in your bed, poked, prodded and checked. My blood pressure tended towards the low side, but you could see that at the 24hr point I was getting a lot less attention, all the pipes in my chest were out, stitches put in, and I was being made to sit for a while now and again. The second night I was definitely left to my own devices for a bit.

After a few checks the next morning, it was off to recovery.

Not my best, look, just two days after the operation. But alive and happy about it!

The poo of doom

Each day you feel better. You need less and less supplemental oxygen. You start eating normally again.

I’d also heard that after a major operation, you get constipation. Had I known this I’d have been tempted to stop eating two days beforehand!

Because after a few days, you realise you have to poo. Thankfully this comes once you’re mobile again. But even walking fifteen metres to the bathroom is still tiring on the third day. The poo won’t wait. Nor should it. Because the longer it takes, the worse it’ll be.

Man, you’re giving birth.

Seriously. I sat in the bathroom. It started to come. Very very slowly. It. Was. Huge.

And a huge poo is going to be unpleasant, no matter how much time you give it. I feel for heroin addicts dealing with that. Their piles must be quite something.

I strained, but only a little as I’d been warned not to. So I had to tolerate this thing… half in, half out. Slowly but surely, little by little, it came. But it seemed to never end. I swear, I spent an hour in that bathroom, swearing, cursing, and wishing I’d never been born. And if I pushed too hard my heart rewarded me with a palpitation or to and I’d feel breathless.

The thought occurred to me… what if I died right now? A poo, half the way out of my arse and me, on the floor? That would be the last thing the world saw of me. Ew.

Deep breath.

Carry on. Wait. Be patient.

Eventually, it was over. I hobbled back to the bed, grabbed my oxygen mask, and had a nap. I’d deserved it.

Eventually you get to go home

Six days after being open and lying surrounded by dedicated specialists, I was going home. They test you to see if you’re capable of being trusted. You have to walk a certain distance, unaided, and climbing and descend a flight of stairs. A group of you go together for this test. We all did it. There was some sort of air of celebration around us. We were survivors! This thing wasn’t going to defeat us after all! Each day we were stronger!

The homecoming

Getting to leave the hospital is a joy. I’d been taking walks and stepping outside anyway. I was very keen to be moving. I felt frail and slow, but it allowed me to feel like life was going to improve.

But in spite of that, on discharge, you’re given your bag of drugs and wheeled to the door. Once you’re off in your car, you’re no longer their problem. Until then though, they have a process to follow and they’ll stick to it!

As you can see, I had the weird hospital socklets and stockings on. The compression stockings help reduce the chance of a blood clot forming in your legs, and reduce swelling. You can see from this photo that my left leg, from which a vein had been harvested, was definitely bigger than my right

And that’s it. The next phase is about getting back to full fitness, work and leading a full life. I surprised myself, and I’ll share more soon. I’m planning to discuss stress, work-life balance, family and a few more things. And this blog may even come back to life a little bit. I’m bored of helping Facebook and friends to keep their platforms populated with content that is then lost in a silo. Longer writing definitely has a place. Please feel free to join me here.

The EU are bullying the UK

A short screenplay, by me.

It’s a Monday morning at a small train station on a mainline. It’s bustling as business travellers head to London for their week’s business. The air is cool, with people blowing little clouds of steam as they head into the station from their taxis and cars.

Mr Hock, a late-middle aged man with a red face and bumpy nose caused by years of excessive alcohol and rich food approaches the ticket office. Miss Nowak, a young Polish woman living in the UK for five years now, is behind the glass, and looks up as Mr Hock sets down his briefcase.

Miss Nowak (neutrally): Good morning. How can I help you?

Mr Hock (confidently): I’d like an open return ticket to London Euston please.

Miss Nowak: That will be £193 please. Are you paying by card?

Mr Hock (with irritation): £193? I’m not travelling first class then, how much for standard class?

Miss Nowak: That *is* standard class. If you need to pay less you can travel out of peak hours. Would you like that?

Mr Hock (exasperated): That’s outrageous! How can it cost so much? I used to travel this way a lot in the eighties and it only cost £20!

Miss Nowak looks down for a moment, then regards the queue of people behind Mr Hock.

Miss Nowak: I guess things have changed. Do you want a ticket or not?

Mr Hock, squinting one eye: Why are you bullying me?

Miss Nowak (confused): What? I… no, this is just how the prices work. Do you want a ticket or not?

Mr Hock (his face reddening): Well can’t you give me a special price?! I’m a very important person you know! People in shops often negotiate you know!

Miss Nowak: I can’t do that, and look, there are other peo….

Mr Hock (interrupting): I will pay £80! Not a penny more! And it must be first class, on the next train to London as I have a very important meeting at ten o’clock and will miss out on getting a very important job if I don’t get there on time!

Miss Nowak: I’m sorry, but rules are rules and I’m not allowed to give you a discount. If you want to go to London you’ll have to try a different way. Now please pay, or go, there’s a queue.

Mr Hock, now furious, grabs his briefcase and storms away to the exit of the station. Looking at his watch, he realises that if he misses the next train he’ll be late for his meeting, and then it dawns on him! A brilliant idea! He grabs his phone and scrolls through his contacts, looking for his friend John.

Mr Hock: John? Hi John! Yes… can you hear me OK it’s a bit… yes, good… OK, remember when we used to watch Scrapheap Challenge? Great wasn’t it? Shows how easy it is to make a vehicle! I need to get to London for 10am. It’s far too long to drive, and the train company is bullying me for £193! But if we can just knock up a home made train in an hour I can make my meeting and…

John interrupted, his voice is a little distorted over a poor mobile connection: Roger? What are you on about? We can’t build a train in an hour… Scrapheap Challenge is just a show and…

Mr Hock: Poppycock! The show only ever lasted an hour and they built all sorts of wonderful machines in that time!

John: No, it doesn’t work like that. These things are carefully orchestrated to make entertainment, and in real life making a train in an hour is impossible.

Mr Hock pulls his phone away from his head and stares at it, shaking with fury, before bringing it back to his ear.

Mr Hock: I see. Well if I fail to get to the meeting, it’s YOUR fault! I’m fed up of people with a can’t do attitude! What happened to plucky English spirit eh? EH? We need to stop letting train firms bully us with their inflexibility, high costs and hatred of people like us! I am proud! I fought in two world wars and won! Well not me personally, no, John… but people like me! And we didn’t make bouncing bombs in two hour…

[muffled voice on phone]

Mr Hock: Yes I know I saw it in a film, and it lasted two hours, it was amazing. Plucky English heroes!

John: You’ve gone mad, Roger. What are you on about? You don’t know anything about bombs or trains. It’s simply impossible. And even if you do make it, National Rail won’t just let you put it on the railway… and… why am I even bothering with this?

Mr Hock: Well it’s people like you that hold people like me back! This should be easy! John… John?

Mr Hock looks at his phone and realises John has hung up. He looks around, sees a taxi, and raises his arm. He gets in. The screen fades.

The taxi pulls up outside a scrapyard, and Mr Hock looks, optimistically, at all the materials there that he can use for his project. A large man in greasy overalls, dismantling an old car, eyes him up as he gets out of the taxi and approaches.

Mr Hock: Good morning!

Large man: Alright. What d’ya want?

Mr Hock: I’d like to make a train! I have one hour. Well, fifty minutes.

The large man stares at Mr Hock, up and down, slowly, without answering. Mr Hock starts to feel uneasy.

Mr Hock: Well?

Large man: Is this a gag or summat?

Mr Hock: I’m deadly serious.

The large man starts to laugh.

Mr Hock: What? Are you one of them? Are you in cahoots with the train company? Is this a conspiracy to take away my freedom on trains?

The large man, between laughs: Fuck off!

Mr Hock turns, and gets his phone out of his pocket. He dials a number and puts it to his head.

Mr Hock: Yes, hello, is that Stephen Barclay? Well, it looks like I can’t get to London for today after all. Yes, I know I wanted the job of chief negotiator in your department… yes… I appreciate that, it’s just I have some minor things to sort out, all fixable with technology of course, and then I’ll be there… Stephen? Stephen? Hello?

Screen fades out.

Staleys in the Isle of Man

One of the funny things about children and their memories is just how fallible they are. Full of false memories and forgotten realities. I lived, for a while, somewhere on the outskirts of Douglas on the Isle of Man, when I was about nine years old.

The family I stayed in had a boy about a year older than me, and a girl about a year younger. The girl was nice, if disinterested by my presence. The boy was giddy at first, but horrible if I dared beat him at anything. Within a month or so every toy I’d brought with me (and they weren’t many) was damaged in some way by him and he wasn’t great at sharing… though he didn’t always get much choice in that matter.

His parents were, I suppose, alright. Why would they have looked after me if not? The father was a Scottish oil-rig worker and absent for what seemed like an age at a time. I didn’t mind. When he was home there seemed to be a lot of porridge to eat, and they weren’t good at making porridge. Then it became An Issue when I didn’t eat it all. I remember one day being left alone with what seemed like a monstrous bowl of porridge while everyone went out. I had to finish the porridge.

The good news is that with care and running water you can wash any amount of porridge down a sink. I don’t know why I didn’t think to use the toilet instead, but I didn’t. It would certainly have been a faster way of disposing of the sticky gloop.

And I have a massive collection of memories from the place. There was a bar of soap in the shape of a blue elephant. A bar of soap which, I must add, wasn’t to be used as soap. Simply not allowed. No idea why. But the days passed. I would go to school, come home for lunch of some thin, hideous soup – often oxtail, and go back. Sometimes I’d have a sandwich to take with me. I only remember soup and porridge from the Isle of Man. I’m sure I got nice meals too. I just have zero recollection.

The funny thing about informal fostering is how risky it is. I suppose that isn’t funny at all, really. But in doing it, your parent(s) could be unwittingly exposing you to dangers. So if I spoke to strangers in the park (and I would, being that kind of child) then my Dad would make it An Issue. But being dumped on an island while Dad goes off to marry his new 19yr old wife? Yeah, no problem!

But nothing bad happened, porridge aside. Nobody molested me. Nobody beat me. Nobody really shouted at me. All the people who put me up were better at the basics of childcare than Dad, no matter how bad their soup was. No matter that mostly they were much more boring in my eyes. Because Dad, although volatile and drunk, was funny and interesting. I didn’t want to live with him, but when he was sober and happy, he was great. But it’s how you act when things aren’t going well that tends to define you. And when things went badly he was a horror and couldn’t keep things together. Hence all the informal fostering when his latest escapade had gone wrong.

What was best about this informal fostering was the new experiences. In Horwich, the landlords of the Albert Arms put me up for quite a while. They handled feeding me, discipline and keeping me relatively on the straight and narrow. I was a little feral, I suppose, but that wasn’t so unusual in 1980. They even made delicious food like fish fingers. They even bought me my first bike, a used Raleigh Chopper. Good people. Took me on holiday too. To Garstang, admittedly, but it was still a holiday and I loved it.

Back in the Isle of Man there was one memory…an experience… that really sticks with me. There was a bakery in a nearby row of shops. I’d been told by some other children that they sold “staleys” some days. Confused, they explained a staley was just yesterday’s cakes and still tasted delicious! I was reluctant at first, but a friend, the guy with the mute mother, took me in and showed me the ropes.

To a nine year old with relatively little going on in life this was… heaven. The only feeling better was the same friend whose mum handed me unused toys and board games to take home. I loved her, a little. And I loved that bakery, because if I found 2p in the nearby phone box I had a treat to look forward to. I’d run in excitedly, ask to be shown the staleys, and choose the nicest I could afford.

But it annoys me that I don’t know the name of the school I went to. Or my friend with the mute mother. Or the name of the family I stayed with. Or their grandparents who often looked after me for long, tedious weekends. Nothing. Just gone. But I remember the bakery. And I remember the broken JPS Lotus model toy that got broken by my temporary roommate. The little shit.

Image credit: CC-BY https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89clair#/media/File:Eclairs_at_Fauchon_in_Paris.jpg

What It’s Like to Dine Out When You’re Veggie

Imagine, you arrive at the restaurant. It’s slick, it’s luscious. Wonderful smells assault your nose.

You’re hungry. Very hungry. This is going to be great!

So, you sit down, the waiter comes over.  Oddly, he doesn’t hand you a menu.  Instead, he decides to tell you what you can eat.

“Tonight, for starters, you can have smoked duck breast with confit duck fritter, orange & shallot dressing.”

“Sounds delicious!” you reply, “What are the other options?”

“I’m sorry sir, that’s the only dish we have for starters.”

“Oh, OK, well, good job it’s tasty! What’s for mains?”

“Roast Duck Breast with spiced plums, shallot puree, spring onions & crispy confit duck,” replies the waiter.

“And?”

“Sir, that’s the only option for you tonight I’m afraid.”

“Bit… heavy on the duck, isn’t it?”

“Sir, you like Duck?”

“Well yes,” you reply, “but twice in one meal is a bit much. Don’t you have anything else?”

“No sir, that’s your only option.”

“Not much of an option. Still, I’m sure it’ll be nice. And what do you do for dessert?”

“Oh sir, naturally we have about twenty desserts you can choose from!” he exclaims, “You can have chocolate mousse, creme brulée, a variety of ice creams…”

You decide to interrupt him and then… realise that it won’t change anything. Your a minority voice – everybody else is offered ten dishes, it’s only you that’s stuck on duck.

And that, my friends, is what many restaurants are like for vegetarians. You get a single cheese based starter, a single cheese based main, and lots and lots of dessert choices. I’d love it if more restaurants got with it and offered a broader range of food. I also think a lot of restaurants could improve their week-night takings by offering healthier food… people who travel a lot for work don’t need to make themselves sick as a result of eating out four or five nights a week.

Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/unanoslucror/7314646402/ by Jon Smith on Flickr, CC-BY-SA 2.0

F%@*!?g Hell

image

I’ve done Arica > San Pedro before, albeit with a change at Calama. Thing is, I just remembered one of the more annoying bits…

Chile has concerns over various food pests and as a consequence you not only get checked for fruit, cheese etc on boarding the bus, there are also occassional checkpoints. So at 3.30 in the freakin’ morning the lights all come on it’s time to step into the cold.

So here I am, wide awake, irritable, and in full realisation that this bus was designed for a country where the average height is a good two inches (5cm) less than back home.  So I’ve got my music on, popped my fleece on and hoping for some sleep.  Soon.

Un Techo Para Chile

Chilean slumI struggled to find somewhere to eat this evening, and in the end decided that some more bad food would have to do.  I have at least found a source of decent fruit at the market, so I’m getting vitamins and fibre now.  Woo!

The smells of Telepizza were calling me in, and I succumbed.  I went in.  I watched them making a pizza… and lo, it looked like pizza!  And verily, I ordered.

While I was waiting for it to be made I sat down and combined reading and watching a telethon for Un Techo Para Chile which has been fundraising like mad lately around here.  I’d thrown a few coins into a collection box without really knowing what it was about.

A wino kept wandering in and out, watching the TV for a bit, and then ambling out.  He’d just stand there, near the door.  I studiously avoiding catching his gaze.

The program then showed a short film about a young family moving from what was essentially a corrugated board shack into a newly built, if somewhat spartan, apartment.  That’s when I heard the blubbing.  I looked and saw the wino, just standing there, mouth turned down, tears streaming down his cheeks, and blubbing like a three year old that’s been denied another sweet.

It was heartbraking.

If you have a moment, consider making a small donation by following the link above.  Since the strong earthquake recently a lot of families and individuals here have lost their homes.  Others are just living in absolute poverty.  They need your help, and once they have decent living conditions they can do more with their lives, educate their children better, and bring themselves a better future.

Food!

Oh seriously, sometimes, when you travel the food is amazing. Sometimes, it looks like it might be a danger to your health…

No, I ordered a veggie pizza, not some sort of mentalist giant cheese flan.

 

 

Argh! It’s vomiting salad at me!

Father’s health was seriously affected by malnourishment.   Maybe he was just scared of the food here?

[playht_player width="100%" height="90px" voice="Noah"]