So Where Was I?

Well first of all thanks to Span and Shy for the comments left here and on Span's blog. Due to a period of introversion and self-examination I hadn't noticed that my absence from the blogsphere has followed my post about the local neighbourhood thugs - doh!

Anyway it's a while since I missed posting for a whole calendar month which was a shame because I had so much to say but so little enthusiasm for contact with the world beyond that part of it I could physically reach out and touch. Where to begin? Well there was Nathalie's school presentation, Mark Cavendish winning six (yes count them) stages of Le Tour De France, a photographic session on the theme of 4th July, the 40th Anniversary of the first landing on the moon, my first experience of a Fashion Show and the month ended with a visit to Paris for the end of the Tour De France.

Well that's what I didn't post about (although a post on Paris will follow), but why wasn't I posting? It wasn't anything to do with the local problems directly but it was down to health reasons and the subsequent effect on my mental stability really, although that makes it sound a lot more serious than it probably was.

As I have mentioned before here and in other places I'm diabetic and earlier this year I was advised that because my blood sugar level had passed the recommended level I should switch from diet control to medicinal control. The size of the tablet I was asked to take, see the photograph above, caused much hilarity to begin with and was known as a 'horse tablet' in our house for obvious reasons. The instructions for taking the tablet were simple, with water and at meal times, and I was told that I should take one tablet for three months and if there weren't any side effects the dosage should be increased to two, one with breakfast and one with a meal in the evening. Now the switching to two tablets coincided with what at the time seemed two unrelated events, firstly I increased my exercise (both at the gym and walking/cycling in the evenings/weekends) and secondly I started to lose weight. The weight loss was a good thing to begin with because although I had spent most of my spring weekends outside taking photographs the walking was gradual, if over a long period of time, rather than intense and so I was aware that the weight lost during the winter gym sessions had come back.

Anyway as I say the loss was gradual and not unexpected given the level of exercise but then something went dramatically wrong at the end of May and I began to lose weight very quickly and by the middle of June I had lost a stone and a half in five weeks. This loss happened at the same time as I had, for me, a serious stomach upset which lasted for a week and resulted in me being housebound for three days, due to the fact (putting it as pleasantly as possible) I needed to be very close to the toilet. I arranged a visit to the doctor and it was decided that I had been one of the few instances where there was, in his words, "a severe reaction to the medication prescribed." He then added that "all drugs can cause some reaction, " in the words of John McLean, "no shit Sherlock," I mean why else would all those addicts be out there if they didn't cause some reaction?

He looked up my latest blood test results and told me that my blood sugar was actually coming down, which I guess was the ying to the yang of me being ill, losing weight and generally feeling a sense of weird paranoia for several weeks. Of course I should have questioned the strange symptoms earlier but the leaflet with the tablets stated that you shouldn't give up and should continue taking them for as long as possible - presumably until somebody notices that the previously sixteen stone bald git in the room upstairs has been replaced by a size zero bald git who spends most his life in the toilet and whose illness has helped buy several dozen Andrex puppies for the community.

So I was taken off the weight loss tablets, I had to take two of the one on the left in the photograph which you may notice are 500 mg each and put on a new tablet which surprisingly comes in at a staggeringly low 25 mg and I only have to take one!

I'm slowly getting back to what passes for normal, I've put weight back on and generally feel more sociable although the combination of the trouble with the local scallies and my tablet experience has left me hovering somewhere between indifference and belligerence when it comes to the Internet. I have however found so release in photography which I think has been possible because its one area where I can control, to a degree, the input and the output.

All this might not make any sense at all but it's sometimes better to write without using the backspace key or editing so that it makes sense to the imaginary reader out there in the vast empty bicycle shed of the soul.

work in progress not completed as at 4th August 2009