MEDICAL MATTERS

[Moh]

Well that sugar did not work, in fact after a few days it irritated the wound, this in turn caused more breakdown plus the dressings causing irritation, I had to go and get antibiotics - the doctor also told me not to cover thewound. At the moment this seems to have done the trick.
Been for my eyes testing after the cararact ops. - optician said I may need lasar treatment later - but only need galsses for reading now. Hubby has been referred for a cataract op.

[Stanley]

Ah well Moh, at least you tried with the sugar! They tell me I will need laser treatment eventually on the implant in my left eye to remove a film forming on the inside of it but they tell me it's non-invasive and can be done without an operation. The right eye is brilliantly clear (which highlights the left's shortcomings!). Distortion in right eye is still slowly correcting itself and still giving me double vision even with new glasses. I shall soldier on for a year and see what my next £300 gives me! That's why I think I'll eventually be able to read again comfortably.

[Moh]

What a day yesterday turned out - hubby took is referral letter up to the GP and had a dizzy turn when he went in to see her, she sent him off to Blackburn hospital in an ambulance - he rang to let me know and to get our granddaughter who was visiting later, to go to reception and collect the car. Our daughter who works in Blackburn went to the hospital after work and rang me to say they were doing tests. Big dos and little dos after a very thorough examination & tests, it turns out it may be a nerve problem in the inner ear, and he was sent home. The doctor said he would order a MRI scan which as he had not put urgent on the order may take a week or two, today at 12pm they rang to say they can do it tomorrow!! Granddaughter went to reception for car keys but they were not there - he had them in his pocket!!!

[Tripps]

I hope you continue to improve MOH. The other sounds possibly like labyrinthitis which Sue had recently. I've had it too - it can hit any time and very suddenly. Good thng is that it susides after about a week.

I am making progress - abandoned the crutches yesterday, just back to the walking stick now.

As an aside - I looked up my surgeon's record which is now available on line. A bit late I know, after the event, but it confirmed that he is good. The remarkable fact is that his first names are

Graham Stanley.

Spooky.

[Stanley]

You've sussed me out..... Good news David, I hope it's a steady return to full mobility. Labyrinthitis... I get a touch occasionally but not serious, wax in my ears I think. That reminds me, I'll get the ear drops out of the fridge and let them warm up.
Ebola marches steadily on. US is giving it full attention now they have had a case. I wonder if there's a tipping point where it gets to the stage where it explodes exponentially? The West is having yet another conference about it.... Could it be that media coverage is being damped down to avoid causing any sort of general public concern?

[plaques]

Don't worry about Ebola its a very difficult disease to catch. There's only 3000+ people died of it so far and that's an underestimate. This being the case I can't understand why everybody who comes into contact with it needs to dress up in full protection gear. Something funny going on here.

[Tizer]

It's a "difficult disease to catch" by comparison with, say, influenza because it's not significantly transmitted by airborne infection. For instance, you could sit in the same room as an ebola patient and not catch it. On the other hand, if that patient vomited in the room you would be in great danger. It's transmitted by contact with a victim's body fluids. The NHS site explains it thus (and offers much more information too):
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People can become infected with the Ebola virus if they come into contact with the blood, body fluids or organs of an infected person. Most people are infected by giving care to other infected people, either by directly touching the victim's body or by cleaning up body fluids (stools, urine or vomit) that carry infectious blood. Traditional African burial rituals have also played a part in its spread. The Ebola virus can survive for several days outside the body, including on the skin of an infected person, and it's common practice for mourners to touch the body of the deceased. They only then need to touch their mouth to become infected.

Other ways people can catch Ebola are:
*touching the soiled clothing of an infected person, then touching their mouth
*having sex with an infected person without using a condom (the virus is present in semen for up to seven weeks after the infected person has recovered)
*handling unsterilised needles or medical equipment that were used in the care of the infected person

A person is infectious as long as their blood, urine, stools or secretions contain the virus. Ebola virus disease is generally not spread through routine social contact (such as shaking hands) with patients who do not have symptoms. The virus is not, for example, as infectious as diseases like the flu, as airborne transmission is much less likely. You'd need to have close contact with the source of infection to be at risk.
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/ebola-viru ... virus.aspx

Although it's not mentioned in the NHS statement another important `vector' (method of transmission) would be through aerosols. I don't mean deodorants etc - I'm using the correct meaning of the word, a cloud of fine droplets suspended in the air. When we sneeze or vomit we spray out an aerosol of tiny droplets which can remain suspended in the air for a long time. Ebola would be carried in such droplets and then inhaled by anyone close by. Aerosols are also possible whenever liquids are disturbed - even peeing into a loo creates an aerosol (you didn't want to know that, did you!).

[Cathy]

[From Tiser - Aerosols are also possible whenever liquids are disturbed - even peeing into a loo creates an aerosol (you didn't want to know that, did you!).[/quote] I remember ages ago being told to always lower the toilet lid when flushing because tiny amounts of what is in the toilet bowl can end up on the toilet walls or whatever is nearby when you flush.

[Tizer]

Cathy, you're right on target with that. If we used lavatory furniture (how about that for a technical term?) properly we should always put the lid down, flush, and leave the lid down because the flushing creates an aerosol. Many decades ago when I was a wee sprog (no pun intended) a microbiologist called John Postgate wrote a book called `Microbes and Man' and I can still remember him writing about infectious aerosols and how we lock ourselves in a cubicle in a fine mist of bacteria due to the lid not being used. Of course, the `continentals' got around that problem by not having the vigorous British flush but instead using a gentle swirl. Unfortunately the gentle swirl is not as efficient in other ways!

[PanBiker]

How does the British instigated weak Greek plumbing which does not allow toilet paper down the loo (bin provided), stack up in the hygiene stakes? It''s never really bothered me (bins are always emptied daily) and it does tend to make you extra vigilant in hand washing, I do this anyway, but the practice does tend to reinforce the need.

[Stanley]

Cathy, I always put the lid down before flushing, common sense! I'm not worrying about Ebola, just thinking of all the poor people exposed to it who don't have our levels of hygiene and different social traditions.
On a personal level, I am very suspicious of my own ability to assess progress in my right eye but I am sure that the reduction in distortion is still happening. If I went and spent another £300 on new glasses I would see a lot better but I'm being patient, I shall wait a year unless things get really bad! The funny thing is that the better the right eye gets, the worse the dystopia. I'm probably at the stage now where I am better off outside at distance with no glasses at all.

[Moh]

Optician has advised me just to have reading glasses as I do not need any for distance -feels good without them.

[Stanley]

Doesn’t it just Moh! I worried at first about my eyes being able to cope with the wind and rain after being covered up for so long but they are fine, and they have windscreen wipers as well....

[Stanley]

Flu jab season is with us again, I am booked in on the 18th October....

[Big Kev]

Flu jab season is with us again, I am booked in on the 18th October....

So am I...

[Stanley]

We hear all the problems some people have with their GP but we must be lucky in Barlick. They run an efficient service. Still, I'll bet someone somewhere is complaining about them!

[Tripps]

This is the most informative and authoritative article I've yet read about Ebola.
Ebola
Some reassuring words, and some very scary.

"There will certainly be Ebola patients from Africa who come to us in the hopes of receiving treatment. And they might even infect a few people here who may then die. But an outbreak in Europe or North America would quickly be brought under control. I am more worried about the many people from India who work in trade or industry in west Africa. It would only take one of them to become infected, travel to India to visit relatives during the virus's incubation period, and then, once he becomes sick, go to a public hospital there. Doctors and nurses in India, too, often don't wear protective gloves. They would immediately become infected and spread the virus."


"In the end, you discovered that the Belgian nuns had unwittingly spread the virus. How did that happen?
In their hospital they regularly gave pregnant women vitamin injections using unsterilised needles. By doing so, they infected many young women in Yambuku with the virus. We told the nuns about the terrible mistake they had made, but looking back I would say that we were much too careful in our choice of words. Clinics that failed to observe this and other rules of hygiene functioned as catalysts in all additional Ebola outbreaks."

After saying all day that scanning air passenger arrivals was not the way to go - it sounds as if the government are about to do it.

[Stanley]

And most of the medical experts say that inspection at airports is a waste of time, if somebody is well enough to get on a plane they aren't going to be infectious when they land. The President of MSF says she can't understand why the response to their warnings has taken so long and even now is not being directed in enough quantity to the place where it is needed, the seat of the outbreak. Bit of a suspicion that the government U turn in UK is more about massaging public perception than practical measures.
The person nearest the truth is probably the US spokesman who said this is the biggest global public health threat since AIDS.

[PanBiker]

Been for my Flu jab today and was asked if I had ever been inoculated against Pneumonia. Not had that one so the Barlick nursing team decided to give me that one as well. So Flu jab in left arm and Pneumonia in the right, apparently that offers lifetime protection against 23 different strains of the viral disease. Less than a minute of time, it always amazes me the number of people that don't take up the vaccination regimes available. I have experience of full blown viral Influenza and certainly never want that again if it can be avoided, I would imagine Pneumonia is something that you are better of without as well.

[Stanley]

Ian, I too have had 'proper flu', The Asian strain in the late 1950s and you're right, you'll never confuses a bad cold with Flu after you've had the latter! I once got very close to pneumonia as well. I had the pneumonia jab about three years ago and when asked didn't think twice about going for it. I've seen really serious measles and other common diseases in my youth and like you I pity the people who haven't a clear view of what the consequences can be because they have no experience. The dangers of a reaction to any jab are real but minuscule when compared with the disease.
I often reflect on the episode of food poisoning I picked up from the Black Watch NAAFI in Berlin. I must have been quite poorly, I have no memory from when I collapsed in Berlin until over a week later when I came to in Hanover MH. It turned out to be a cocktail including Botulism and at that time was often fatal. God alone knows what they pumped into me then but I remember I had sore arms! As my dad always said, there is a providence that looks after drunken men and idiots!
[ I looked the proverb up, here's what I found on Wikiquote.....
Earliest known appearance, 1849:
Were it not for this torpid ductility, this self-abandonment to what Correa called “the special providence over the United States and little children,” the accidents of a young government, like the accidents of a young child, would be fearfully accumulated.
Attributed to Abbé Correa in Wharton, Francis (1849). State trials of the United States during the administrations of Washington and Adams. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart. p. 4. The same attribution is repeated in Hermann Von Holst's Constitutional and Political History of the United States (1888), 2:687.

Some other nineteenth-century appearances:
It has been said that a “special Providence watches over children, drunkards, and the United States.”
(December 1856). "Editor's Drawer". Harper's New Monthly Magazine 14.
I understand the saying that God takes care of children, drunken men and the United States.
Curtis, George W (1882). "The leadership of educated men". The Preacher and Homiletic Monthly (The Homiletic Review) 6: 695-703,696.
There is a popular faith that “God takes care of children, fools and the United States.”
Strong, Josiah (1885). Our country: its possible future and its present crisis. New York: Baker & Taylor for the American Home Missionary Society.
We labor continuously against this seemingly popular American idea, that Providence takes care of children, fools and the United States.
Brevet-Major Melville C. Wilkinson, “Relation of the regulary army to the country in time of peace”, speech read March 13, 1893, Glimpses of the nation's struggle (1898), 4th series, p. 57
Why are the prosperous times for this country so largely due to the whimsical intervention of that Providence which our French friends say watches over fools, drunkards, and Americans?
"Inverted protection", New York Times, July 22, 1897, Page 4]

[LizG]

Last Friday (a week ago) my 88 year old Mum and Dad had a burn off. They still live on 2.5 acres and do the maintenance themselves. They were assisted with the burn off of course. However, since last Saturday Mum has been in bed with a self diagnosed bad back, which today morphed into a hamstring problem.

I hope I did the right thing but I read her the riot act and reminded her that she was 88 and 'if you don't use it you lose it'. I told her to get out of bed for a short time, stand up straight and walk as far a she could to get some blood flowing in her muscles. Needless to say she wasn't very happy with me, but to my surprise she rang me back this afternoon to say she had taken my advice and felt much better. I think she was scared to do anything in case it got worse.

It's the first time I've ever known her to be like this. A bit of a shock.

[Cathy]

I'm glad it worked out well for your Mum Liz, sometimes just thinking that you can't do something actually becomes just that. Better to think positive and have a go.

[Stanley]

I recognise that one Liz. I'm convinced that being afraid of finding out how bad my eyes were was what kept me out of the shed for 18 months.... That's why having a small black fitness trainer is so good for me....

[Stanley]

Update on the progress of my right eye. The distortion is still reducing, they were right when they said it was a slow job. One of the indicators is that my new reading glasses are almost as good as my old computer glasses now, I have found myself using them by mistake and not noticing until I take them off. Encouraging, what I want to see now is the central distortion go away! Onward and upwards!

[Bruff]

.......have had 'proper flu'..

Me too. Back in 2003. I'd been to the Cook Islands in the South Pacific whilst a nasty strain was going through New Zealand, and we flew Air NZ and a lot of NZers were in the Cooks. I was back home and it hit me in a half hour from leaving work to getting on a train, I was absolutely fine all day. I've no idea how I got home, and went straight to bed. Got the Dr out the day after as there was a Dengue Fever outbreak in the Cooks. But I didn't have that. I had 'flu. I was basically in bed for 2 weeks, back in work after 3 and not right 'till 2 months after.

Yes, you know when you've got 'flu.

Richard Broughton