Sogger’s Blog

When I recently posted about a crappy week, I alluded to a crappy hospital visit - let me elaborate. Since no medication has been working since my ill-fated dabble with generic medication, I have regular visits to a neurologist and he decided that since the last failure, it was now time for another EEG. It pains me to run down generics, but if you are going to claim that there are no differences between generic medication and their more expensive patent-protected versions, then please make sure that this is the case. No idea what I am talking about? Read more here.

An EEG is the one that leaves you looking like the Sputnik monkey, with several tens of wired electrodes attached to your head, neck, arms and chest via blobs of wax that sets hard and is a bugger to get off again afterwards. As the test starts, you are asked to open your eyes, close them again etc. as they calibrate the signals from your brain. The worst thing about my test was that they had a student doctor in, and the technician was muttering lots of “ooohh, did you see that there when he just breathed out” as some spike in the signal no doubt showed up on the screen.

The EEG is actually a series of small tests, some of them repeated. This time, the same as the previous time, the part with the flashing lights was a doddle: playing a series of increasingly rapidly flashing lights in front of your eyes as you open and close them, while monitoring your brains reaction to them. No light-sensitive epileptic action for me, so I won’t be putting the Wii back in the cupboard just yet.

No, the bit that gets me is the hyperventilation test: spending 5 minutes deep breathing - really deep breathing. It didn’t give me what I recognized as an epileptic seizure, but, apparently my brain-wave patterns belied this. I felt nauseous afterwards in any case, but so would you. Just try it, and see if your fingers and toes aren’t tingling and if you aren’t feeling extremely dizzy.

So after 30 minutes it was over, off with the wires and off to the bathroom to pick the wax from my hair while waiting for the neurologist to examine the results…

Her opening gambit wasn’t too reassuring: “Hhhmm, it looks a lot worse than last time, it looks like a volcano has opened and we need to get a lid back on it as soon as possible”. “Yes please, that would be nice”. “Have you considered surgery?”. “Yes, but only for a vascectomy: not to have a slice of my brain removed”, I hypothetically replied to my computer two weeks later. She considered this a viable option, but when she saw the look on my face, retracted somewhat. With hindsight, I wonder if it wasn’t designed to shock a little, something along the lines of “snap out of it”. Why do I think that? Well, because, one of the other things she said was that I needed to work on was the “psychological aspects”. I nodded along sagely at the time she said this, not really thinking about what that really meant. I am now wondering if she was implying that she meant something along the lines of:

• I was imagining half of the seizures. Maybe some of them aren’t really seizures at all. Maybe my disorientation comes from premature Alzheimer’s. D’oh!
• I was bringing them on myself by thinking about having them. For example, before an important meeting, I might imagine how I might react if I am half-way through a presentation and have a seizure, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When I told her about this, she asked me whether it would be possible to get a job that didn’t involve me having to be in contact with people. Chance would be a fine thing.
• I could stop them before they start by positive thinking.
• Once they had started, I could bring them to a close more quickly by thought alone. I think there is merit in this one, and I have been trying it out, with maybe some positive results.
• Another reason, that I haven’t got round to thinking about yet.

You could tell it was the quiet summer period because she also had a student doctor with her for the consultation and she threw the whole panopoly of treatments at me, including, for example, the modified Atkins Diet which has been known to be useful to control seizures in children. There is no way I am going to go to thes lengths, but one of the things I have done since is to cut down on quick sugar hits such as Snickers (boo hoo), and - well - no difference really - apart from  losing a couple of kilos…

The final outcome, as always, was a change in medication. So, now it’s time to slowly wean off the Keppra and onto Epitomax. One of the ultimately disheartening things about changing medication is that it is often followed by an improvement in the condition. This time I went 10 days without a seizure. Considering that I had been having at least 1-a-day for several weeks previously, this was a stunning result. Unfortunately, the effect seems to have worn off now, and I am back to one every two or three days, but I am still playing with the dosage and still handling a stressful time at work.

At the moment we are under extreme pressure on a project for our biggest customer, so it’s all hands to the pumps. This means that today I had to ask a guy who works from home to come into the office for 4 days next week. This is someone who, two years ago, was going to leave because his wife wanted to move to the countryside and he didn’t fancy the long drive to work. That’s understandable, but because we didn’t want to lose him, teleworking seemed a good compromise, and, even though management were against it, we fought to get it for him. When I asked him to come to the office, his reply was, “OK, I will come in for 4 days, but you need to know that for the last 2 days I will be on sick leave - 2 hours driving in each direction are going to leave me extremely tired that I will just end up sleeping on Saturday”. There may be some logic in there somewhere, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.

Maybe the neurologist was right. Maybe I just need to find a job where I don’t have to deal with people…

I’m painting the shutters on the house before Wnter sets in. Aren’t shutters great? Why don’t we have them in England? They keep the house insulated, protected, private; in fact, I don’t see any disadvantage at all…apart from having to paint them once every few years.

Shutters are heavy, so you want to make sure that the “few” in “every few years” is as large as possible. It was for this reason that we decided to buy the Dulux Valentine, “Guaranteed 10 Years Exterieur Wood Paint”. We went to the local DIY shop - the one I lovingly wrote about several months ago, spent a fortune on the stuff and followed the instructions to the letter, spending an inordinate amount of time sanding them down, removing loose paint and doing all that stuff that you do up front for a better quality result.

It was dark by the time I had finished preparing the first pair, but to get a move on, I decided to put a first coat on in the garage, even though it would be more difficult to see where I had already painted under the weak light. We had bought a nice “Patrick Green” paint (at least, that is what it said it was). I opened it up, and looking at it, I wasn’t sure at all that it was green. Maybe it just needs a good stirring? I thought. Hhhmm no, still a strange-looking green. Maybe I’ll try a few brush-strokes and it’ll dry green? Hhhmm, no. No doubting it, this is blue paint!, It definitely does not do what it says on the tin.

My wife is furious at this and can’t wait to get back to the shop to complain. When she gets there, she has (as usual) to wait for 45 minutes in the queue for returned goods. Behind the counter are 10 members of staff, with only 1 till operating, “1 more and they’ll be forming a football team” cries someone from behind, more in frustration than amusement. The conversation when she arrives at the front goes like this:

“I bought this tin of paint. On the side it says it is green. On the top, it says it is green. Inside, it is blue”.

“Did you open it?”

“Yes, how would I know it was blue otherwise?”

“Sorry, I can’t take it back - we don’t accept goods that have already been opened”.

“How would I know it was blue if I hadn’t opened it?”

“I don’t know, but I am not allowed to take back opened goods”.

“Please fetch me the manager”.

“If you like, but I can’t take back opened goods”.

Over comes the manager. “What seems to be the problem madam?”. “Please open this tin of green paint and prove to the lady that it is blue”. The “customer service” lady is still looking over the manager’s shoulder as he opens the tin, covering his hands in blue paint. “Is it blue?” she says. “What colour are these?” says the manager holding up his hands, trying not to get any on his Boss suit. “Well I can’t take it back because it’s been opened”. “Yes, I opened it. Please give the lady a voucher.”.

“Let me stop you there”, says my wife. “It’s 7:55PM, the store closes in 5 minutes, you have only 1 till open, so if you think I am going to go through the rigmarole of getting a voucher, searching for the paint, queuing and getting home before checking it is the right colour, you are sadly mistaken. Here is what is going to happen: You are going to go back to the paint aisle. You are going to get an identical tin of paint. You are going to open it in front of me and prove to me that it is the same colour inside as it says on the outside, I am going to walk out with it, and you can be sure that I won’t be coming back again.”.

There are still 10 people behind her in the returns queue, but their own frustration is momentarily forgotten in a bout of clapping as my wife walks triumphantly from the store, safe in the knowledge that she is carrying the paint that she originally came for.

I am a man, so the the way I would have dealt with it would have been different. I would have waited for the 45 minutes, looking at my watch and tutting, and preparing my indignant-sounding speech. However, when I arrived at the front, I would have said, “I didn’t need this”, taken my voucher, replaced the paint, queued and left, hammering one more nail in the coffin of the consumer in the face of big business. Ho hum, I would have said, with sighing acceptance on the way home, “why is everything so crap these days?”. And the ulcer in my stomach would have grown that little bit larger.

I would like to say in case you are interested, that the name of the store with this appalling customer service is CASTORAMA