Today has started sunny, and the forecast says sunshine or sunny spells should last until sunset. It will even be a little bit less cold with a peak of 10° C for maybe just a single hour, or so the latest revision to the forecast says. Tomorrow may feature a few random sunny spells in the first half of the day, and the temperature could be 10° C for most of the afternoon.

    Yesterday was definitely not a good day, although a quite a few hours were semi-good. I finally got out to do some shopping in Tesco, and that was good. The trouble was that my chest started to ache going there, and ached more coming home again. It did seem to be related to the very cold air, but later on I had serious doubts about that diagnosis.

  I wore a nice warm coat to go to Tesco, and it kept me warm inside it. In fact by the time I got to Tesco I could feel it getting damp with sweat in places, but I was reluctant to open it for fear of getting chilly. Maybe that was a bad idea because, although the coat is quite a generous fit, I could still feel some pressure on my chest. I recall last Wednesday when I went to the pub with my coat open, and didn't get much discomfort either from external or internal cold.

  On the way back from the pub last Wednesday, I did the coat up, and I was in a lot of pain by the time I had walked home from the station. That was the case yesterday coming home from Tesco. I arrived home with my chest really complaining. I still thought it was a reaction to cold air because the ache didn't seem to reduce when waiting at the checkout. It did eventually reduce only when I got back indoors  with coat off and in the warm.

  My shop in Tesco was generally "sane", and even the possibly not quite sane purchase turned out to be semi-sane. I am talking about the amount of sugar in some products when judging them sane or insane. I spotted and bought two chicken and mushroom slices with reduced price stickers on them. I suspected they may be rather unhealthy, but I threw caution to the wind because they seemed like a tasty thing to have for lunch.

  I was quite surprised when I checked the basic "traffic light colours" nutritional information panel. As suspected they had too much salt, fat and had a fair few calories. What was not expected was that their sugar content was shown as in the green at about (from memory) just 1.2gms of sugar per slice. After dinner I didn't really fancy doing much, and I wasn't even fully free of pain at first. I spent a couple of hours laying on my bed reading.

  It was still a couple of hours before I needed to worry about dinner, but I went down in the cold kitchen to wash up some beer glasses and other stuff. I then prepared what may, or may not be tonight's dinner. If I am in the position to eat it* it was will diced pork, cooked in the slow cooker all evening, and all night, with some Chinese five spice powder. It will have beansprouts and pak choi added in the last stages of cooking, plus possibly more five spice powder.

* More about this a bit later.

  My dinner, last night, was to to be bits of ready cooked roast chicken, grilled to heat it up, and dry it out a bit, plus crisp up the skin a bit more, with a side serving of garden peas. Peas were the greenest thing I thought I could add to my dinner. Unfortunately peas can have a high-ish sugar content, although fresh frozen ones may not be too bad because unlike tinned peas they can't add extra sugar.

  I watched a few interesting things on TV last night. One thing was an episode of The Avengers that was being shown on the London Live channel. That is one of two channels I can't see any picture when I tune to them on my PC. The silly thing is that the picture is there, but can't be displayed for some weird reason. What I can, and did do was to record it. The recorded video stream will play on one of my video players, and it can also be seen by the video editor I use. I recorded it, and the used the video editor to top and tail it, and to snip out all the ad breaks before saving it in a format any video player can play.

  After saving the clean version I didn't watch it - partly because that episode had been shown recently on the Great TV ! channel, but mostly because I was distracted by other stuff. In particular I found that a quick look at "Muddy Waters And The Rolling Stones" being shown on Sky Arts was a lot more interesting than expected. I am not a rabid blues fan, but I like a lot of blues stuff, and I was quite taken with Muddy Waters and the musicians who supported him - including two Rolling Stones Guitarists, and Mick Jagger on vocals.

   Now I think of it, the first distraction was watching quite a lot, almost all, of The Who recorded live in Kilburn in 1977. As much as I enjoyed the music, I also found myself watching the production values. I suspect it was filmed on film like a movie because in 1977 TV cameras needed a lot of light, and produced various artifacts. Using cinefilm probably made it sharper and maybe more colourful, and that was aided by good lighting. The back of the stage was illuminated but PAR (polished aluminium reflector) with tungsten lights. They gave a much warmer and smoother colour than modern LED lighting. They were used only to provide "mood". All performers were in white spotlights for very faithful colour reproduction. To my mind, mainly as a photographer, modern lighting rigs just tend to splash bright colours everywhere, and sometimes, maybe most times, there is little artistry about it.

  I could feel some aches in my chest while watching TV, and towards the end I made them slightly worse like I did the previous night by massaging in some Comfrey cream. After I turned the TV off I went out to the cold-ish bathroom to brush my teeth. With that done I came back to my bedroom, and got into bed to do some reading. It seemed just the effort of brushing my teeth, and walking back to my bedroom, had got my chest aching a lot more.

  After I finished reading, turned out the light, and turned over to try for sleep I found my chest ache had got quite bad. It was fairly obvious that this was more than just the old operation scar tissue reacting badly to cold, but possible heart attack material. The pain never increased to the point that it seemed like it would pass the annoying level to something more dangerous, but it was still quite bad enough to make sleep seem impossible.

  Any idea of getting to sleep at a reasonable time, maybe something like 10pm, was blown out of the water. It was approaching 1am when I got up to go for a pee. After that I went back to bed, but I suddenly seemed to be farting a lot. I went back to the toilet and after a while I produced quite a substantial "stool". I went back to bed feeling a lot better. For a while it seemed my chest pains had retreated a bit, although the connection between the two seemed very odd.

  As 1.30am approached my chest was still giving me a lot of discomfort, and I decided to get up for a while, and check my blood pressure. It was bad, but not truly terrible, and I have seen a lot higher in my time. It was 156/68. At 1.53am it was very slightly worse at 157.71. At 1,40am it was the same. At 1.49 it had risen to 160/69.At 1.56am it was 161/72. I then tried my hardest to relax, and at 2.02am I managed to get it down to 145/52. The next reading was slightly higher, and then at 2.14am it was back down again to a "mildly hypertensive" 145/69. That seemed low enough to have another go at getting to sleep.

  Between then and about 8.30am I seemed to get very little sleep, but I knew I got some sleep because I remember waking up from dreams. All the dreams seemed to be very fragmented, and there was nothing I seem to remember except for one that I felt I should remember, but I still can't seem to drag up any details from the murky depths of my memory. At 8.30am I felt odd, but not really in any bad pain. In fact there was very little of what you might call pain. My blood pressure was really high when I first got out of bed. It was an eye popping 182/74 (but many years ago I could get systolic readings of over 200 in the doctors surgery.

  The good news this morning concerns my blood glucose readings. They could be better but: Contour meter 8.3, GlucoRX meter 7.7, and Sinocare meter 8.8mmol/l is not too bad.The GlucoRX meter reading of 7.7mmol/l would be very good if the other two backed it up. The Sinocare reading was a second attempt, using fresh blood from a different finer, because the first reading was very high. I remain convinced that these blood glucose meters are, as my nurses and doctors tell me, only a rough guide, but that using three meters can, on a good day, give a figure that closely approached the truth.

  After taking my blood glucose readings, and dishing out my morning and afternoon pills, I went down into the cold kitchen to prepare some breakfast. I fully expected the cold to trigger off all sorts of pains, but after preparing a single bowl if instant noodles, and taking them back up to my bedroom, I felt no worse at all, and maybe in some way possibly better - perhaps it was the relief of not feeling worse than made it seem like it might be better.

  After eating my breakfast, and taking my pills, I gave it another 15 minutes and checked my blood pressure again. At 9.23am it was 153/60 - still rather high. At 9.47am it was a ore reasonable 140/57, although just now, at 10.25am, it had risen a bit to 148/59. I am forced to concede that things are not right ! When I have washed my hair, and had shower, I will allow a good half hour to relax, and check my blood pressure again. If, as I expect, it is still very high, I will check my "emergency kit", which is packed for most things that would be useful for a hospital stay, and add anything else I can usefully squeeze in the ruck sack, and then sit back calmly, and once calm (hopefully) do one more blood pressure check.

   If it is still high, which seems inevitable, I had better take a walk to Lewisham Hospital A&E, and book myself in. The last time I did this was in 2019, just under 5 years ago, so I am not exactly making a habit of it. On that occasion I was prodded and poked, and my repaired plumbing of my 2013 quad heart bypass operation was checked and found to be still perfect. They never did find any real problems, and after a week everything, except my blood glucose level, which was very high while in hospital, had returned to normal/acceptable. The only outcome was a small change in medication.

  A couple of years later I was doing all my very long Covid Lockdown walks. I recorded a total of 244 miles of walking in 2020, and some months I was out on many consecutive days with typical walks being at least 3 miles, and many 5 or more miles. I doubt I have ever been so healthy in my life - and that in the middle of a pandemic ! After that I slackened off a lot, and last year I only recorded a total of 15 miles of walking exercise. Possible reasons were I don't remember last year having a glorious summer, and maybe I was starting to get some twinges while walking - particularly a sort of wheeziness, although both only started to become an annoyance later in the autumn when it started to get cold and wet.

  I reckon by about midday I will have decided if I am going to hospital. If I do I think I can expect at least a weeks stay, and I won't be writing any more until I am out again, but I will try and get plenty of pictures to show once I start writing again !
     







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