hughmacdougall.com

Seeing that another year has passed and I have reached another milestone today I thought I would let you all know how I am going. Despite a start to the year that had me and many others wondering if I was going to make it to my 57th birthday, here I am.

I must admit that I still have a somewhat cynical, put up with it, attitude to the rattle of medicines I am supposed to take every day. However, it is true that without them I would probably be dead and I don’t want to achieve that particular life goal yet. My doubts are doubts about the side effects of long term exposure to such powerful drugs and a concern is that I am not supposed to eat a lot of foods that would give my body the vitamins and minerals necessary for tissue repair. The main hindrance to eating good foods is warfarin, a substance that thins the blood and supposedly reduces the chance of stroke in people with my conditions. At the moment I am not taking warfarin because I am having some teeth extracted. If I were on warfarin and had a tooth pulled I would bleed profusely for an hour or two and could well die from loss of blood. In a car accident of any seriousness I would be lucky to survive. Can you believe that this is the substance marketed as ‘Ratsack’? It kills the rats by making them bleed to death internally. Levels have to be carefully established for its medicinal use in humans. I had to go for a weekly blood test at first until my tolerance was established. Too low and it has no effect, too high and one suffers internal bleeding. What a dangerous drug!

Really it is wonderful that I am able to live a happy life and breathe freely. I am now capable of travelling again and plan to go to China and the UK next year. Also, the car I am about to buy will take me to national parks where I will walk and exercise just to get to the beautiful spots that are there. If I can tolerate those excursions without setback I will have proved that I can travel abroad so long as my pack includes a sufficient supply of medicine. I won’t travel in really hot weather or in cold so it seems China will be in the Northern hemisphere Spring, and Britain in Autumn.

I have fallen in love again with photography, which was a passion when I was younger. The National Park trips will supply food for my camera as well as the basis of stories and articles for my writing.

It’s a beautiful sunny day with a rich blue sky here, warm but not too hot yet. It’s 27 degrees and I suppose by about three o’clock we might have 30 and humidity. I’ll feel it then. I’m impressed by the weather bureau’s forecasts They’re pretty accurate to a week ahead lately. Yesterday I paid someone to stick needles into me! Just a whim, I suppose. She also gave me a bottle of Chinese pills called ????? Tian wang bu xin wan. Many Chinese medicines come in the form of little black balls. One is often asked to take eight at a time. That’s what I have to do with these, take eight, three times a day. The doctor told me they will complement the Western medicine I am taking. I had asked for some treatment that would help my body to repair itself, which is the big claim of Chinese medicine. I wonder why it is always eight. Is it because eight is a lucky number in China?

It must be a time of making changes for me. Not only did I have an acupuncture treatment for the first time in my life, but I had the annual haircut a couple of days ago! I like my hair long and in the last two or three years it has been growing very slowly so it really is over a year since I last had my hair cut. Sue did it that time but this time I went to a barber. Amazingly I still felt some residual tension from when I was a child and was taken to barbers who were very rough and made me hate haircuts. At last you can understand why I prefer my hair long. Most of my adult life I have had my hair cut by ladies’ hairdressers and it was to challenge my child-originated fears that I went to a barber this time. It was a good experience with a nice Greek born Australian who is very gentle and does his job quickly and well.

The Bats Wing Coral Tree I shot the picture of the parrots on has stopped flowering now but there is a beautiful Frangipani tree in blossom by my back door and a couple of houses away there is an African Tulip tree in full flower. The frangipani bears in shades of pink and the tulip has bright orange flowers. Talking of bright orange, if I had chosen the bright orange colour scheme for my car I would have it by now. As it is, all the other colours turn out to have been sent to Perth in Western Australia, 4275 miles away (6880 kilometres), and the dark blue one I chose is on a truck somewhere between there and here. I had a casual thought the other day that it must be coming from over there to take this long to arrive. My joke in fact, turned out not to be a joke. When it gets here it will have to be prepared and the windows will be tinted before I am able to drive it away. The window tinting was a choice and I’m getting it at a bargain. Unless you have lived in a subtropical area, say California or Hainan in China, you would not know the glare of the sun we experience here. Tinting makes the job of the air conditioner much easier.

Another experience of overcoming tensions from the past was with Centrelink, Australia‘s Social Security agency. In the past Australia‘s attitude to welfare has been ambivalent, what is proudly seen as an advanced welfare system delivered in an atmosphere of great suspicion and bureaucratic reluctance. In regard to the bureaucracy and intense scrutiny of entitlement, as well as punishment of anyone who by failing to disclose something receives more than they ought, the system is still fearsome. However customer service and an attitude of service has improved immensely. I went in to disclose money I deposited in my bank account and possibly my delay in doing so was partly due to my past knowledge of the ‘department’ both as client and as a worker there in the late seventies. The woman who interviewed me about my money was lovely. We talked very freely about my plans to use it. I am talking about the meagre superannuation I accumulated over my life of ever changing careers and some money left by my mother. I also asked a lot of questions and came away with valuable information which will prevent me falling foul of Centrelink if I start selling photos or writing or Chinese artefacts. It turned out that because of my late notification I had been overpaid the enormous sum of fifteen dollars and the new spirit of Social Welfare in Australia decided that it was not significant and forgave it. Hooray! Things really have changed. Someone must have finally taken the research seriously that showed years ago that the number of staff hours spent recovering debt was far more expensive than the sum recovered.

Tonight I will be going to an Indian restaurant to celebrate my birthday with family. Unfortunately one or two can’t be there but it will be a nice evening. I was fairly diffident about having any sort of birthday event as I don’t think 57 is very significant, but then I realized that I have not been able to be with my family for birthdays for about five years and decided it would be good to do it.

There were eleven people at dinner last night and we had a very pleasant meal, with a selection of wonderful Indian curries. I drank mango Lhassi. The owners of the restaurant are from the Punjab region of India and everything there is cooked very well. Humorously I was thinking it was good that I was not in China for my birthday for there, as the person inviting everyone, I would have had to pay the bill. Here our custom is that everyone pays for their own meal. No wonder birthdays are not commonly celebrated in China!

Love and Peace,

                                                                                                           Hugh

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 2:21 am and is filed under Anyblog, just anything I feel like saying, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.