Nice people thread 2 - now even nicer

John_Pierpoint

Out here in Essex - the area with less rainfall than Rome - we have had no appreciable rainfall for months. At least that was until about a week ago. I think it has rained every day since.

OK the garden was getting desperate and we were saving every drop of "grey" water for the nightly watering chore, but the greengages were just developing a yellow tinge and even a touch of freckled red sunburn. Perfection was only 7 - 10 days away.

Now every one has split and the wasps and ants are getting stuck into fruit that is not yet quite ripe.

Instead of sitting in the evening sun (or even in front of the telly)
simply slicing the majority to get the stone out and dry freezing the two halves; while picking out the best ones to pig on; I now have a horrible sticky job of cutting out the rotten damaged split bits and boiling up what is left. Ugh.

SingleSue

I received a lovely card from the vets with a beautiful message inside after the loss of our cat...they even put forget me not seeds in with it.

Lovely gesture and had me blubbing like a baby yesterday morning again.

Apart from that, all quiet on the western front here...youngest has calmed down and is not so upset anymore although he has taken to carrying around a teddy and calling it Tiah (our elder cats name), eldest has been busy at his part time job and middle is being middle and doing lots of CD's for the car...just wish he would put different music on them, they are all the blooming same!

That's aspergers for you though.....

Davesnave

Fairly quiet here in the west too, though I'll probably fire the brushcutter up in a minute and change all that!

We've not had much rain here either, much of it going south over Dartmoor, or north over Exmoor, while we sit in the middle.:)

We are also blessed with very few slugs, wasps, magpies and squirrels, so I'm hopeful that we shall have the bumper crop of nuts that is ripening. They're proper Kent cobs.

It's been a poor year for plums, maybe because it was such a good one last year. Plenty of apples though, despite our free-form pruning in February.

Star of todays harvest, however, is a giant puffball weighing well over 1lb. We will probably cook some of it tonight, but it looks like a meal for four on its own! Should go down well with all our peppers squashes, toms, onions and garlic that we make into stir-fry most nights.

misskool

found maggots in the plums. Cropping lots of toms

And been staring at immigration forms all day. I can assure the detractors that it is indeed very hard to try and stay in this country legally. Perhaps that's why there are so many illegals?

John_Pierpoint

My brother in law and his wife were working in Hong Kong. when she fell pregnant.
Neither of them were born in the UK, so there was a frisson of excitement about the status of the future infant.

Muggins here got a copy of the then new "Nationality Act" - we are talking about events over 20 year ago.

One needed a Ph.D. in obscurantism to understand it, so I failed.

I think it had been written by a civil servant, after awaking from a nightmare about Ugandan Asians, getting cold feet about the whole population of Hong Kong arriving on a container ship at Felixstowe.

A few years later I was working with some Indian software contractors. They spent some considerable time visiting Croydon.
http://www.yelp.co.uk/biz/home-office-immigration-and-nationality-directorate-croydon
At least one must have passed the "intelligence" test - because I am still in touch with him. He has a full time job working in London and has managed to import that nice young woman his mum found for him.;)

Talking of Croydon & intelligence did anyone else watch the C4 documentary at 21:00 called Mayday Hospital?.
It was all about young people and the "epidemic" of diabetes.
Well if you want to watch on catch-up TV, it featured products of our education system that had problems finding a brain cell amongst the lot of them; plus truly memorable scenes of amputated toes, red raw wounds and a pregnant young woman having the puss squeezed from her "buboes".

It was enough to make you want to eat a whole bar of chocolate to feel normal again.:j

JonnyBravo

John_Pierpoint wrote: »

Talking of Croydon & intelligence did anyone else watch the C4 documentary at 21:00 called Mayday Hospital?.
It was all about young people and the "epidemic" of diabetes.
Well if you want to watch on catch-up TV, it featured products of our education system that had problems finding a brain cell amongst the lot of them; plus truly memorable scenes of amputated toes, red raw wounds and a pregnant young woman having the puss squeezed from her "buboes".

It was enough to make you want to eat a whole bar of chocolate to feel normal again.:j

Yep. Real car crash TV.
So many people with diabetes only understand the gravity of the situation once they reach Keith's position. By then of course it is too late.
Made me truly cross to see all the wasted time from missed appt's. Nothing I didn't know already, but maddening all the same.
These people will be the first to bleat when the NHS collapses under the weight (perhaps literally? ) of these idle t0$$ers.

Insulin is undoubtedly one of the hardest regimes you have to undertake as a patient. You, ideally, have to monitor and dose adjust yourself. No doubt some aren't capable of doing this effectively, but the vast majority just don't bother. They can't be ar$-ed.
Until, they go blind, have an amputation, have their kidneys fail, have a stroke etc etc. Then it's the good ol' taxpayers problem.

:mad:

Generali

JonnyBravo wrote: »

Yep. Real car crash TV.
So many people with diabetes only understand the gravity of the situation once they reach Keith's position. By then of course it is too late.
Made me truly cross to see all the wasted time from missed appt's. Nothing I didn't know already, but maddening all the same.
These people will be the first to bleat when the NHS collapses under the weight (perhaps literally? ) of these idle t0$$ers.

Insulin is undoubtedly one of the hardest regimes you have to undertake as a patient. You, ideally, have to monitor and dose adjust yourself. No doubt some aren't capable of doing this effectively, but the vast majority just don't bother. They can't be ar$-ed.
Until, they go blind, have an amputation, have their kidneys fail, have a stroke etc etc. Then it's the good ol' taxpayers problem.

:mad:

My father-in-law once said to a stewardess on Eurostar that he didn't really take too much notice of his diabetes.

Her response? "That's what my Grandfather said so the doctors came and cut his legs off".

SingleSue

I disagree that insulin is one of the hardest regimes and that is as a (now ex) wife of an insulin dependent diabetic.

We got into a very good routine of planning mealtimes, day trips etc around his injections, of balancing his diet with the amount of units of insulin he needed and for me, recognising the signs of an impending hypo (he was a brittle diabetic caused by another auto immune disorder constantly putting his levels out) and then dealing with said hypo's.

I became a dab hand at administering emergency glucagon via injection, warding off an aggressive hubby in the midst of a violent hypo (thankfully, they were very few) or keeping him safe whilst having a silly hypo (the kids loved those ones, it was one of the few times they saw their father being very silly). I also knew when he had gone beyond the glucagon emergency kit and needed to be admitted although this was usually due to the addisons and an addisonian crisis.

We never missed his appointments and always took his diabetes and addisons very seriously....if we didn't, he would have been dead.

Unfortunately, I blame a change of medication for his diabetes in part for the downfall of our marriage. He went from an aritifical type of insulin back to a porcine version (mainly as he had lost his warning signs of a hypo), he went from a loving husband and father to a very unpredictable, aggressive and controlling husband who didn't want to have a family anymore. Yes, he had his warning signs back but our lives became hellish and we all felt we were walking on eggshells around him for the last 18 months-2 years of our marriage, where he destroyed my confidence, my sanity and probably my future life as I can never see me trusting anyone ever again enough to allow them to live with me.

I must add, he had been diabetic since the age of 2, it was not connected to a lazy lifestyle or excess weight.

JonnyBravo

SingleSue wrote: »

I disagree that insulin is one of the hardest regimes and that is as a (now ex) wife of an insulin dependent diabetic.

We got into a very good routine of planning mealtimes, day trips etc around his injections, of balancing his diet with the amount of units of insulin he needed and for me, recognising the signs of an impending hypo (he was a brittle diabetic caused by another auto immune disorder constantly putting his levels out) and then dealing with said hypo's.

I became a dab hand at administering emergency glucagon via injection, warding off an aggressive hubby in the midst of a violent hypo (thankfully, they were very few) or keeping him safe whilst having a silly hypo (the kids loved those ones, it was one of the few times they saw their father being very silly). I also knew when he had gone beyond the glucagon emergency kit and needed to be admitted although this was usually due to the addisons and an addisonian crisis.

We never missed his appointments and always took his diabetes and addisons very seriously....if we didn't, he would have been dead.

Unfortunately, I blame a change of medication for his diabetes in part for the downfall of our marriage. He went from an aritifical type of insulin back to a porcine version (mainly as he had lost his warning signs of a hypo), he went from a loving husband and father to a very unpredictable, aggressive and controlling husband who didn't want to have a family anymore. Yes, he had his warning signs back but our lives became hellish and we all felt we were walking on eggshells around him for the last 18 months-2 years of our marriage, where he destroyed my confidence, my sanity and probably my future life as I can never see me trusting anyone ever again enough to allow them to live with me.

I must add, he had been diabetic since the age of 2, it was not connected to a lazy lifestyle or excess weight.

You describe it vividly and in great detail.
Type I's do tend to be better at managing their condition than Type II's. Undoubtedly you managed it well, your description of what was involved is testament to that.

Which self-monitored and continually dose-adjusting condition do you think is harder to manage well?

SingleSue

To be honest, I am not sure, I think because we got into such a good routine, it wasn't a huge problem for us. Yes, there were times when control was difficult (or he got sidetracked by F1 being on and didn't eat when he should have - funny story connected to a holiday and getting some chips there) but in the main, it was easily adjustable.

I am not sure how much the fact he had had it since a toddler comes into play there, for him, it was just part of life and something he had been doing for all of his recognisable memory, for me, I learnt along the way, initially very quickly (another funny story involving just moving in together and an anniversary dinner for my parents)...I tend to be a quick learner and a stickler for routines.

For someone who develops diabetes later on in life, I suggest it could be harder to obtain that control and make the changes to lifestyle especially if they have been the sort to have had a completely uncontrolled lifestyle, the same as my father who has gone from having no medication on retirement to having a myriad amount of medication due to a heart attack and now 2 strokes...he finds balancing his medication, what to take when etc, very difficult.

I know some people find what my youngest son has to take for his asthma confusing, he is not just on the normal preventer/reliever and has different inhalers to add in for different things and at different times but both me and my son find it very easy to understand when to add those extras in and at what measures.

So, in answer to your question.....errrrrrrr, I don't know!