Food for thought

For any professionals out there, please excuse the rather poor drawing of my stomach above. It is the best I can do in the circumstances but it helps to explain to people a problem I have had for some time.

Back in 2016, it was discovered that I had a tumour growing on my stomach wall. I wrote about it at the time here. Known as a GIST (Gastro-Intestinal Stromal Tumour), the Stromal in this case refers to it growing in the stomach wall or muscle. In the drawing above, you can see the oesophagus or food pipe coming down into the stomach and the tumour (shown in red) was just below that near the top of the stomach. Fortunately the tumour was benign but it was removed as they can become aggressive, if left. The whole procedure was supposed to be done by laparoscopes, but it was awkward to remove that way and the four-hour operation resulted in me being opened up completely, so I have a vertical zip-fastener scar down my middle.

So far so good. Unfortunately, the stomach wall that was removed with the tumour contained nerves which tell the pyloric sphincter (the little black line shown at the base of the stomach) to open and spill its contents into the duodenum and onwards to the intestines. Consequently without that nerve constantly nagging the sphincter to open, my stomach only empties when it feels like it and can be bothered. It results in food and acid building up which then refluxes into my throat, often in the middle of the night when I am in a deep sleep, and I wake choking. I have to take meds to neutralise the acid and also occasionally have the pyloric sphincter stretched via a gastroscopy to encourage it to open better. My consultant prefers to do the procedure once a year or even once every six months as the valve gets very lazy indeed. It is pushing two years since I last had it done, so had been experiencing more problems with the acid reflux including one awful episode where I was in a deep sleep and the acid came up and went into my lungs instead, resulting in my "drowning" and fighting for my breath for over half an hour. As you can imagine, living on my own, this was a frightening experience, so I immediately arranged for another gastroscopy and stretch which was done two days ago.

Because of the acidity problem, I cannot eat too late into the day and need at least 4 hours between eating and going to bed. I also have a nightmare choosing what to eat when dining out. These days most menus seem to be full of spicy this and spicy that with chilli or curry or other fiery combinations - all of which can cause my stomach to flare up. It is so difficult to find something on the menu that is not going to cause me problems. I wish chefs would realise that not everyone has a cast-iron stomach. Obviously things could be far worse in old age and I must be grateful this is the only real medical problem I have.

Addendum

Just to update my previous post, I thought I'd record my waking last night.

Having gone to bed at 11.30pm I woke at

00:01

01:17

02:31

03:33

04:42

06:53

07:07

at which point I dragged myself out of bed. Needless to say, I have cancelled both the back-to-back gym classes today which I nickname my survival classes as I usually come out drenched in sweat afterwards. I didn't think I would survive if I went to them today after such poor sleep.

Sleepless in London (not Seattle)

 

The  picture above is typical of what I often see in the night. Sometimes it says 12:31 or 2.54 or 3:17 or all of those. The fact is I wake at least four times in the night these days, often half an hour after I have fallen asleep in the first place.  Often every 90 minutes. I used to be such a sound sleeper and could manage eight hours solid perfectly well. But the last three years has seen a serious decline in my sleep pattern to the extent that I wake frequently and don't feel slept-out when I rise at my usual 7 or 8am. When I wake during the night, I rehearse having difficult conversations with people, or draft in my head an email I need to send or practise learning off by heart a choir song I need to learn or make a mental list of things I need to do the next day or what to wear for a special event. My mind just doesn't seem to switch off. (By the way, I never ever wake because I need the toilet!)

I tend to avoid looking at blue light before bedtime, retire regularly around 11pm, read for half an hour or so in bed and even take medication to help me sleep (amitriptyline prescribed when my daughter was not sleeping through the night until she was 8 years old and my sleep patterns were disturbed at the time.) I have even sprayed lavender on my pillows to aid sleep (supposedly meant to help except it doesn't!) I have undergone sleep apnoea tests and they have proved I don't have that, so I am in a quandary what to do to get a decent sleep. Rather than fight it, I often get up, say at 3am and make a hot chocolate, then read for an hour and that often helps. By 7 or 8 am I am in such a deep coma, I could sleep forever, but usually have things I need to address so drag myself out of bed. 

 

Global warming?

In my front garden, I have a climbing rose that I have had for about 3 decades. This is a picture of it when it was blooming its heart out a few summers ago....

Today it looks like this....

It has obviously been distressed in the heatwaves we have experienced this summer. I did water it with the hose regularly. Maybe I overwatered it or underwatered it or it just didn't like the heat, but, whatever the reason, sadly it has died after all these years with me. I shall give it until spring to see whether it recovers, but all the branches are brown,  so I very much doubt it.

How not to be a parent

I was travelling back home on the local tram the other day. A woman got on with a little boy of about 6 years old and a buggy carrying twins of about 2 years old. She was glued to her phone for her entire journey on the tram as she stood by the pram. I could see she had earphones and was obviously gyrating about to some music fed into her ear. The little 6-year-old boy kept trying to engage in conversation with her but she just totally ignored him, not even acknowledging him at all. She was so engrossed in her phone. The little boy started to call out the name of the next tram stop as it was announced on the tram. He would repeatedly say "The next stop is....." much to the amusement of the other passengers. Still his mother ignored him. Then just as the tram was pulling into their stop, the little boy put his hand on one of the twins, at which point the mother yelled at him with a look of disgust on her face "What did you have to wake him up for?"  In a foul mood, she pushed the pram off the tram and the little boy followed behind sheepishly.

It got me thinking what kind of person that little boy would grow up into. Starved of interaction with his mother and always in the wrong. Desperate for human contact and ignored. In complete contrast, there was another mother on the same tram with a young baby of about a year old, holding him up to the window and pointing everything out to him. Is what we become nature or nurture? I seriously worry what will become of that little boy.

Isle of Man Part 2

Our third full day was quite busy and involved studying the transport timetables carefully to work out a strict timetable to see everything north of Douglas.

After an early breakfast, we walked northwards along the Douglas seafront and caught the Manx Electric railway from its terminus to Laxey. 

With the sea ever on our right we finally arrived at Laxey, famous for the largest working water wheel in the world at just over 72 feet in diameter. Built in 1854, it was used to pump water from the nearby mines which were rich in lead, copper, silver and zinc. We climbed the 96 steps to view the very top of the wheel and survey the surrounding countryside. Back on the ground we did a short walk to the entrance to the mines where we donned hard hats and went in as far as we were allowed.

Entrance to the mine

Miners' cottages

Our strict timetable allowed an hour there altogether before we headed the 20-minute walk past the delightful miners' cottages back to Laxey train station to catch the Snaefell Mountain Railway that would take us up to the highest point of the island. 

The island is quite hilly (dare I say even mountainous) along the central part that rises from north to the south. Scattered with flocks of sheep, it is also quite important for the Grand Prix TT races which use that area as part of their route. In fact while we were on the island what looked like hundreds of motor bikers dressed in their leathers and on powerful motorbikes were arriving for the Grand Prix that started days after we left. Once the mountain train gets you to the very top, you are greeted by amazing views on all sides, although the wind was so powerful up there, you could barely stand upright. 

We dived into the only building up there - once a tiny hotel and now a cafe with the most amazing cakes and choice of hot drinks, which we utilised as our lunch stop. All too soon, it was time to catch the mountain railway back down to Laxey again where we picked up the connecting electric railway on to Ramsey.

Some of you will be familiar with the lovely Jaycee who writes a blog called Diary of a Nobody. I have followed her blog for some time and of course knew she lived on the island, so was keen to meet her, if I could, while I was there. We arrived in Ramsey soon after mid-afternoon and had time to do a quick tour of Ramsey before meeting up with her. Considering we had never met in person before, it was like meeting an old friend and the conversation flowed so much so that the hour we had allotted together flew by and all too soon it was time to say goodbye. It is heartwarming to think that blogging can lead to such meetings and friendships and that the internet can bring people together.

Ramsey Harbour

Ramsey town centre

After saying goodbye, we caught the bus (much quicker than the electric railway) back to Douglas. We grabbed a lovely fish supper in Douglas harbour and then walked the entire length of the promenade back to our hotel, content that we had fitted a lot in that day.

Our final full day was spent exploring the area south of Douglas. First we caught the steam train as far as the small fishing village Port St Mary. 

Steam train about to leave Douglas

Port St Mary

The locals all over the island are so friendly. Numerous times over the four full days there, whenever we stopped maybe to check a bus timetable or look at the map, someone would approach us with helpful directions or information. Even more so in the smaller villages. We then caught the bus for the short hop to Port Erin. In all fairness, we could probably have walked it in about 20 minutes, but by then it was very hot and already midday so I was beginning to flag. Once at Port Erin, two scoops each of the local dairy ice cream for lunch revived us and we sat on the seafront watching the families on the very sandy beach enjoying the hot sunshine.

The amazing beach at Port Erin

We then caught the bus to Castletown, which was formerly the capital of the island until 1869 when the Parliament moved to Douglas. As can be befitting to an ancient capital, it boasts one of the best medieval castles in the British Isles, Castle Rushen. It was built around 1200 AD for a Norse king and served first as a fortress, then royal residence, then mint and latterly a Victorian prison. There was so much to see that we spent a good couple of hours just wandering around the many rooms and reading up about it. Entry, as with the other sites we had visited, was all included in our Go Explore pass we had bought several days before. 

View from the castle

By the time we left the castle, it was late afternoon and very hot, so we decided to sit on the outside terrace of a very attractive bar with a nice cool beer and enjoy the view of old buildings of the town, before catching the bus back to Douglas for our last night there. A walk along the promenade to a pub at the far end took us to our last supper there and we agreed it had been a lovely relaxing holiday.

Our final day saw an early start and a bus to the airport only to discover our flight back to London Gatwick had been delayed by an hour. All other internal flights were unaffected and there was no explanation why there was a delay. It was only when we were on board the plane that the Captain apologised for the delay and said they had been waiting for a part to be delivered from Aberdeen. If anything was going to undo the calm we had felt after a relaxing week on the island, that would be it. Had the wing fallen off or was there a loose screw in the engine? Bravely Kay and I gritted our teeth and with our intrepid help -after all the Captain was not going to manage without us - we oversaw the safe take-off and landing of the plane!!  Back to Gatwick, back to South London and the end of a wonderful break.  I can now picture the Isle of Man perfectly and have been able to assemble more information on my father's time there. All in all a perfect holiday.

Isle of Man Part 1

I've just returned from a lovely holiday on the Isle of Man with my daughter Kay.  Her husband Darcy had a very important (expensive and stressful) exam to do as part of his career, so Kay thought it best to leave him for a week to his concentrated arduous revision and offered to go away somewhere with me. 

Why did I choose the Isle of Man? It's always been on my list of places to go for a very good reason. My father was a refugee from Germany and arrived here in March 1939 with his brother (my uncle). His parents (my grandparents) arrived a few months after. My grandmother came from Jewish lineage and so the family were in danger of their lives, even though she had married a Christian and her sons had been raised as Lutherans (the German equivalent of Church of England).  All of them escaped here thankfully in the nick of time before war broke out and therefore were spared the threat of being repatriated. However, once war was declared, all Germans living in the UK were considered a potential threat to security and were rounded up and interned on the Isle of Man to establish whether they were spies or Nazi sympathisers. My father often spoke about the six months he was interned there and I therefore always had a hankering interest to see the place in the capital Douglas where he was interned.

Our holiday lasted six days, two of them being the flight there and back, so four full days to explore. I had done some research about the island and also about the internees so was fairly equipped to make the most of the stay. We booked into our hotel on the Douglas seafront and planned our days out. We decided to buy a Go pass. The island has a very good transport system - be it buses, electric trains, horse-drawn trams or a steam train. The Go pass will cover all of these for a choice of 1,3,5 or 7 days and there is even a pass which will include limitless travel on all those modes of transport and let you in free to all the heritage sites and museums as well for 5 days for £77. We went for the latter and found it extremely good value. We discovered you can set your watch to the bus times - they're so  punctual and not at all like the delays we experience in London. We decided not to take the horse-drawn trams as we felt sorry for the poor horses that were pulling their human cargo and heavy trams along in the heat, but here is a picture for you to get the idea.

We spent the remainder of the first arrival day getting our whereabouts in Douglas, the capital on the east coast. Douglas is a spawling town with a row of grand Edwardian hotels all along the curved seafront. Back in the day, they must have been heaving with tourists, as there are so many of them.  There is a small high street packed with numerous shops (a few of them chains of the mainland shops) and smaller local ones. Round the corner by the quayside there are a few restaurants and bars where you can sit out and watch the boats moored in the harbour. There are not that many independent restaurants in the town, we discovered, considering it is so large and the capital. The Isle of Man has always been mainly reliant on farming, fishing and tourism. Tourism dropped drastically during the last world war and, with the advent of foreign travel since, it has probably not recovered enough to change its ways. Most of the Edwardian hotels along the seafront have a themed restaurant but are open to non-hotel residents too, but we did stumble upon a tapas/cocktail bar and had supper there, before walking the length of the mile-long promenade back to our hotel, passing the statue of the Bee Gees who were born on the island.

Statue of the Bee Gees

We decided to take the bus and spend our first full day day in Peel on the west coast.  It was a lovely fishing village dominated by a huge castle which was once the fort of a Viking king. It is a vast site which took several hours to wander around. 

It is largely ruins so after three hours wandering around in the open air, I had caught the sun and my nose made me resemble Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer! We grabbed some of the local dairy's ice cream and sat on a bench high up surveying the village. 

Peel as seen high up on the castle site

We finished off the day eating supper at The Boatyard - a lovely restaurant specialising in fish. I chose  the special - my favourite of skate wing with a lemon and caper sauce - which was delicious. The bus home took us through the Manx countryside with a sun setting over fields of sheep and sleepy villages.

The second full day was spent in Douglas, visiting the Manx Museum and archives - the main reason for being on the island in the first place. We started in the Archives section and met a very useful and kind librarian who pointed us in the right direction on the computer and provided several books on the island's internment. I was able to find out a lot about my my family's internment on the island with details of Home Office reference numbers, dates of release back into the community etc. Unfortunately a lot of records were apparently burned after the war, so it was not possible to delve too deeply, but enough to raise more questions in my mind and solve others. 

One interesting fact is that my uncle was put on board a ship bound for Australia. 

At the time the authorities were overwhelmed with internees and passing them on to allied Australia or Canada was a solution. The ship my uncle was on (the Dunera) sounds a horrendous trip after the stress of reaching England from Germany in the first place. I googled the story which you can read here. No wonder he suffered some sort of PTSD in later life.

We went around the Manx museum after lunch and saw many interesting exhibits from Viking times through to the modern age. It was well worth spending the day there and we came away much the wiser. We ended up in one of the large Edwardian hotels, called The Sefton,  which offered non-hotel and hotel guests alike a pan-asian supper. Another wander along the seafront took us back to our hotel.

The Sefton hotel, one of many grand Edwardian hotels along the seafront

I expect this post is far too long already so will stop there. Part 2 will follow soon.

Tina

To complete my bunch of theatre visits to musicals as delayed presents for Christmas and birthdays long past,  Kay and I went to see the Tina Turner show at the Aldwych Theatre in London this week. 

It was an incredibly good production with some fantastic music. It tells the life story of Tina from a little girl called Anna Mae who loved singing out loud in church, much to her mother's embarrassment, through to when she met Ike Turner who changed her name to Tina, the cruel way Ike treated her, her break from him and her musical success on her own. The 9-year-old who played the little Anna Mae was outstanding and was a livewire herself. Fleur East who won the UK X-Factor in 2005 played the adult Tina. Her voice and energy were electrifying. Of course there were all the favourite numbers like River Deep Mountain High, Proud Mary, What's Love Got To Do With It and Simply The Best. The cast got the audience to stand up in the last few minutes to sing along to the several encores, so that by the time of the final curtain, we were all buzzing.

I can thoroughly recommend it, although don't wait too long to see it - it finishes in London on 13 September, although I understand there is a UK tour.

Fiddler on the Roof

I am having a feast of theatre visits at the moment.  This week saw me going to see Fiddler on the Roof at our local theatre. I saw the film many moons ago but hadn't seen the stage production, when it was all the rage in the 1960s and 1970s. The production was excellent - it had originally been on last year at Regents Park and then the Barbican in central London but was now touring the country. There was comedy, energetic dancing and of course quite a lot of well-known songs, the words of which I weirdly remembered from the 1960s.

The story is of course quite harrowing about the Russian pogroms, forcing the Jews out of their villages. Quite ironic really with what is happening now in Gaza. The violinist (Raphael Papo) who played the Fiddler was exceptionally talented and made his violin almost talk. Here is a youtube video of him, playing on the roof of the Barbican in London.

The main character, Tevye, is on stage about 95% of the time for the two and a half hours, either singing or talking. From my pathetic efforts to learn a 15-minute piece off by heart for our choir concerts, I can imagine what a lot of lines and lyrics he has to keep in his head. Here is also a favourite bit of mine - The Bottle Dance at the wedding scene - which was very cleverly done. It starts about a minute into the video.

Chartwell

In my life I have been three times to Chartwell, the Kent home of Winston Churchill. It is about a 30-minute drive from my house. Churchill had bought the house in 1922 for £5,000, much to the disapproval of his wife Clementine who thought it needed a lot of money throwing at it to do it up.  It had eventually been taken on by the National Trust in 1946 and opened to the public. My first visit  was about 40 years ago, when I went with Greg and my parents.  The second time was a few years ago when I went with some friends. The third time was a couple of weeks ago on Kay's birthday. She and her husband Darcy had been having visits to a few places linked with Churchill. They had visited the Cabinet War Rooms in London, then Bletchley Park and now wanted to round it off with visiting Chartwell.

It was a hot sweltering Sunday when we went and the Kent countryside was scorched. The gardens at Chartwell are beautiful with walled gardens and sweeping lawns which were also suffering from the heat. We arrived at midday and went straight into the house. It was an original Tudor house with extensions added on by Clementine. 

The rooms were huge and tastefully decorated, although the kitchen still retained the style of the 1930s and 1940s.  

There is a separate building called The Studio where Churchill painted his masterpieces, no doubt to help him relax from the stress of running a country at war.

The grounds are amazing - sweeping lawns, a small lake, walled gardens full of native cottage garden flowers and roses of every description. Near the studio is a tall pendant lime tree which gave off a very strong perfume from several metres away. 

Suffice to say there were butterflies and bees in their hundreds. 

The views across the wider Kent countryside could be seen inside and outside the house and were very calming.

All in all a good day was had by all, polished off by a celebratory meal in our local posh Italian restaurant.