So, that was summer

I rarely go to see my General Practitioner (GP), but this year I seem to have made a lot of appointments and had a lot of tests done for one reason or another. It started early in the year when I was invited to have the RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) injection available to the vulnerable, among others the over 75s.

Later on in the year, I tore my thumbnail while doing some gardening for Kay and had to get a tetanus booster.

Then during those prolonged heatwaves, I started to feel very tired and initially put it down to the heat, but after Kay persuaded me to get a blood test, it revealed that I was very low in iron reserves. The GP prescribed iron tablets which unfortunately disagreed with my long-term stomach problem and, because of the medication I was on, my stomach was not absorbing iron in the conventional way. It was suggested I might need an intravenous iron infusion to bypass the stomach, but more blood tests were arranged, before I went down that route.

Unfortunately these days, blood tests in my locality, require you to book an appointment in advance rather than the hitherto walk-in service. It can sometimes take up to 2 weeks to get a blood test done, then the usual wait to get the results and then a further 2-week wait to see the GP again. This has gone back and forth as the GP wanted more and more different blood tests so the whole of the summer went by with more tests and more waiting. The final conclusion is that yes, I am short of iron, yes to persevere with the tablets, maybe on alternate days rather than every day, maybe this, maybe that and still no real solution. 

To crown it all, while I was in Glasgow, I went down with a urine infection which required a 3-day antibiotic course. Once back in London, I went down with the mother of all cold viruses. I must have sneezed over 500 times in one day alone!

Now my sneezy virus has more or less burnt itself out after 12 days, I visited the GP practice yet again today to get my annual covid and flu vaccinations. I suspect that will not be the end of my medical visits as the iron situation has still not been resolved.

It has meant that I have not made as much progress as I had intended in various projects to renovate some rooms in the house and to do some genealogy research, to name but a few. Now the days are getting shorter, the dark nights set in at about 7pm and it's nearly the end of another year. Christmas foods are already appearing in the supermarkets. I am somewhat at a loss to know what happened to summer this year - it has flown by so fast.