A nice neighborhood to have bad habits in

How to mend a broken heart

Fri, 31 May 2024 12:01:18 GMT

I may have mentioned, somewhere in my ramblings, that during one of my yearly MOT exams the doctor noticed a small bruit - a sign that blood isn't flowing smoothly through my heart. He sent me off to a consultant, and after an ECG and an MRI I was told this shouldn't be a problem for a few decades yet.

Last year I started to get severe shortness of breath, and problems walking for more than 5 minutes at a time.

Off to see another consultant, (the original having retired and moved to Switzerland) who did an ultrasound and set me up with the head of thorassic surgery. He did some more tests, hummed and hawed, and told me I had a serious valve problem, and if not resplaced this would lead to congestive heart failure. I asked what the outcome would be without a valve replacement, and he told me I'd be dead in three years. He must close a lot of business that way.

So 6 weeks later I checked into the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh for what was described as routine urgent surgery, knowing that my old valve (apparently faulty since birth) would be replaced with one which was partially made from pig tissue. Yes, I am now a gammon.

I woke up after the op and (what I thought was) a night of sleep with dressings all down my chest and multiple tubes (chest drains, catheter, breathing tubes, temperature and heart rate sensors and a cannula in my wrist. I was in a fair bit of pain, but the morphine was flowing on demand. I was in Intensive Care, a peaceful setting apart from all the beeps. All was going well until I fell asleep, and woke to find out that my view of the ward had been replaced with an 8-bit cartoon image, mostly pink, with an 8-bit nurse telling me to take my medicine. This upset me quite a bit and I started to demand to be checked out. Politely, but insistently, and I was also trying to remove the tubes. (I'm minimising it here, but I was terrified. I absolutely believed that I was in a poorly rendered video game world with no way out). I was quickly sedated (but not quickly enough to stop me calling Marie and begging her to rescue me) and when I woke up I was in the High Dependency Ward. I had two nurses assigned to me, and the older one reminded me that one of the side-effects I'd been warned about was hallucinations. First time I've ever had them. The next few days were about gradually recovering enough to be discharged, via a normal ward. That first night I woke to see a six foot zombie figure, wearing only a surgical gown, stalking about the ward (almost identical to the Buffy "Grr-Argh" credit zombie) until he was escorted off by two uniformed police. Hah, I thought, more hallucinations. No. Or at least not mine. Next morning I was told that it had actually happened at three in the morning.

Long story short, before I hit the word-limit, I did get out, a couple of days longer than expected, since they wanted to clear up the pneumonia I'd picked up on the ward.

I still have bad arm pains, which are probably down to nerve damage. I'm seeing a neurologist shortly about that. I no longer have to stop, gasping, after walking for 5 minutes. It's morel like 20. The heart folk think I'll be ok to get back to work on the 20th of June, and I agree. I can drive now, despite the hand and arm page, and I can control my dizzy spells.

It's been a journey, which I think I've come through.

Next step? Phased return to work.

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If only I had a journal oh wait.

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 13:30:04 GMT

Yes, I had more or less forgotten that this journal was here. An interesting cross-post by Andrew, the urge to comment, and I logged in to Dreamwidth for the first time, in, oh, a while.

How do I know it was a while? Stuff has happened.

First off, what hasn't changed.

I'm happily still in the same relationship, in the same cottage (classified as "fairy tale" by my s-i-l, and who am I to argue?) and my health is more or less (for better or worse) in the same state. I seem to have slipped on another 5kg or so, and I'll do something about that. Tomorrow.

There has been travel. Spain, again, though this time to a part I don't usually see. Seville is worth a mention, because it gave me one of the few moments that have ever rendered me genuinely speechless. I wanted to visit the cathedral (what, isn't that what everyone does when they get to a new city?), and it doesn't take a lot of finding. There's a trick, though... You pays your money at a gate, and go into a few rooms of archeological finds. Small rooms. Lowish ceilings, rough hewn walls. The rooms are linked by small doors in small archways. There's a short hall, another arch, another door. You go through it and... Wow. Another world. A vast space. Maybe it has a roof, but if so it's too far away to see. In the distance are altars, or rather pyramids of gold. There are people, in the distance, so small that they might be homunculi.

I'm sure I gasped, and, yes, I was speechless for a good couple of minutes. They knew something about cowing the masses, did those ecclesiastical architects.

Anyway, that's what not brought me here. I want to vent a little about work, because that HAS changed.

I realised last year that somehow or another I'd been with Fujitsu for 11 years, and that was probably long enough. The time had whizzed by - everytime I finished up a project or programme or a role, they offered me something else that I was interested in. But at the end of '21 I finished up a big programme, and it became gradually obvious that they weren't sure what to do with me, and there was nothing I desperately wanted to do with them. I was shunted into a role that was fairly undemanding, and it didn't take long for me to realise it wasn't a home, it was a departure lounge.

I should probably have started looking then, but I remembered the words of Eleanor Coppola when her husband phoned to tell her what a nightmare filming Apocalypse Now was becoming - "Don't quit. Make them fire you."

I wasn't that active - I just waited for an offer to come, and enjoyed a fairly leisurely summer until it came, and then an even more leisurely couple of months of negotiations until the numbers worked out (I'm paranoid about ever getting another job when I leave one, so like to have at least six months of a cushion when I go).

Once I had a leaving date agreed, I started looking, and had two sets of interesting interviews. The more interesting needed three interviews, one with each of the managing partners, and one with the company founder. I enjoyed the meetings - they seemed like a company really looking to build a culture in the UK, and they wanted someone to help develop their work in Scotland. Then they went quiet. The other was a small company in Nottingham. I drove down twice, spent half a day with them, got on well, and then they told me they were appointing an internal candidate. I can't say I was delighted, but I had a chat with my agent, and he said they had been really keen on taking me, but weren't sure they could afford me. I suggested they made an offer for a six-month contract role, and gave him a daily rate I'd be happy with. They liked the idea, and made me an offer. It was a good offer.

And then the first company got back in touch. Things had stalled because of back and forth with Denmark, but that was resolved now and they wanted to make an offer too. I explained that I had something on the table I was happy with, but that they shouldn't let that stop them.

So they did make an offer. The day-rate for the contract job would have bumped me up about 30% from my permie rate with Fujitsu - which was roughly equivalent to the package I was on. My agent said he thought I'd be happy with the offer from Denmark. He was right. Lower bonus, but basic salary boosted almost 60%.

So I joined up with the Danish mob in September, and so far everything they sold me in the interviews has come through. They're mid-size: 7,000 global, 600 in the UK. Three in Scotland. There are down-sides: I'm mostly remote, with the pros and cons that brings, after two years of having no office to go to. HQ is definitely London (a very nice floor in Pancras Square, across from Google) and I don't spend enough time there to get face-time with the partners. I'm of the level immediately below partner, with a dozen and a half others, and imposter syndrome occasionally bites hard.

But that's the story. I'm in a job with people who rate me. I get to work from home, with travel paid. I'm earning more than I ever have, and if all goes well this year I'll break a significant number I never thought I'd come close to.

I'm living in a fairly-tale cottage, and when I finish typing this I think I'll go for a hot tub.

My partner is the smartest person I know, who's been in my life for almost exactly 30 years now (and, oh, I was at a party thrown by dear friends Kay and James to celebrate their 30 years of unwedded bliss. Someone asked how I knew them - "Oh", I said, "I'm the ex").

I'm off in September to spend a couple of weeks in North America, and I'll cross the Canadian Rockies by train, something I've wanted to do since I crossed the US Rockies and the mid-West by Amtrak 30 years ago.

So, friends, console me.

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Notes From A Small Village

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 14:25:33 GMT

Apparently there's some sort of a lock down going on, but it's largely passed me by. At least until now, when I should be getting ready to take M to Austria for a birthday opera, and gearing up for the Edinburgh Festival. The lack of Festival isn't going to hit me the way it does the natives - it's been part of M's August for all of her adult life - but I will miss it. For me it's the late-night buzz around the Pleasance, and the hit and miss of seeing six shows in a day. Ah well, next year.

My company pivoted pretty quickly to home-working, as you'd hope it would, being a global IT firm with a good view of how things were playing out in Asia. One Monday in March we were asked to work from home on Friday, as a test, and we haven't been back since. The company are doing a phased return from August, but my team haven't been told to come back at all - I staged a raid on the office for my chair and two monitors, and I'm ensconced comfortably in our study. The only complaint I have is that it's a little dull in there, since there's thick brush outside the window. A wren was building a nest there earlier this summer, so it won't be getting cut back quite yet.

I'm fully aware of how lucky I am. No one in my close family has caught the virus, we have a detached cottage with room for all plus pets, and I've managed to keep working. So no complaints from me. The lack of sun is a bit of a bugger. I bought an extra week's holiday this year, which means I now have about six weeks to fit in between now and the end of the year. We have tickets to fly to Prague in September (a birthday gift to me) and I'm hopeful we'll be able to use them. I really wanted to do a drive to the South of France too, and maybe cross some more borders before they're closed to Brits, as we enjoy our freedom of movement, but it looks like that may be, literally, no-go. And that's something I won't be able to do next year.

But, on the whole, life is good. There's some pretty heavy duty pet-care going on just now, but again, that's inevitable when your spaniel is pushing 17.

Hey ho, and on with the motley...

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