Covid-19

 

I work (for now), I love, I live, I have fun. Just with wheelchairs and drugs and spasms and stuff...

 
15 January 2022
A man in red short-sleeved shirt and dodgy patchwork trousers is sitting outside in his wheelchair. He's in a lovely garden setting (mature trees in the background). He's clearly pretending to work (laptop, headphones) as he has a cheeky smile and a glass of booze

Sodding Multiple Sclerosis and Sodding Covid. My mental health in quiet isolation.

Ironically, whilst trying to write for months about mental health, I have been struggling with a mental block in putting pen to paper. Or finger to keyboard. Actually it’s been so long it should be quill to parchment. So long that the word ‘blog’ probably wasn’t invented and I should call this ‘ye olde chronicle update’. Awkward. I have faintly covered up my failures with virtual speaking engagements and a shiny series of new podcasts, https://www.prca.org.uk/Disability-at-the-Table . Available on all your favourite gramophones now, with a thrilling new episode out soon. So I can blame my workload on a good few distractions and my fave new invented phrase, ‘other nonsensing’. I’ve stayed tastily busy. Not to mention on telly a […]
19 May 2021
A family of four, faces only, including two boys. All smiling

Multiple Sclerosis. Vaccinations. Can I venture out now? Will I?

In a double episode of ‘Back in the Game’, I am proud and excited to return: To blogging. After a brief and pesky technology pause. Information Technology was never a strong point of mine. My 1980s ZX Spectrum coding got as far as ’10 PRINT “I love you”, 20 GOTO 10. Pop here for some nostalgia if you recall the excitement of Space Invaders and 48k Ram. Or for some jaw-dropping and some pitying of us old folk if you’re younger:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum To life more than 100 metres beyond our garden boundary. I’ve played it super careful these last sixteen months, but new Covid infections are now encouragingly low. And I nearly wet myself about our second jab booking. (Not […]
30 June 2020

The Gazillion Stages of Grief. Covid, MS and Bloody Everything!

It’s tough out there right now. As I write this, and in the U.K. alone, perhaps 50,000 family and friends, (more or less 20,000, because we’re in both a guessing game and watching political football), are mourning a loved one. Gone to a virus none of us had heard of just a few distant months ago. In that same brief, surreal period, others have lost equally loved ones to something else. Accidents, scary illnesses, and old age? Well, they trample on, regardless of what makes the headlines. And very few of us dealing with the mounting waves of shock, bewilderment and fear have been allowed to manage the grief process. No proper funerals with cucumber sandwiches and sherry. No final, […]
18 April 2020
A man lies sprawled in the shade. He is lying across a sofa, asleep. He is wearing pyjamas, with his T-shirt riding up to reveal a less than glamorous belly. He has a dodgy Mohican haircut.

Covid-19 ain’t no flu. My Coronavirus and my Multiple Sclerosis

Yikes! Well that’s been a fun two weeks or so. Not. Lockdown all started out ok. The sun was out and I was set on getting just a bit fitter. This brief video of me exercising is not speeded up. At all. No sir-eee https://youtu.be/lKE6OAxR9HI Then, just as the U.K. was approaching peak cases and hospitals were heroically, desperately bursting at the seams, I developed the main symptoms of Covid-19. A constant, exhausting and painful dry cough. A fever. In my case, a sore throat and a touch of nausea too. And anxiety through the roof. A doctor call-back confirmed I probably had it, as did a dashed paramedic visit to our son, who also had Covid-19, but with an […]