2022 can bite my shiny metal ass

When I list out all the stuff that's happened to me in the last 6 months, it seems slightly unreal.

One of my colleagues called it "the crumblies" - you get to fifty and everything just starts to crumble.

Some of it I've written about previously.

• A stroke in my retina.
• Two eye surgeries.
• Toxoplasmosis.
• A permanent blind spot in one eye.

But I haven't shared this fun news: the day I got out of the second eye surgery, I tested positive for Covid.

So I was struggling with respiratory symptoms while recovering from having my eye deflated.

They also put me on a potent cocktail of drugs, which was enough to make my head literally spin those first couple of nights.

And it doesn't end there! Oh no, my friends, fate had more in store for me.

One night I went to pee and it hurt like crazy. Once the pain settled down, I still felt like I needed to pee very badly. Ended up in Emergency yet again and it turns out I'd passed a kidney stone, which had scratched up my most sensitive tubes on the way out.

If that wasn't enough, I accidentally tipped a few litres of near-boiling water across my wrist, giving me a second degree burn about the size of my hand.

So that meant another night at Emergency and regular check-ups with the Burns Unit, who change your dressings and give you other treatments and exercises as required.

Here's what the burn looked like about two weeks after doing it.

(The pictures from before that are a bit too gruesome to share. I accidentally put one of those on Twitter and traumatised a bunch of people.)

I also had to come down from the drugs they'd given me. After the eye surgery, I was on a lot of steroids to keep the swelling under control. And you have to wean yourselves off them ever so slowly.

The last few steps in that weaning were pretty unpleasant. Each time I tapered down my dose, I'd get withdrawal symptoms - headache, nausea, weakness, head-spins. It has given me new respect for my medications.

But I'm now off all of those medications. The Ophthalmologist says the scans are good. The white area on the left scan is the toxo spreading across my retina. On the right you can see it's shrinking away again.

So I'm on my way out of the diseased doldrums. I started running again!

I take my little poodle to Cornelian Bay, which has a lead-free area, so we can do some laps of the track together. It's glorious!

I also returned to kung fu training and managed to kick my big toe during warm-up. It has gone green.

(Ignore the weird vertical lines on that toenail, that's from a very old injury.)

So I'm crumbling, but I'm not toast quite yet!

I'm working on a new book. I'm doing some great stuff at work - follow my Twitter account to get updates about that. And I'm planning a big lazy Christmas break.

On New Year's Eve, I'll punch 2022 in the kidney as it leaves.

Onward and upward.

JR

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