Today sees the seventh anniversary of the passing of my best friend Llŷr, and yet again I find myself wondering where time has gone, and that it simply can’t be possible that so much of it has passed since I last saw him.
I wonder if he’s been watching me have my own brush with cancer recently (which, in case you’re interested, has now been formally diagnosed as a grade 3 renal cell carcinoma (kidney cancer), measuring 73mm by 50mm – all safely removed, as far as I know, although I’m waiting to have a post-op consultation with the surgeon) and wondering if I’d be coming to join him soon.
I can imagine him gesticulating to a group of friends he’s made since he’s been up there, pointing them back to the bar: “Bowie, Prince, Parfitt – sorry, he’s not coming this time. Back inside. Who’s round is it?”
I almost feel like I’ve let him down by surviving, but I’m damn sure that’s not how he would view it.
As I often do around this time, I also find myself revisiting previous posts I’ve written about him, to check there will be no repetition of either song or story. This will always include a visit to the “eulogy” I wrote shortly after he passed and this time I was drawn to these words:
“We became inseparable. On the rare occasions that he went out without me, he would come home telling me everyone had been asking where I was, and I found the reverse to be true.”
Now, I knew that people would always be asking after him, but I had my doubts that people would have been asking after me. I’ve never been the most self-confident person in the world.
Anyway, that reminded me of an encounter at his memorial service (note: not a wake), which I didn’t think I’d mentioned here before, but, when doing my usual sweep, I found that I had. Dammit. Still, the idea’s in my head now, so I’ll throw a little more flesh on the bones of what I wrote last time out.
I met Llŷr because we had a mutual friend at an insurance company I started working for in 1999, a guy called Richie that I’d worked with years earlier when he first moved to Cardiff, and with whom Llŷr lived at the time. But shortly before he was diagnosed with the brain tumour, Llŷr had quit his job and had enrolled on a speech therapy course. He had identified a lack of Welsh-speaking speech therapists, and, since he was a fluent Welsh-speaker, he figured he had spotted a gap in the market which he could fill. Amongst the many things which broke my heart about his condition was that the medication led to his own speech becoming slow and laboured, and eventually he had to concede that he could not train to do the job he yearned to do.
I have to say that – and since my own time with them ended rather abruptly, I have no reason to be nice about them – the insurance company were brilliant with him; once diagnosed and under a strict regime of medication and treatment, he wanted to go back to work, but he couldn’t do the role he once did, due to his speech, so he was re-employed in an administrative role, where he didn’t have to speak to or argue with policyholders on the phone about how much their stolen car was worth. This must have been incredibly frustrating to him; his mind was just as sharp as ever, it just took him longer to articulate himself than it did before. But not once did I ever hear him complain or moan about the cards he had been dealt. Instead, he would regale me with funny things that happened in the office, involving people I didn’t really know, the admin team he was on being completely separate to the one which fuelled the team I’d been on when I was there. He always seemed happy enough, having accepted that was the best he was going to be able to get, for the time being, at least.
Fast forward to the reception after his memorial service (note: not a wake). His older sister, Hel, and I were waiting to be served at a packed bar. In front of us was a gaggle of Cardiff girls, a couple of whom I recognised, but didn’t know well enough to acknowledge. They were doing what Cardiff girls do best: getting some shots in. Suddenly, shots of I know-not-what were thrust into mine and Hel’s hands. We of course dutifully necked them, it would have been rude not to do so.
The girl who seemed to be the leader asked what our names were; I introduced Hel and told her mine. She stared, open-mouthed, like she was in awe.
“Oh my God,” she said, “You’re Jez! He fucking loved you! He was always talking about you!”
Not for the first nor for the last time that day, I forced a smile and held back a tear.
“The feeling was mutual”, I muttered.
“You’re a lot older than I thought you were,” she continued. “He never told me you were old.”
And suddenly, I wasn’t holding back tears of sadness but tears of laughter.
******
Having regurgitated an old anecdote, a tune not posted in this series before is required. That said, as I have previously mentioned, it was a rare event when I managed to introduce Llŷr to a musical act or record he wasn’t already aware of. This one fits.
We both loved Beck, and in 2009, he embarked on a musical project called: Record Club. So I was both surprised and overjoyed when I sent Llŷr a couple of tracks from one of the albums in the series, including today’s selection, and he had no idea they existed.
The concept: Beck would gather together an informal and fluid collective of musicians (collective was a very “in” term in 2009), cover and record an entire album by another artist in one day. That’s it.
As one might expect from Beck, the list of albums was….eclectic, to say the least: Yanni’s Yanni Live at the Acropolis, The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, Skip Spence’s Oar, Leonard Cohen’s Songs of Leonard Cohen and INXS’s Kick. The collective of musicians included (but were not limited to): Devendra Banhart (on Songs of Leonard Cohen), Feist and Wilco (on Oar), Thurston Moore on Yanni Live at the Acropolis, St Vincent (on Kick):
Time to blow the dust of another old series. For the uninitiated, here is where I post an upbeat song with a positive message, sound or feel – preferably all three – in the hope of helping you start your week in a similar way.
Yesterday I was watching Smugday – sorry, Sunday Brunch on Channel 4. I know, I know. I can’t stand either host, but often there is at least one guest I like on each week, and on the way back from each commercial break, they play a clip of a new pop single, usually of an indie bent, and then at the end of the show there is a pre-recorded live performance from one of the musical guests of the week.
This week, that honour fell to The Molotovs, a teenage brother/sister combo, (with full band behind them), and I was rather taken by Mathew and Issey Cartlidge’s mod/ Jam/young Weller cosplay schtick.
Their debut album Wasted on Youth is out this Friday 30th January, available in all good record stores, probably in a couple of not very good ones too, and to pre-order via their website and here’s one of the tunes you’ll be able to find on it:
I think that one of the best ways to decide whether one particular song can be described as a classic, is to see who has covered it.
I’m not just talking about the calibre of the covering artist, or how good the cover is for that matter.
This morning’s tune was written by a country legend, and the following have all covered it: The Everley Brother, Joan Baez, The Byrds (albeit only a live version), The Flying Burrito Brothers (with Gram Parsons performing vocals), Marianne Faithful (with Keith Richards), Don Williams, The Grateful Dead, Alabama, and Billy Ray Cyrus. And yes, the quality of that list really does drop off at the end.
You all know the story of the writer, I imagine: incarcerated in Bakersfield Jail following his part in a botched robbery, but was transferred to San Quentin State Prison after an also botched escape attempt. In 1960, he was present at, and inspired by, Johnny Cash’s legendary performance.
As for the song, well (this from wiki:) “….it draws upon the writer’s relationships with two fellow inmates: Caryl Chessman, the “first modern American executed for a non-lethal kidnapping”; and James “Rabbit” Kendrick, who was executed in 1961 for killing a California Highway Patrolman after escaping from prison.
Here, the singer takes the role of an inmate at a state penitentiary, where a condemned prisoner is being led toward the death chamber. The inmate, who regularly plays guitar and sings in his jail cell to pass the time, is asked to perform a final song at the condemned prisoner’s request before he and the guards continue on. As the song is completed, he reflects on a church choir’s visit to the prison just a week earlier, where members performed hymns for the inmates; one of the songs evoked the soon-to-be-executed prisoner’s memories of his mother and carefree childhood … before his life went wrong.”
You didn’t really think I’d be ditching this so close to hitting a century, did you…?
No, course not.
So, hello, here’s Volume 94 of the usual “something-for-everyone-but-still-ace-(hopefully)” schtick. No spoilers, but there’s a particularly fab Kirsty MacColl song in this one where she warns us that her current beau will smash your face in if you don’t leave her alone, a sentiment I’m sure we’d all extend to whoever was driving the speedboat that killed her.
Anyway, usual remit – just a bunch of songs which sound good together (to these ears) – and, as usual, there’s a track-listing, but (and I don’t think I’ve explicitly said this before) it would be much better if you just listened to it and then checked back to identify any tunes you don’t recognise or can’t remember the name of:
A song written by Joe South back in 1967, first recorded by South on his Billy Joe Royal Featuring Hush album, and then a minor hit for Dobie Gray in 1969.
A song which, when recorded in 1970 (the version I’m posting today), was a worldwide hit, topping the charts around the globe (it got to #3 in the UK). At 1971’s 13th Annual Grammy Awards, this version won the Grammy for ‘Best Country Vocal Performance, Female’. Mary Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann, in their book Finding Their Voice: The History of Women in Country Music, said it “…ushered in a decade of ‘crossover’ country women whose music reached out to the broader pop marketplace and dramatically expanded country music’s national notoriety…”
For me, though, it will always be Side one, Track one on a compilation tape in my Dad’s car, which my brother would listen to, accompanied by a bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps each, in a pub car park on a Saturday night where we had stopped on the way back from visiting the relatives so Dad could have a drink before closing time.
Mondegreens are the unintentional switcheroo of correct lyrics for incorrect, creating a new phrase that makes sense (or sometimes more sense) to the listener. It happens when the brain tries to make sense of unclear sounds, leading to a breakdown in auditory perception.
There are loads of famous examples. like: “Excuse me while I kiss this guy” being sung instead of “Excuse me while I kiss the sky” in Hendrix’s Purple Haze, and thinking that Johnny Nash could see clearer once Lorraine had gone, rather than the much more likely “the rain”.
I’ve written before about growing up in the late 70s/early 80s, and having to listen to Radio 2 at breakfast time. This morning’s selection was often played, and I would always misguidedly think “Blimey, four hundred children! They’ve been busy!!”
Now, I’m no maths genius, never have been, but even I should have been able to work out that the lady in question would have to have started having kids at a very young age, and would have been knocking on a bit to have reached the landmark 400-offspring by the time our Kenny tried to hit on her in a bar. Had it existed back then, I’d probably have been wondering how she hadn’t got her own fly-on-the-wall documentary on Channel 5.
Well, lookie here, it’s only the return of the internet’s favourite Sunday morning dip into my big bag of Country records.
I had a quick scoot to see when I last wrote one of these and was genuinely shocked to see that the last post in this series was back on August 3rd 2025, and even that was the first post since April 27th 2025. I knew I’d neglected this place a lot last year, with good reason: health issues, stays in hospital, convalescing after stays in hospital blah blah blah. However, I hadn’t fully appreciated just how much I’d neglected the place until now – especially when I see that in 2025 I only posted 44 times, the lowest, by quite some distance, since I started this place up back in 2013/2014.
Not that I’m exactly brimming with ideas or new songs to post, as you’ll see, for today’s song has featured here before, but way back in 2017, so I figure a little repetition refresher won’t hurt.
That said, I wanted my first post of 2026 to be an upbeat, positive tune. And I kind of liked the idea of it starting with the act tuning up and getting ready for their performance/the new year.
But as I’m easing myself back in gently, here’s (some of) what I wrote way back then:
“Perhaps the most well-known version of today’s track is performed by The Whites and appears on the soundtrack of the Coen brothers’ 2000 movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, and is a song recorded many times by the Carter family dynasty – in fact, it’s practically The Carter Family’s theme tune. A.P. Carter’s tombstone even has a gold record of the song embedded in it.
Here’s the version from The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” triple album, complete with explanatory introduction by none other than Mother Maybelle Carter:”
Hello, and happy betwixmas to you all. For all that celebrate it, I hope you had a wonderful Christmas. For those of you that don’t, well, I hope you had a pretty great time too. I had a rather lovely Christmas staying up ay my brother’s house, catching up with his daughters, grandson, and all the rest of that side of the family, testing whether or not it was a good idea or not to have a festive tipple so soon after surgery (Conclusion: yes!).
Which leads me nicely on to this: for those of you who a) are concerned and b) haven’t read my replies to a couple of comments on my last post, just thought I’d check in to let you know my surgery went well; I’m one kidney lighter, and spent the week after I was discharged from hospital convalescing at my mother’s house, and now I’m back home: a bit sore, understandably, but otherwise okay.
Stitches (well, clips, actually – they looked more like staples) came out last week. As I’m sure you’ll expect, I have some gruesome tales to tell about my time in hospital, but we’ll save them for another time; this is just me seeing how painful it is to sit and write at my laptop (Conclusion: quite).
Often I struggle to come up with a title for these posts. Usually, they will come to me midway through writing it. Such is the case with today’s post. And yes, it does refer to what you’re thinking.
Imagine that your phone starts ringing in the middle of the night. You know it can only be bad news.
Well, substitute ‘the middle of the night’ with ‘Saturday morning’, and the ringing phone with me posting something, and that’s how I imagine many of you feel right now. “What’s wrong with him now….?” I can almost hear you sigh.
But this week, some good news.
Tuesday morning just gone. I have the first of three appointments at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge. To recap, it is here that I have been referred to deal with the issue of my right kidney, which is 80/90% likely to be riddled with cancer. But whilst there’s that 10/20% chance that it isn’t, they refuse to categorically say either way, but decide that they will treat it as if it is cancer, i.e. whip it out and then test it to see if there is or is not any cancerous cells in what’s left of it.
When I was first referred to Addenbrooke’s a couple of months ago, I had to attend the Pre-Op Assessment Team, which sounds like the sort of place where the size of my Adam’s Apple, whether I need to Immac the backs of my hands, and how I look in an off-the shoulder number are assessed, whilst JK Rowling stands outside, brandishing a “Down With This Sort of Thing” placard, but isn’t. Instead, I was dealt with by typically lovely NHS staff, who were assigned the unenviable task of assessing my suitability to have surgery. In short: is this man likely to die if we operate on him? They asked a lot of questions (Them: “Have you ever taken any recreational drugs? If so, which ones, how much and how long ago?” Me: “Errrrmmmm….how much room do you have on that form….?”)
They decided that a) I needed to lose weight (no surprise there), and b) within the notes from the referring hospital, but with no detail, there were mentions of issues regarding my lungs and heart/chest they had detected before referring me over.
“What’s going on there?”
I shrug. “No idea, this is the first I’m hearing of it.”
As you may have read last week, the issue with my lungs rather overtook matters when I was admitted to hospital with respiratory issues in mid-October and diagnosed with COPD and a sleep apnea. And it seems that in the meantime, Addenbrooke’s have decided that they’d grab the nettle and investigate the heart stuff themselves, for on Tuesday (just gone) I am due to visit the Cardiology Team and then a return visit to the Pre-Op Assessment Team.
I arrive at the Cardiology Team at 08:00, and, after a short wait, I have an ECG done, then it’s off to the Cardiologist, who has been asked to write a report about my heart and how likely it is to either explode or just pack in when I’m under the knife. We don’t exactly get off to a great start when he says he has written but not sent a strongly-worded letter about the number of appointments I’ve either cancelled or failed to attend.
“I’m sorry, what? When?” I asked.
He peers at his screen. “Last Tuesday. You cancelled on the morning of the appointment…”
“No,” I said, I didn’t cancel them, I was told on the day that they’d been cancelled due to a staff shortage. One was rearranged for Thursday, which I attended, and the rest for today.”
“Oh,” he says, tapping at his keyboard.
“And then there were three in October….?”
“Yes, I cancelled those, because I was in hospital – not this one – and therefore unable to attend. I notified Addenbrooke’s via email as soon as it was clear I wouldn’t be able to make them. The email was acknowledged, if you want to see it….?”
We get on a lot better after the air has been cleared; he tells me that even though my weight isn’t ideal (you’re telling me!), and despite me having an enlarged aorta, which he would be referring me back to my own local hospital for further investigation, he could see no reason why I can’t have the required surgery.
And so off I went to the Pre-Op Assessment Team, where I was asked a load more questions, and the nurse asked me to provide a swab from up my nose and also from my groin. Job done, I handed back the swabs, ensuring I told them which has been where: it’s not the sort of thing you want there to be any confusion about. And then they delivered one more final request, Columbo-style:
“There’s just one more thing: we also need a swab from your back passage.”
I look around for the hidden camera. Spying none, I ask:
“Yeh, that’s what Kurt Cobain chose, and look what happened to him” I say, taking the swab from her hand and heading off to the Gents to debase myself in the name of medicine, fully aware that my Kurt Cobain joke didn’t really work.
Task done, I return the tainted swab to the nurse, and head off to have some bloods taken.
When I got home, I called my concerned mother to update her, like the considerate son I try to be. We discuss when the surgery is likely to happen. I have another appointment on the following Monday (08/12) with the Urology Team, so I figure I’ll learn more then, but we conclude it’s unlikely to be this side of Christmas. A follow-up call to my boss, and we come to the same conclusion.
But.
Thursday morning I get a call from the hospital, telling me the appointment on Monday is to be cancelled, as they were looking to get me in for the surgery on Tuesday or Wednesday, and I’d be hearing from Admissions shortly.
Friday morning I get a call from the same guy I spoke to on Thursday: he has been told to reinstate the appointment, but to make it a telephone consultation. The surgeon is going to call me to explain the procedure and answer any questions I might have.
I then get a call from Admissions: my surgery has been scheduled for 07:00 on Tuesday, is that ok? Bit early in the morning, I think, but not wishing to reject it and find myself at the back of the queue, I tell them that’s fine. I learn that post-surgery, I’ll be kept in overnight to monitor me and, all being well, I’ll be discharged on Wednesday, for a period of convalescence.
And so that’s it – unless I happen to write anything else over the weekend (and let’s face it, that’s pretty unlikely) this is likely to be my last post of the year. Hope you all have a fabulous Christmas, and that 2026 is better than not just 2025 (it can hardly be worse in my book) but every other year.
All being well, I’ll be back next year, I hope to hear from you all then.
Until then, one final song, one which I posted when I first got my probably-cancer news and the only song I know of with the word ‘kidney’ in the title:
You’re thinking: “Here he is, rocking up on a Saturday morning, almost four months since he announced he had cancer in his right kidney, before giving us a couple of Friday night mixes and disappearing for a month, reappearing to update us that whilst he probably had cancer, nobody was wanting say so officially (despite numerous consultations and the provision of a raft of leaflets about cancer of the kidney) but it was being treated as if it was cancer (i.e. “we won’t know until we’ve taken it out”), which meant whipping that naughty old kidney out, at which point, another Friday night mix and a very brief review of a Gene gig aside, and that was over a month ago, and then….nothing.” Am I right?
Some of you may have assumed that I’ve either died (I can categorically confirm I am still not dead) or have been having the aforementioned surgery. No such luck.
Either way, you may well be thinking: he’d better have a bloody good reason for leaving us all in the lurch again. Well I have. I definitely have. So settle down, buckle up and I’ll fill you in.
You may recall that when I was going though my pre-operation check-list at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, they had found amongst the notes from Peterborough Hospital (who had first identified the issue with my kidney, and referred me to Addenbrooke’s) reference to there being issues with my chest and lungs which required investigation. It was unclear who was supposed to be doing said investigations, so Addenbrooke’s decided to deal with the chest (by which I mean “heart”) issues, and they would chase Peterborough up regarding the lungs. Oh, and I needed to lose some weight.
But before any of that could start, events rather overtook us.
Midway through October, I noticed I was having some issues with breathing. A few people over the weeks prior had commented that my breathing seemed laboured; I dismissed it – just a cold coming on, I convinced myself.
16th October: I have slept on my settee as it’s nearer the bathroom and my stomach issues had reappeared. At around 6:00, I decide I need to get to the bathroom sharpish. I live in one of those old fashioned terraced houses, where the bathroom is downstairs, on the other side of the kitchen, which is next to my living room, which, you’ll be surprised to learn, is where my settee/make-shift bed lives. The kitchen is not very big, but I find that halfway along it, maybe 3 metres from my settee, I have to stop to take get my breath back. As I leaned across the kitchen worktop, it occurred to me that all was not well.
I should intervene for a moment here to point out to those new round these parts, when I’m writing about a real event in my life, by which I don’t mean a gig I went to recently, or a film or TV show I’ve seen that I enjoyed, or a record I love, what I tend to do is pepper the post with relevant songs – which, I should stress, are not necessarily songs that I like – to either make a point, to lighten the mood, or, more usually, just to break up the text. Like this:
I mean, that one falls into the “Songs I Can’t Stand” category, but still, here it is. Fear not though: there are a lot of songs which mention breath or breathing in the title for me to lob into this. Look, here’s another one (and yes, I know it’s not the original, but it’s Belinda, and I bloody adore Belinda):
That’s a bit better. Soothing, at least, although it does end rather abruptly.
Anyway, where was I? Ah yes: gasping for breath whilst having the shits. By the time I’d *ahem* finished in the toilet, I’d decided action was required. Too early to call my GP, and not convinced my current circumstances really constituted either an Accident or an Emergency, I decided to call 111.
My one previous experience with 111 had not been great: I answered a few questions, and was told it was probably better that I took myself to hospital to be examined, which I did, and having sat waiting for four hours I was told there wasn’t anything they could do, and I should just go home.
But this time, the 111 operative was great, said they’d get someone out to me asap and, sure enough, just after 7am, two paramedics arrived at my door. They checked my lung capacity and gave me the following advice: “If you ever get like this again, just call 999; judging by this reading, you should be dead by now.”
“Built of sterner stuff, me”, I joked, as they strapped an oxygen mask over my face.
NB: both my paramedics, one of whom was also the ambulance driver, were women. I thought I ought to point that out as a show of unity and my contempt for the patriarchy, am I right, sisters?
A bit more background for newer folks: this is not my first recent brush the medical world with respiratory issues. In 2018, I was admitted to hospital with a pulmonary embolism (a blood clot) on my left lung, and pneumonia on the right lung. I spent a week in hospital and I learned two valuable lessons:
Anytime you go to hospital for what could pan out to include a residency there, take an overnight bag with essentials in it, and
Let your family know what’s going on, and try to keep them updated as best you can, until they can come and visit.
Back in 2018, I took no overnight bag, sent a text to my mother advising I’d been asked to go to hospital urgently, then, when detained and with no phone charger, I turned my phone off to save the battery until a charger had been located. When I finally got one, recharged my phone and found a mountain of texts, messages and voicemails, all getting increasingly more and more desperate for a response, what I should have done is simply notified my mother I was ok, in hospital and in good hands. What I actually did was call my mother, pass the phone to a nurse without introduction and asked her to explain what was going on. Sorry Mum!
Lesson learned, that wasn’t going to happen again this time. I had my phone, my phone charger, and I’d let her know what was going on, and that I’d update here as soon as I had something to tell her.
After a couple of hours in admissions, I am wheeled up to what will be my home for the foreseeable future: my own little room in a ward full of little rooms. I have an en suite toilet and shower, which is better than at home. I have an oxygen mask, which they strap to my head for several hours a day and overnight. I have a television (I discover a few days later, following a visit from my buddy Richard, although I later establish, with assistance of one of the Healthcare Assistants (HCA’s) or nurses – I can’t remember which – that either it or the remote control, or possibly both, didn’t work “I could log it, but by the time they get out to have a look at it, you’ll be long gone”, the HCA tells me, and I try not to dwell on the dual meanings of “long gone” and which one he meant), but what I don’t have is a phone signal or internet connection to get a message to my mother. Looking at the logs on my phone now, it seems we finally established contact the following day. (Sorry again, Mum – but not my fault this time!).
Ah, the oxygen mask. The stuff of my recurring nightmares. Essentially, it was a deep sea diver’s mask, covering the whole of my face, with a snorkel attachment through which oxygen was pumped, regulated and monitored by…well, I dunno, a machine, I guess: there was a screen with lots of numbers and running line graphs attached to it that I didn’t understand.
What’s so nightmarish about that? Well, the problem is that the mask they gave me didn’t fit. It was too small. When clamped into place, as it was overnight and for large chunks of the day, the top of it cut into the bridge of my nose. On top of that, around the mask was a kind of rubber seal, designed to keep the oxygen in – but when the mask doesn’t fit, all it does is flap as the oxygen escaped, like a bed sheet on a washing line on a windy day. And that makes a noise, a big flapping noise, every time I breathed in or out, which I don’t know about you, but I’m in the habit of doing quite a lot, asleep or not.
On top of that, whenever it detected an oxygen outage (or when it thought I had no pulse), the screen would flash and an alarm would go off, which was pretty much all the time. It prevented me from sleeping at all, which made me cranky and irritable and quite rude to some of the staff who were looking after me. I complain about the mask – although I can’t be heard when it’s on – it’s torture, and every time they come into my room and tell me it’s time to go back on the mask, I moan and whine like a teenager whose just been told he can’t got to a house party. Think Kevin from Kevin & Perry, and if you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s a collection of clips from Harry Enfield’s marvelous show, which I found when sliding down a wormhole whilst trying to source an appropriate bit:
NB: I do no endorse any requests to subscribe that may flash up on your screen when watching that.
Anyway, I’m told they are trying to source a bigger mask, but for the time being, no luck.
Then finally, on the Monday after I was admitted, they source a bigger mask. Compared to what has gone before, it feels like heaven. I no longer moan about having it on, and I make a point of apologising to all of the staff if I’ve been rude or snappy to them beforehand. I’m not normally like that, I explain.
As it turned out, they has plenty of time to find out for themselves.
On about day 3 or 4, one of the nurses says: “It must be very difficult to go to the toilet when you’re hooked up to that machine; how do you feel about having a catheter?”
I’d had a catheter fitted when i was hospitalised back in 2018 and I bloody loved it. Whilst they’re no fun to attach, or indeed remove, the joy of not having to get up in the night and go to the toilet (or, since I had been in hospital, sit up and pee into a cardboard funnel) was immeasurable.
And so we welcome back Little Jez, who swiftly, and relatively painlessly, had a catheter shoved up him. And for a few hours, all was well with the world.
Until, I got up to have a shower one morning, got the catheter tube caught around the bed frame, yanking it out from his penile moorings. Ouchies.
Asked if I wanted it re-inserting, I opted not to. Back behind the thin veneer of the hospital gown with you, Little Jez.
A physiotherapist visits me. He explains to me how to breathe properly, and leaves me an A4 sheet with instructions. It literally says: “Breathe in…and breathe out again. Breathe in…hold your breath for a few seconds…and breathe out.” Thanks, I couldn’t have done it without you.
In the meantime, my room becomes a haven: as well as remembering to bring my phone charger, I have also brought a small but powerful blue-tooth speaker with me. Now, free from the tyrannical torture of the mis-sized oxygen mask, I play 6Music throughout the day, and pretty much every nurse or HCA who attends to me comments that they like coming into my room now because the music playing is always happy and upbeat – so props are due to 6Music DJ’s Nick Grimshaw, Lauren Laverne and Huw Stephens
One afternoon, the door to my room has been left open. I have 6Music going, and they (Huw, I think) dropped this…:
…which leads to one nurse/HCA popping into my room, for no reason whatsoever, other than to tell me that they love the song and hadn’t heard it in ages. She has a little dance in my doorway, I have a little dance in my bed. It’s a glorious moment.
Suitably emboldened, I decide that the next time a member of staff comments on the music I had on, I’d tell them what I was listening to, so they could tune in too, if they so wished. See, I’m not one of those BBC-bashing types, calling for it to be brought down, just because they (stupidly) edited a speech to show what Trump said more concisely than he could ever manage.
Around the two-week anniversary of my stay in hospital, a student nurse comes into my room. The last time she was in, she mentioned the music, and sure enough she did on this occasion too. I’d say she was in her late teens or maybe early twenties, had a nose ring, and, I decide, seemed exactly the sort of person who would appreciate being guided in the direction of some great music by an old lag like me.
But I must wait until she mentions it, or I’ll just seem like a desperate old perv, and sure enough, she raises the topic.
“I like coming in here, you’ve always got music playing”, she says.
“It’s just 6Music,” I say, “in case you want to check it out. It’s on the BBC Sounds app.”
She nods, and almost absent mindedly says: “Yeh, It’s the sort of thing my Dad listens to.”
I laugh and pretend not to feel mortally wounded. “Thanks!” I say, in response to this “You’re old enough to be my father”-type response.
“No, no,” she says, “I just mean…he’s even got a little blue-tooth speaker like you, thinks he’s proper cool.”
“That really doesn’t make me feel any better,” I tell her.
Anyway, by now the diagnosis was in, and I have some new things to add to my ever-growing list of complaints and conditions; now, as well as having, in no particular order, (probably) cancer. rheumatoid arthritis, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, (latent) spine bifida and psoriasis, I can add these to the list: COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) – in lay-person’s speak: my lungs are so full of gunk due to years of smoking, they don’t work properly. This has led to me also having a sleep apnea, a disorder where breathing stops and starts repeatedly during sleep, because my lungs don’t work, I’m prevented from entering a deep sleep at night.
“Have you been feeling tired a lot recently?” one consultant asks me.
“Yes, very much so!” I reply.
“And have you found yourself wanting to sleep, or even falling asleep at unusual times of the day?”
“Yes! I fell asleep in a meeting at work a couple of months ago!”
“That’s because you’re not getting into a deep, or R.E.M, sleep, so your brain thinks it has to keep doing stuff,” they explain to me. “Is what little sleep you get disturbed?”
“Yes! I am forever having to get up and pee! I know most men of my age have to go two, maybe three times a night, but I’m up every hour or so.”
“That’s your sleep apnea: your brain isn’t shutting down properly because of the COPD, so it looks for something to do, and in your case, it’s decided it’s time would be best spent making more urine for you to get rid of.”
Suddenly, a lot makes sense.
As I enter the second week of my stay in hospital, they start weening me off the big oxygen mask: at first the hours are reduced, them I’m put on a smaller, hand-held oxygen mask (think Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet) and then, finally onto one of those where a small tube goes up each nostril.
The progress is positive: I don’t have to wear any of them during the day, and at night they monitor me and, if my oxygen intake happened to drop below a certain level, they would come into my room, wake me, and attach the small, nostril tube method of getting oxygen into me.
This all seems quite positive, in terms of being discharged, until I am awoken at around 4am on the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of my second week in hospital, where I had been sleeping maskless, by a nurse telling me I had to use the small, up-the-nostrils method of oxygen intake, as my levels had dropped too far.
Thursday 30th October was the two-week mark of my stay in hospital, and when I was awoken at 4am on the Friday morning, I figured I’d be staying there over the weekend. They’re not going to let me out if I’m still having issues breathing at night, I figured.
But no! Late Friday afternoon on 31st October, they wheeled a chair into my room, told me to get my things together, and took me down to the appropriately if distastefully named Discharge Suite, where I sat for a few hours for my medication to be prepared before….
And so here we are, four weeks post-discharge, just completed my first week back at work (albeit on a reduced hours/phased return basis) and I feel pretty good.
Going back to that pre-operation check-list, I think we can safely say we’ve established what the lungs issue Peterborough Hospital identified was and it’s been dealt with; I lost a bit of weight in hospital (maybe around a stone or so, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of that having been added again since I was discharged), and the heart stuff? Thankfully, Addenbrooke’s have grasped the mettle here: I’ve had a couple of heart scans in the past couple of weeks, and am due to have a consultation to discuss (I assume) the results next week.
Fingers crossed, the cancer/kidney operation might be a little closer to happening now and then I can get back to normal…I might even let you know before I go AWOL again….
A History of Dubious Taste 
