Just a note to my loyal friends......

Hello all! :-)

I feel I must thank everyone who dropped in here while I was away and kept the blog going just by your presence alone. I knew you were dropping in because at first the reason I wasn't able to keep the blog up-to-date was because I didn't have a working computer, but I was able from time to time to look in on the site anyway from a friends's house.

I must say that it was truly heartening to see that people, and you my friends in particular, were dropping in, even while you knew that I wasn't keeping the blog as up to date as I should have been. This is true loyalty! You know who you are, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your belief in me and for your friendship.

Then I had the computer fixed and up and running again. But still my being able to continue the story was frustrated because I became ill. At first I put it down to tiredness, lack of interest. Yet I knew I wasn't not writing through lack of interest because I really and truly enjoy sharing my stories. In a nutshell I felt pretty much... or rather that should be pretty NOT much myself :-)

So then one evening I discovered that my breathing apparatus seemed to be packing up. Scary business! If I made the smallest effort I felt as if I'd ran a marathon and was breathing like a bull.

I did the usual (bad) thing. I figured if you ignore it it will go away. It didn't.

So at last the breathing just seemed to stop! Yep, just like that. To say it gave me a fright would be to greatly understate it. I called my son (Jimmy the Paramedic.... sounds like a Mafia name that doesn't it?.... Like Jimmy the Fish.... ahh you know what I mean :-) in the middle of the night and asked him if I might have pneumonia or something. He gave me the advice that I should have had the good sense not to need anyway.... he told me there were no short cuts.... I had to see the doc and get properly checked out.

So next morning (I was a bit surprised to actually make it to the next morning) I called the doc and told her that either she see me now or else send an ambulance to take me to hospital. (That was just me doing my panic bit) and she replied that if I came to her now she'd see me immediately. I told her I could hardly walk. She insisted. She's so nice.

To make this long story short I did make it to the doc's office and she had a listen to my breathing (almost non existant), heart and so on. Then she said the words that every hypochondriac wants to hear. "Okay, you're bad, but not as bad as you think. Lungs a bit tight (a BIT? I thought they'd shrunk and disappeared!), so lets go in here and see what we can do."

Off we went to a different office and she placed one of those jet pilots face masks over my face, and told me to breathe normally. (Missus, if I could breather normally I wouldn't be here!) But I tried anyway.... and in minutes I was so relaxed that I almost fell asleep. God bless whoever invented oxygen! The doc left me in charge of a rather pretty and chatty nurse and off she went saying she'd be back soon. Funny how a pretty nurse can take your mind off what you believe may be your imminent departure from this vale of tears. Few minutes later the doc came back, put some stuff into the face mask and in a matter of moments I was breathing like a kid again. I swear, I sort of shuffled into that surgery like a man in chains, and after my treatment I walked out like a soldier on duty! Amazin' what they can do these days.

Bottom line (hah... I know who's saying now "Awww thank gawd, I thought he was never going to shut up!") is I had some kind of lung infection, a chest infection just for good measure, and my first ever asthmatic attack.... all at once.

Well the good news is I'm on the road to recovery. At the mo I'm still a bit under the weather but I suppose that's to be expected. I'm taking so many pills that if I jumped now I'd rattle.

And the even better news is that I'll be continuing the story very soon.... just as soon as the doc tells me I'm free of whatever it was that made me ill in the first place.

So till then, and I hope this will be very, very soon. I want to say a huge heartfelt thank you to all of my friends who never gave up on me. You're the best!

Soon.