77. Does my bum look big in this?
This week I received a photo of my brain. I’m thinking of sending it as a Christmas card. It’s the result of the six thousand quid scan I had a couple of weeks ago and so is the most expensive photo I’ll ever have taken.
As I understand it – which I don’t really – the yellowish bits are the proteins that have gone bonkers because of the Parkinson’s. Looks like we’ve got it cornered.
73. Tunnel vision
Yesterday was very interesting, in a boring kind of way.
You might remember that, in the early part of the year, I participated in a drugs trial. There’s more about it here and here, if you can be arsed to look.
In essence, the lovely Dr LaMancha and his team are trying to see if a particular drug, currently in use for another condition, has any effect on the progress of Parkinson’s. The trial is now over and the results are still being analysed: a painstaking task. I asked about it today, as Dr LM prepared to inject me with radioactivity.
72. The kindness of strangers…
Last weekend I was, in truth, feeling pretty low. I realise that this will come as a bit of a shock to anyone who knows me. You’ll have stopped reading my blog – as instructed – before the whole cat-food/porridge/iPod fiasco. You didn’t miss much – it got a bit wimpy from that point.
57. Clang, clang, clang went the bell…
Crammed into the sidecar attached to Pa’s motorbike, Ma, LittleBro, the budgie and I followed the removal van across the City, not dilly-dallying on the way. We were moving from our tiny first floor flat to a house in the suburbs of North London. It would be just like in my favourite Janet and John books, with a real garden and an upstairs. All very exciting and not in the least scary.
40. Do you promise not to tell…
“You remember this – answer from Never to Always passing through Very Occasionally, Sometimes and Often.”
We’ve done the neurology questionnaire three times now: at the start of the drugs trial, in the middle and now, at the end. Where did that six months go? Dr LaMancha knows me so well that his pencil hovers over my answers before I say them. We whip through the questions. Then there’s that moment when I long for Dr LaMancha to give me a red pen to mark my own paper while he runs through what the answers should have been. It’s a test and I want to know how I’ve done. Perhaps I could be put in a league table with the other Parkie patients.
36. Listen, do you want to know a secret…?
“Did you know that Parkinson’s Awareness Week is next week?” says InfantPhenomenon. She’s just started work as a trainee journalist and is calling me in her coffee break. I, however, am on Easter holidays and evading doing school-work by skulking in bed with coffee and a Kindle. Lounging around while the children are at work; Earth hath not anything to show more fair.
32. I’m never gonna stop the rain by complainin’
“How do you do, Mehmet?”
“Very well thank you, Mrs Jellywoman.”
“How do you do, Ololade?”
“Very well thank you, Mrs Jellywoman.”
“How do you do, George?”
“My leg hurts.”
17. Slow, slow, quick quick, slow
Compare.
“Look, dragon breath!” Mixed infants circle round me, their breath steaming in the winter air. I roar obligingly and they scamper away.
One little dragon loses her footing and is brought to me, howling, by Katie. We check out the knees and agree that a quick magic rub and the application of a little TLC will be sufficient. We’re just setting off on a turn around the playground when there’s a tug on my coat. Owen is standing behind me with a plastic cup filled with mud.
“Coffee?” he asks. I take the cup and pretend to sip.
“Delicious!”
“That’ll be fifty pounds,” he says. “You can pay by card.” I pick up a leaf and hand it over. “Do you want cash-back with that?” he asks.
9. Cool for cats
“I’ve been reading your blog” says Dr LaMancha as he slides the needle into my vein. I attempt a sort of “am I bovvered?” nonchalance: I’ve been working on this look since starting my blog three weeks ago, just in case. I suspect, though, that my veneer of cultivated cool is rather undermined by multiple calls to Mum informing her that somebody I don’t know in the Isle of Man has just Liked my blog.
Mum does her best to sound excited, bless her, but as her last brush with new technology ground to a halt when she couldn’t work out how to fit a CD into an i-pod, I suspect she’s humouring me.
The Jelly Chronicles 