Medical Tourism

My poor old dead Dad had a very hard and short life. Forty years as a Docker on Garston Dock, loading and unloading loose cargoes. Four years as a stoker on Destroyers on the North Atlantic Convoys and finally wasting away for a month in Sefton General Hospital after having a number of severe strokes, which left him initially speechless and then witless.

After we finally buried him and sorted all his affairs out we found we were £11 out of pocket. So apart from his set of false teeth which I still have and his large nose and ears, the only other thing he left me was a genetic disorder called “Duputryens Contracture”. What I didn’t know at the time was what such good company I was in, Maggie Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and the ever present Bill Nighy has it. About 2% of the population have it and about 80% of the people who have it are descended from Vikings (I always wondered why raping and pillaging was so appealing, well pillaging is).

The condition means that the tendons in your palm contracts, hardens and sticks to the skin above. This has the effect of making your fingers bend into a “claw” (appropriate in Thatchers case). By the time my Dad died his hand hand his little and ring fingers totally curled up…..the only cure then was to cut the tendons, you got straight fingers but you can’t actually use, very useful.

Anyhow I’ve ended up with a mild form of it, fortunately only in the ring finger in my left hand and instead of making a claw it was making my finger drop out of line with the other fingers. It wasn’t painful but it was becoming uncomfortable.

So after doing the research on the internet as you do I found out much to my dismay that a cure would mean my hand being butchered, performed under general anaesthetic the hand would be out of use for between 3 and 12 months, and may come back within 5 to 10 years. More reading on message boards and I kept noticing an ongoign argument about something called needle aprenovathy (sic) but this is only done in France ??? .The proponents sang its’ praises, whereas some surgeons we critical of it.

The main advantages seemed to be it was done under local anaesthetic, you can use your hand straight away and it left no scarring. So I contacted one of the French Doctors to find out if I could get it done Privee, which I could, so I booked the procedure for last weekend.

The Plan, catch the Easyjet to Charles De Gaulle, stay in Paris for two nights, do some touristy things and then get the operation done.

This is what we did, arrived Saturday night and found the Hotel had overbooked and we had to be moved to another (pissed off) found out we had to put our clocks forward a whole two hours, one for France , one for Summertime, so we ended up getting jet lag.

Sunday morning we went to a Porte de Vanvas a great antique flea market, we bought a brilliant leather hold all and a pistol holster and belt for Harry (Sheila’s dad, yeah don’t ask). Then we did the sights, Eiffel Tower (too crowded too long a wait to go up) the David Lynch Art Exhibition (see next blog “David Lynch Sick and Twisted Bastard or what?”), we then went for brilliant fixed price meal and then to bed.

Next day after a strenuous uphill climb we visited Sacre Couer, which was very impressive if a little crowded. The interior and ambiance was almost as impressive as the outside and the panoramic view of the city. Inside the 11 o’clock mass was taking place. We then made our way across the city to place de Victor Hugo to where the Doctors office was. Turns out that Ave Burgeaud is the equivalent of our Harley Street in London or Rodney Street in Liverpool, a succession of consulting rooms.

Anyhow we are trying to work out which bell to ring when this small man in a grey suit in hos late 50’s or early 60’s comes along, voile ici Doctuer Bernard Boullier de Branche. I introduced myself “Bonjour je m’appelle…” go upstairs fill out a form and then spent abut 10 mins getting examined and talking Franglais, as his english was about as good as my french, but we made ourselves understood.

The operation lasted about 40 minutes, and apart form the initial needle was completely painless. The procedure means instead of opening the skin, the doctor slides needles at various points along the tendon and wiggles it to release the skin from the tendon, it took 9 needles in total to sort mine out. The Doctor did the operation in his office, un assisted (no nurse) and it was remarkably straight forward.

After care is to keep the dressing clean and dry for five days, exercise the fingers for at least a month and voila no scars, no dodgey finger, no paternal heirloom. The cost 300 euros plus travel and accommodation, and you can only get it in france, we are thinking of doing it in the UK but the specialist consultant surgeons seem to feel it doesn’t work, or maybe they dont get enough money for doing it?

Robop 2

After yesterday’s blog about the robotic peregrine falcon Liverpool City Council have bought to control the pigeons in the city centre I just started to have surreal thoughts about how this type of thing in Sci-Fi films usually ends up with the technology going beserk and killing everyone, just like “Robocop” or “I Robot”.

The vision of Mike Storey fending off a frenzied attack by a killer robot hawk filled my life with glee for an instant, the hawk won by the way….or maybe the lib dems are training them to attack opposition councillors…..

Another issue from yesterday’s news was the council paid £160,000 for 88 man hours a week (by their calculations) to clean up the crap, means the council are paying their pigeon shit cleaners about £30 an hour…..”gis a job”. It’ll be interesting to see whether this £160K goes down once the “Birds” are in place.

They were also featured in last night’s “BBC Look Northwest” the Hawks were shown off  near Clayton Square er….surrounded by …..er….pigeons, but at least it didnt look like they werent shitting themselves so thats one good thing I suppose!

Are you a Hawk or a Dove?

Not very realistic is it

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/merseyside/6469451.stm

http://www.robop.co.uk/Q-Site_howmuch.html

This above news item refers to Liverpool City Council’s latest run in with the feral pigeon.

A couple of month’s ago the council officer took an undemocratic decision side stepping the elected members and decided to vote themselves a roof for the car park at the rear of the Municipal Buildings. The roof cost a mere £18,000 and was meant to stop claims arising agaisnt the council for damage to cars in the car park. Its a staff car park!

I’ve written to the council to ask who has actually made damage claims how much are they for and if any of the claims were successful, and were made by councillors or council officers. I dont think there can be a legal case for ownership of the pigeons (and their shit) falling at the feet of the council’s coffers.

So the council now decides that buying robot peregrine falcons will solve the problem, the news item highlights how much the council pay out each year £160,000 for cleaning up after these flying rats, but fails to mention that the ROBOP hawks cost nearly £2000 a pop, and apparently councillor Berni Turner believes that a couple of these things will “encourage the birds into parks and open spaces. ” Try telling the pigeons that!

What does strike me that shooting them or poisoning is probably a better way rather than wasting rate payers money on such a thick and simplistic idea. Maybe the council’s media department feel this is goign to make the council look good but it’s jsut an expensive gimmick

Kensington Crap reaches the Media

Went to a photoshoot for the Liverpool Echo on Friday. One of their reporters is doing a piece on how Liverpool 6 (Kensington and Fairfield) is getting the short or shitty end of the stick compared to Kensington new Deal for Communities area.

Needless to say its didnt take long to find graffiti broken glass and piles of dumped rubbish for the echo Photographer. I hope the story when it’s published has some sort of long term effect on the area, as things do not seem to be getting better around here, no ripple effect here that I can see.

This has been organised by the local Labour Councillor Louise Baldock, she’s the local councillor with the Duracell batteries.

At the moment we have three councillors, two lib dems and Louise the labour one. The lib dems lost out last year and the high profile service being provided by Frank and Richard looks like they might be throwing the towel in well before the May elections. I get the feeling that in this ward and in other (working class) parts of the city the new sparkly lib dem council is loosing popularity. There seems to be lots of dosh being spent on the city centre but areas like kensington especially L6 are looking neglected and miserable. Maybe if there’s no votes around here then they’ll pay lss attention until its gets to the point when it looks like they will loose their majority, then the place will be chocker bloc.

The definition of a good councillor must be someone who is interested in the well being of the area they represent, not city wide politics and especially not country wide politics. I also think councillors should have a maximum tenure of five years then two years off before they can restand again.

I also think there should be training courses so people can become a councillor to encourage real people into the role and not just party animals.

Old Friends Reunited or an unexploded Scotsman in the Headrow

Last Wednesday I went on a little social trip over to Huddersfield to meet up with an old friend from Art College days (Leeds Polytechnic Fine Art course 1975 to 1978).

Meeting up with people you haven’t seen for years can either be a delight or a disaster, or even embarassing as in Leeds I was known for my ability to drink vast amouns of Tetley’s Bitter and usually vomit it up at the end of the night. I should also point out that I am about to celebrate (not with a drink) 12 years of complete and occasionally boring sobriety. Maybe he was expecting pissed up Steve.

Ian McKay (the unexploded scotsman of the title) was one of my best mates on the course but over the last twenty or so years we lost touch, but good old Friends Reunited has hooked us up again. He looks and sounds little changed and he’s now living with the girl he went out with thirty years ago Anne-Marie, who is very nice, again it’s a Friends Reunited tale. She went to live in Austria when she was 19, got married had kids and got divorced. They met up a couple of years ago and she moved back over here two years ago.They are boviously very very happy together and it’s nice to see things sorting themselves out, This is the second friend of mine who has rekindled a relationship with an old flame. I’ll write about the oterh person at some other occasion.

Anyhow we spent the whole evening catching up and sorting the world out covering everything from Marks and Spencers returns policy to CSA and finally ending up with how crap Further Education is especially if you have to teach in it which thank god I dont have to. He really hasnt changed, and we didnt differ on our world views from years ago, which left me feeling good about a lot of things really.

I had to leave relatively early as I had a Radio Merseyside newspaper Review spot the next day.

The other reason I went over is I had to go over and borrow something off Mr McKay to wear at the Kensington Citizen’s Award on teh 29th March, more about this later…….after the 29th

More Crap but maybe not from Joyce

Well the phantom crap tipper has struck again, although it is in all probabilites not just one person, and not wanting to have a root through it for an address or a name the dumper shall remain anonymous. This post is more about the way our dear local council deals with these things.

Whenever the phantom crap tipper has struck I always call the local council via their new interactive telephone response system called imaginatively “Liverpool Direct”.

This week’s call to Liverpool Direct went something like this

Me: I like to report…….blah blah yadda yadda, name address rubbish…….

LD customer response oeprative: We’ll get the “Clean UP Crew” (if this was the commercial sector it would be spelt with a K and copyrighted) onto this right away….(they say this everytime)but there is an eight day response time to this call…

Me: Well the only problem with that is the bin men will come in four days and take the crap away and the “Clean UP Crew” will have nothing to clean up,

LDCRO: Well there’s nothing we can do to get them out faster

Me: Well can I ask for a sign to be put up to warn people off dumping

LDCRO: We dont do those signs

Me: But you do, I’ve seen them and they say Liverpool City Council on the bottom of them

LDCRO: Yes but you jsut cant ask for them you have to get the local councillor toask for it

Me: So I have to ask the councillor to ask you put the sign up….

Anyhow I’ve emailed all three of my local councillors, Frank, Richard and Louise and to date Ive had a response from the ever efficient Ms Baldock. eho has told me a local coucil official will be contacting me.

One last thing, and this is to do with how used you can get to something whenits there all the time. Taking my latest archival pictures of the dumped crap I noticed that all this time there has been a huge pile of rubbish (see photo) stuck behind a fence which is part of old bakers. Luckily this part of the side of my house is in the New Deal for Communities so I have asked the C7 Wardens to look into it.

Joyce, why did you go and do it………

Joyce’s handy work-or why kensington is still shit

I got back today and someone has decided to dump bags and bags of rubbish next to my home.

I live at the end of a terrace of houses and we have a security gate and fence to stop people going around the back and stealing all our worldly goods. We also have wheelie bins.

Its dead simple really, you are supposed to put all your rubbish in the wheelie bin, put it outside the night before the binmen come around (in my case Sunday Night) and sometime Monday you take your wheelie bin back into your house. Simple innit.

For a while it was the Polish people in the flats at the end. This was understandable in some respects, maybe they operate differently over there, maybe a Stalinist single state have a more laissez faire attitude to dumping rubbish, I doubt it but maybe it was because the bin collection and society in general in Poland is so strict that being “over here” made them feel liberated and free to dump wherever they liked. The fact they were piggy backing on my WIFI broadband didn’t endear them to me either.

Anyhow after many notes through the door (some in English some in Polish), phone calls to the council, and the threat of a Pogron, they suddenly stopped……success I thought.

So Poles apart it is obviously far too complicated, don’t know whether it’s because they can’t put stuff in the big purple wheelie bin, can’t physically wheel the bin or don’t know the days of the week.

But obviously doing this simple task is beyond their mental capabilities. I would never normally say people were naturally stupid but it is obvious that these people are just that, stupid. The only other explanation is that they are lazy, but it would take the same effort to wheelie bin it as it does to dump it.

They are stupid for doing it, but they are even more stupid because they leave their addressed mail in the bags.

So if Joyce Guilsh of 25 Romer Road, kensington, Liverpool l6 6DH would like to step up and receive “the most stupidest and inconsiderate neighbour” award, then it’s waiting for you, in Liverpool City Council’s environmental health department.

Again Nice one Joyce!