23 February 2012
This morning I went off to the pain clinic to have the injection in my shoulder. Dr Mark Abrahams, the pain consultant, at Addenbrookes, carried out the .procedure. He managed to do with me sitting in my wheelchair. I can’t pretend that it was particularly pleasant or pain free, poking the needle about inside my shoulder trying to find a particular nerve. Following the shoulder he injected both hips with steroids which was not such a complicated procedure. As they must always tell you. possible side effects or reactions. I was a little alarmed when he said that very rarely they can puncture a lung and that if I felt particularly breathless towards the evening I should ring for an ambulance. Of course, the very idea made me more breathless as the evening went on, particularly as I had a bit of a pain in my chest, but, in the event, all was well. Apparently the pain in the shoulder might get worse for around one month, after which, if it has worked, it should substantially reduce the pain for a year or so.
It was such a beautiful day with a temperature around 17/18°C-,something like 12° above normal for this time of year – that when I returned in the ambulance, I went straight out into the garden and sat there for half an hour with a small cigar. Apparently where we live in, East Anglia, we have had the lowest rainfall for 100 years and face Hose bans in our garden this coming summer. Certainly, the weather seems to be topsy-turvy. The five day forecast for next Tuesday is for a cloudy & sunny and day of 15°C so I’m very tempted to go to the golf club for a drive around in my wheelchair and lunch.my old mates.
Readers might well remember that, some time ago, after the Smedley suicide in Dignitas Switzerland. I propounded the idea of a programme which explained the working of Hospices, the purposes of which is frequently misunderstood as being a place where you go to die. I put the idea to the producer of the original programme, Craig Hunter, who took the matter up with the BBC. When it was initially suggested, the BBC did not reject the idea out of hand,. I chased him up today and as he has not heard anything is undertaken to contact them again and hopefully let me know the outcome within a couple of weeks.
Regular readers will recall the weeks of hou-ha over removing the Dale farm, so-called’ travellers’ (see entries between September 2 011 and early February 2012). Therefore, you can imagine my horror when I learned that an application has been made for a permanent site on the back road no more than a mile or so from our house. I accept that these’ travellers’ have to live somewhere and that permanent sites should be made available for them but they should be limited in number, say no more than 10 caravans at the time, not 50 like Dale farm. I imagine there will be a local campaign against this proposal.
I assiduously avoid putting anything offensively critical or political on this blog. I get quite a lot of propaganda from the USA criticising their president, which I have never repeated. However, this current piece of propaganda spells out the cost of illegal immigration in America. I have been an advocate for some long time now on some sort of control on the number of people who are allowed to come here to work, even from the EU, with positive discrimination in favour of our own unemployed over these incomers. These figures , in the following note, on what it is costing America, may well be an object lesson to those who feel there should be a complete freedom of movement between countries and therefore no such thing as illegal immigration. One expects propagandists to exaggerate but even if these figures are anywhere near the truth. they are real eye-openers when it comes to the cost of illegal immigration. At least the author has given readers the opportunity of linking through to the original source of the statistics. Click here to see the cost to America and speculate on what it is costing us .