Getting stuff fixed

Hospital appointment this morning. I have a dodgy varicose vein in my left leg which has a nasty tendency to throb in bad weather. I saw a consultant a couple of months ago who poked and prodded me for a while and stuck some sort of microphone into my groin so I could hear blood swooshing where it didn't ought to be swooshing and recommended an operation to whip it out.

This was my first visit to the Day Surgery unit and in the end they just gave me loads of leaflets, weighed me, measured me (not quite tall enough for my weight apparently) and told me I'm going to be having my operation on the 20th of July.

Bum.

That's four days before my birthday and I had planned to take a week off the following week to go for a ride in Emma Kennedy's new car and see Richard Herring's new show but I don't know if I'm going to be capable of driving anywhere by then. On the plus side, Alicia will be on holiday with her mother that week so I don't have to worry about driving her to school or whatever.

I've never had an operation before, so I'm mildly anxious. I've seen enough episodes of Holby City to know that going in for a routine minor operation means I'm a certain to be diagnosed with some rare tropical disease of the leg and end up with blood squirting all over the grumpy surgeons gown before I end up having a pneumothorax or a subdural haematoma or worst of all in vf which is invariably fatal regardless of how many volts they pump through me.

Like I said, bum.

I had a call from the garage who had a replacement cd player in stock. The service guy assured me that it would take a mere 20 minutes to install but when I actually got to the garage that turned out to be all day before they could get the requisite circular tuit. I decided to get a bus home, and managed to just miss one that would have taken me all the way to Burncross so cue a twenty minute wait and a journey of nearly an hour to get home.

I did a bit of work in the afternoon in between trying to catch up with
email and usenet, and then got another bus back at ten to five. To quote a text from Alicia, 'this has got 2 b the hottest summer eva!' Stuck in a rattling bus full of sweaty people in 30 degree temperatures was not my idea of fun, but it was worth it to get my car back, stick the air con on full blast and crank up the new stereo for the drive home. Bliss.