Full Metal Wheelbarrow

But I appear to have failed to post here for Aeons.

In my defense I have been Rather Busy - Rob has been off work with a poorly eye and last week we finally got referred to the Royal Hallamshire hospital in Sheffield to have it looked at, the folk at Derby lacking the equipment to peer at it properly.

We saw a splendidly jovial Professor there on Thursday and were then sent to see a very nice surgeon and Rob was booked in to have a vitrectomy on the Friday with a checkup on Saturday morning. This basically means removing the jelly in the eye and is apparently fairly common.

Rob is now at home recovering with All The Eye Drops (4 different sorts, in varying doses) and pills, which make him very sleepy. We're now waiting for an appointment for the followup examination.

He can see better than before the operation though, despite on of the drops being the sort that dilates the pupil and blurs the vision.

Incidentally, when we were waiting at the hospital on Monday, Rob's mum and I were talking to one of the nurses and apparently one of the most common injuries they have to deal with at the hand unit is the aftermath of people trying to prise frozen beefburgers apart with a knife...

So please be careful of the beefburgers, folks!

Took Rob to the  hospital for his eye check up today. Unusually we were only there for about half an hour and were told he doesn't need to go back again, which is good. They still gave him the eye drops that mean he can't see worth a damn for most of the rest of the day though.

Feeling rather more myself today after Tuesday's minor operation.

Yesterday I was basically OK, but abandoned the idea of going out after a few minutes of sweeping leaves in the back garden left me really tired. Gentle pootling was the order of the day and I pottered around, helping Rob to put in a pipe to catch rainwater from the gutter and run it down to the back of the new flowerbed.

Today though, I went and delivered the letter from the hospital to my doctor and then strolled out to the farm shop at Woodhouses to buy some more flowers. After saying hello to the resident goats, I bought a tray of pinks and a tray of African marigolds and was followed home by a hoverfly desperate to stay with his beloved flower :-)

Here's the bed with new additions :-



Rob's pipe should be visible by the fence on the right of the picture.

I also bought a purple cauliflower, because I needed to spend a fiver to be able to use my card and besides, purple cauliflowers are cool. I can report though that they don't taste substantially different from white cauliflowers.

LJ appears to be sulking about crossposts at the moment, so my earlier post today about heading off to the hospital for my hysteroscopy didn't get there.

It was about as much fun as I'd expected (i.e. none) with added tediousness and waiting. But anyway I'm home now and not feeling too bad.

The ultrasound scan seemed to go OK. I was a bit concerned that the scan lady called in one of her colleagues and they were both pulling worried faces at the machine, but they assured me that this was because of the difficulty of interpreting the picture they were getting rather than because there were any horrors thereon. Apparently real ovaries and uteri don't always sit nicely in the exact places where the textbooks say they should, which can make reading the scan data a bit more difficult than you might expect.

Anyway, I was sent away after twenty minutes or so, with the needful ball of string to help me find my way back to the car park. I went a bit wrong en route and found a charity bookstall, which would have been good if they'd had any books  I wanted.

So then I did battle with the car park pay machine, which disdainfully rejected two of my pound coins, but accepted the others after I'd sworn at it volubly, and then trundled around to the other side of the roundabout whereon the hospital sits, to Aldi, where I bought Cake. And Lemon Meringue PIe.

I then came home to wait for the roof man, who arrived ten minutes early and declared we had not one displaced tile, but two broken ones, which needed little lead hats putting on them, which he could do now for fifty quid. I consulted Rob who agreed with me that this was a small price to pay for not having a leaky roof and the roof man went and fetched his two chums from the van, scooted up the ladder and fixed the tiles in about twenty minutes. Which, given the forecast for tonight seems like a Good Thing.