Catching up with 2018 - Part three

Part Three

Not the best holiday ever

After returning home from Scotland, I started to suffer from oral thrush, a painful condition that firstly hurts and secondly ruins your sense of taste.  I went to the doctor and he prescribed a paste which your rub on the inside of your mouth.  That did very little apart from making the lack of taste worse.  Not only was it painful to eat, but everything tasted like recycled cardboard.  I was not eating much when as previously arranged The Cousin's Daughter (TCD) and Granddaughter (TCGD) arrived for a visit.    I was not so bad as to not make them welcome but after their visit I was feeling pretty low.    Whilst they were here, we took them to Westonbirt Arboretum.

They had recently, well at least since our last visit, introduced a treetop walkway and I was keen to see this.  As it turned out it was not exactly treetop height, but made for an interesting walk anyway.

After they had gone, I went back to the doctor and he prescribed a series of tablets, which started to work on the thrush but which removed any desire to eat altogether. By the end of the week, I was running out of energy and felt tired all the time.
Unfortunately we were going on holiday with the family in a few days.  This had been booked since last year and could not be easily cancelled since all three families had already paid for it and anyway, I would soon recover now the thrush was under control.

The Son (TS) and family were arriving from the USA and we needed to be able to transport five people and enough luggage for two weeks in North Wales, where we would be joining The Daughter and Son in Law (TD and TSIL). The trip would need both our cars and so I was needed to drive.  Since I was not improving, but as I believed, would start to improve when I finished my course of pills, we were not too concerned, but should I have not recovered by the start of the holiday, TBH organised a contingency plan.  This was that if I was still too ill to drive safely, she had asked TS if he would mind taking over the driving if it became necessary.  He still has his British passport, nationality and a British driving licence, and he agreed. In order for TS to drive my car, I added his name to my insurance and got extra cover for him to drive.
As the date of the start of our holiday approached, I grew weaker and weaker since I could not eat more than a spoonful of food at any one time without feeling thoroughly nauseous. I was not eating and I was still getting worse instead of better. We sincerely believed that once the course of pills was finished my appetite would come back. On the day we all set off for Wales, I was still showing no sign of recovery, so TBH insisted that TS drove, so off we went to Llandudno with TBH driving her own car and TS driving mine. The pills were the kind that the doctor insisted should be completed, but a few days into our holiday, the thrush had gone and so I stopped taking the pills and we waited to see if my appetite would come back.

We had booked a large house in Llandudno which could accommodate us all with room to spare. It was a lovely house and it was well equipped with an upstairs and downstairs living room both with TV.

The house we were staying in does not look huge from the front, but it has three stories with a large extension out at the back and provided really spacious accommodation for all eight of us

By half way through the first week, I had weakened so much that all sorts of other unpleasant effects started to join in. TBH took me to see a local doctor at Craig-y-don, a district in Llandudno with a rather familiar name. Familiar to me that is, because Craig-y-don was the name of my grandparent's house in England.  It had one of the longest gardens I have ever encountered and was a place of wonderful childhood memories for me and all my cousins on that side of the family.

 One of these extra symptoms I developed was hiccups. Before resorting to a doctor, we had tried every known cure for hiccups that we could think of, holding your breath, clapping hands over your ears, sipping from the wrong side of the cup, a spoonful of honey and several more. Annoyingly each remedy seemed to work, but only worked once, so each cure was temporary and later they would came back.   If you have never had hiccups from 4PM until 3AM, you have never lived.

One of the Craig-y-don doctors we saw suggested I drink regular and frequent sips of water to prevent the hiccups. This did work, so I spent the rest of the time in Wales with a water bottle close to hand and have done so more or less ever since. The water allowed me to go out in the car for rides and short visits, but I could still not walk too far and I experienced what it would be like to be a very elderly man, instead of just being an old man. What I had not realised at the time, was that several of my symptoms were caused by acid reflux, including the hiccups. When you are starving, your stomach still continues to generate acid, even though there is nothing for it to use it on and my stomach seemed to be doing this overtime.

 I was also much more susceptible to infections, so although the thrush had gone, I got an infected artery in my temple, earache and eventually a sinus infection that felt as if I had gone three rounds with a heavyweight champion.   All this time I did not go out much and most days stayed in the house trying to eat and listening to music, watching TV and generally lounging about waiting to get better so that I could join in with the others. This is where the upstairs living room TV proved useful. Going up stairs was a chore that I wanted to avoid if I could, so I spent much of my day in the upstairs living room or on my bed in the bedroom that was just opposite the living room.

My prison cell

 Before the advice to drink water regularly, I was reluctant to go out much and anyway, I did not particularly want to have a sudden and noisy bout of hiccups whilst in a public place.
 Although we did get out a bit, I ruined the holiday for TBH, who often stayed with me whilst the rest of the family went out and about.

 Some days we walked the half mile to the sea front, which was all I could manage in my weakened state, and sat on a seat on the sea front.

There I would sit on a bench and admire the scenery before giving up and going back to the house.

The North Shore

Two of the 'trips around the bay' boats

Coming back was more of a stagger than a walk and TBH said I looked as if I was drunk.
One particular day, I was able to walk as far as the West beach, something of a marathon for me at the time.

The West beach is less popular with the average Llandudno holidaymaker because it is undeveloped and has no amusements, chip shops or pier, but for me, it was a peaceful interlude where I could sit and look at something different from the inside of the holiday house.

Another day, TBH drove us both to Betwsy Coed.  We parked in a car park next to a rather spectacular church and walked via a cafe to the railway station.

The church at Betwsy Coed

One of the things that always springs to mind whenever I visit Betswy Coed is the film Zulu.  Some, but not all of the troops that made up the regiment were from Wales and during the film, in a quiet interlude before the Zulus attack, two troopers are on watch and one of them says something like 'Not good farmland here, too dry, not like Betswy Coed.'  For some reason, I have never forgotten that line.

Of course, like most 'historical' movies, they got a lot of the detail wrong.  They were at the time the 23rd Regiment of Foot, a Warwickshire regiment and did not sing Men of Harlech.  A few years after the battle they became the Welsh Borderers and then it became the regimental song and they were based in South Wales.  In Caernafon Castle there is a museum for the 24th Regiment of Foot, which later became the Welsh Fusiliers and in their museum there is reference to the battle of Rawks Drift and some mementos from the 23rd Foot. 

 I digress, so back to the main dialogue. 
On Betwsy Coed station platform were two sculptures supporting different charities.  One was an orangutan, made from rubbish collected from the sea, whilst the other was a rhino named Edith, made from a wire cage which was collecting bottle tops for recycling.

An orangutan made entirely of discarded fishing gear

Edith

 At Betwsy Coed station, running alongside the main line railway is a miniature railway which has  a loop of track running around the station grounds.   Naturally we took a ride along with the other children.

A long time after stopping the pills, my appetite started to return and eventually after experimenting with what I could and could not get down me, I found that I was able to eat a spoonful of mash with a portion of frozen boil-in-the-bag cod in parsley or butter sauce.

 On a diet of this I gradually got stronger, but by that time I had lost about 18kg and I had to go on a shopping trip in Llandudno to buy a new belt. My existing one had run out of holes for the buckle and so could not be tightened up enough to keep my trousers up.

One thing I did not discover until it was almost time to go home was that since my last visit to Llandudno, a number of statues on the theme of Alice in Wonderland had been erected and placed at various points around the town.  This is because Alice Liddell, the inspiration for Lewis Caroll's story character used to stay in Llandudno for her summer holidays.

 By the time we finished our holiday, I was starting to recover, but for some time after I was still very weak. I was really annoyed about this, because just before the holiday, owing to the rehabilitation exercise regime I had been going through after my heart attack, I had been fitter than I had been for several years and was going to show off by nonchalantly striding up the Great Orm or walking for miles, in fact I could do none of these things and missed out on at least four castles and a trip to Liverpool to see the Terracotta Army. Instead I was confined to barracks and had lost all that hard won muscle.

 The journey home was fairly uneventful, TS drove my car once more and we went back in convoy with TBH leading the way in her car. The roads were busy but not too bad, but knowing that the M6/M5 junction usually jams up, we decided it was worth the few pounds needed to use the Toll road which whilst slightly more busy than usual, was unlikely to become jammed. Whilst queuing in an orderly fashion at the tool booths, we were pushed out of line by someone who believed that owning a large Bentley entitled them to be first in any queue and peasants driving lesser vehicles beware.

The Dash cam makes everything look further away that it really is. 
This close encounter was close enough to alarm both of us

Although the motorways were flowing steadily, there was so much traffic that when we got to the services for a comfort break and a coffee, they need men in high viz jackets to control the parking, something I had never seen before.