Humour – Bill Leithhead's Personal Blog

Me and a rubber mask.

Last Monday night I did a Sleep Lab. That’s where you sleep overnight in a hospital suite, where you are wired up by dozens of wires – especially from the skull – for the different patterns of brain waves during sleep- and also over the body, to pick up other muscle movement. And you get monitored by a nurse in an observation room. They can see you by infrared light camera, plus via all of those wires. They go through the wall to a computer, and you are watched by nurse. They do this to a group of people, each in separate rooms.

That goes on all night. In a later appointment, the sleep specialist discusses the ways you went into various levels (4 levels) of sleep, plus REM sleep. As well, snoring is monitored, and the breathing pattern. They’re looking for the occasions where the soft palate collapses, blocking the airway and causing cessation of breathing – that’s sleep apnoea. As well, they monitor the level of oxygen in the blood.

All of this is in order to check my performance using the CPAP (Continuous Positive Airways Pressure) device that I’ve been using most of the time since 2004. Yes – that’s a long time! I’ve been using a CPAP pump which delivers slightly pressurized air through my nose to my lungs when I sleep. It was set at 9 cmH2O, meaning the pressure of a column of water 9cm high. The current doctor, whom I met when a different illness put me into hospital, picked me up as a “likely customer” when I was using the CPAP device in hospital. He does sleep labs. I hadn’t been checked for just 13 years! So I did a sleep lab!

It was OK – I sleep well with my own mask, which covers only my nose, into which the pressurized air is delivered at 9 cmH2O.

BUT … they found that to prevent the collapse of my soft palate, they needed to increase the pressure from 9 cmH2O up to 15 cmH2O.

BUT again … they found that at that pressure, the air escapes from my mouth! That wasn’t happening previously, but is undesirable because it reduces the pressure applied to the soft palate .

HENCE .. they needed to use a different mask which cover my nose AND my mouth. That cost me the tidy sum of $280. The Sleep Lab itself cost me zilch – I suppose because I have a high level of private hospital cover. SO … they gave me a free sleep lab, with free supper and breakfast, and close attendance of a nurse during the night.

Here’s the problem! They adjusted up the pump pressure of my own pump to 15 cm. —————–

BUT … when I tried on my expensive mask the first night at home, it was hopeless! The pressure was tending to blast it off my face, making farting sounds. I just couldn’t use it!! What to do???

I found that I didn’t have any instructions in my booklets with the REMSTAR Plus pump from 2004 which enabled me to reset the pressure back to 9 cmH2O, so that at least I could operate at a pressure I was used to. There had to be some trick that enabled the nurse to change the pressure of my own pump back and forth.

Google! That’s the trick. I soon found that I could get into the control settings ONLY IF I held the unplugged it, and held down all 3 of the buttons it has, then plugged it in again! BINGO!

So far, I’ve had a night where I’ve set it from 9 cm to 11 cm, but even that modest increase tends to cause my new mask to leak at the edges, with those “farting” noises! I could only sleep if I tied the mask down quite strongly against my face. So that was last night. not a lot of fun. I got to sleep about 1 am, woke up for the toilet at 2:30 am, then woke up again at 5 am, to a freezing house. I toileted again, and gave away the mask and pump for the night.

Not sure what I’ll do tonight. Might fiddle with the adjustments and loosen them up a bit to see if I can work out some position on my face that sits right without pressure escaping with those peculiar noises. You can’t sleep like that, and neither can my wife! These masks are sold all over the world – surely there’s some way of using them properly!

Perhaps I’ll Google onto a user’s group … good idea!

More to come.

Well, that was a bloody useless attempt at a new start, wasn’t it?

Almost 3 weeks have passed since I started a new train of blogs. And now I’ve just run out of energy and ideas. But I’ve been overwhelmed with all sorts of things to do around the house, and am plugging away at HTM/CSS code towards the display of all sorts of good stuff from our trip from Melbourne to Cairns and back in 10 weeks.

But I’m getting there, and am sure it will be worth it. I’m looking forward to a month’s caravanning in Tasmania starting October 19th. Any tips about what to see? That would be much appreciated.

Our packing is a bit of a farce, but we’ll get there.

Well, it’s 10:30 pm on Tuesday night. We leave tomorrow before lunch time. Glenyce is standing staring at our double bed covered with clothing and she can’t decide what to pack, because we have to cope with the cold and the heat – well – warmth, at least.

I keep telling her “We’ll just buy anything you need in Cairns!”, but the uncertainty continues. I’ve got all my stuff in the caravan, or selected already and sitting in any of 3 drawers in the family room. Being a male makes it easier, for some reason I dare not even broach. Don’t go there, guys!! About 10 shirts, 4 or 5 sets of trousers, one set of shorts, 8 pairs of socks and 8 underpants. Plus 3 jumpers – one good, one OK, and one a bit tattered and good for driving, and setting up the van on arrival at wherever we are. And one pair of bathers, togs, swimmers or cozzies (whatever), which Glenyce informs me the elastic has perished. “I’ll buy them up there”, I said.

But I also need them for the four beaut pools at the caravan park in Moree, which pipes in heated Artesian water to the pools and mixes colder water in to give several pools at temperatures up to 39 degrees Celsius. The latter is very tiring, I remember from about 6 years ago when we went through. It’s quite fun there. Glenyce tells me the bathers will last through Moree. Of course, I could pack either of the ridiculous budgie smugglers I have from some years back when I passed through some phase or other – if I want to trigger a divorce! But my gut would now make me look like a muffin. It’s bad enough with the perished bathers I already possess.

And – Oh God! – the medications – making sure we’ve both have enough of the requisite pills we take for various “medical conditions”. We’ve both got written statements about our disorders, and the prescribed medications, plus enough repeat prescriptions to last up to 10 weeks on the road.

I hope to wean myself off the Temazepam I need to sleep well. I only take two at most, usually only one. But these benzodiazepines are somewhat addictive, and it’s better to not be addicted. We both find that caravanning makes us healthier. We’ll return fitter, with fewer pains, and less weight!!! But as soon as I walk into the house, the post-nasal drip will return. I have no idea what causes it, but I’m allergic to something in the house. I’m not selling the house just yet.

Now it’s 11 pm the night before we leave for the big trip. I have all of my data (over 800 GB) on the main desktop here at home transferred onto two 2 Terabyte hard drives, but not all, so right now I need to arrange the final backup of all of the Outlook emails (back to 2007!) and Contacts, plus all of the Internet Explorer ‘Favorites’ and ‘Cookies’, so that I can load them en route into the laptop and be ready for the road.

Wish us luck as we wave goodbye soon to downtown Glen Waverley, chock-a-block with Asian restaurants and Asian groceries. A most fascinating place now, too – it was rather boring before they started coming in!

Zài Jiàn, I recall it is in Mandarin. Or if you like: 再见.

“Goodbye”, I think it means. Someone will correct me!

Final packing will be a rush in and out in the Melbourne wind and showers

Hi everyone! Coming up to Tuesday now, the day before we leave for the first leg of our Cairns trip on Wednesday. They forecast the possibility of snow in the suburbs, so that would be novel for us. On Wednesday’s leg we only drive from Glen Waverley north-east to Wangaratta, via the Hume Highway. it’s a leisurely drive of about 4 hours, including a lunch stop at a roadhouse.

We always stay in caravan sites, with power, for the laptop, for camera recharging, and especially for the electric blankets and fan heater on the floor, which soon warms up the van if it’s cold – and we will indeed get cold weather, especially overnight, until we’re well up into Queensland. The blanket heat is needed for our arthritic spines and sciatica, and the pain control is helped by lots of codeine (Panadeine Forte) and also Lyrica, a medication for neurogenic pain, which is exactly the nature of the sciatic pain in our legs. Plus a few other pills for hypertension and other boring stuff …

The purpose is to visit Ron and Mary Hammersley, Glenyce’s brother and sister-in-law in Wangaratta. They’ve been rather ill lately, and in their 80s, so we’ll have a good family natter and go out for dinner. Then on Thursday we’ll get an early start – about 9 am departure – that’s early for us. We’re driving from Wangaratta to Forbes – about 440 km, and that’s about my limit. After that I get severe back pain and also get dangerously sleepy, helped by No-Doz tablets (caffeine). They do help to get extra mileage, but they’re not really very strong so I take about 4 at once! I don’t do that all that often. I have driven 900 km per day on several occasions, and I don’t recommend it! Glenyce does drive with the caravan, but only small amounts of the time.

Our overnight stays (at least one night) will be in sequence Wangaratta, Forbes, Coonabarabran, Moree, then perhaps St George, and then we’ll vary it, but will include Emerald (Qld), Charter’s Towers, and after 14 days travel we’ll enter Cairns on July 31st to settle in for 15 days in the beach-side caravan park at Palm Cove, north of Cairns , either coming down on that day from inland in the Atherton Tablelands, or via the coastal road.

So it’ll be about 14 days of enjoyable travel in the Australian inland, starting from the Newell Highway, then varying it, especially to traverse through the Carnarvon Gorge country. We want to get well north into Queensland as soon as we can, in a business-like but leisurely fashion! Keep reading ….

Bill and Glenyce’s Caravan Trip to Cairns, 2016 – and blogs following our lives after that …….

PLEASE NOTE: Please check the <—– LH SIDE among the butterflies for further Recent Posts.

Hello and welcome from Bill and Glenyce Leithhead, from Glen Waverley, SE suburb of cosmopolitan Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria, Australia. This ‘sticky’ Header was used in 2016 as part of a Blog, recording our caravan journey as a round trip from Melbourne to Cairns and back, from July 13th, to between the middle and the end of September. We aimed to escape the cold southern winter into the warmth of the tropical northern Queensland dry season, and to see more of this wonderful country of ours. It was an excellent trip, but too tiring to keep up the Travel Blog, so I ditched it. But I’ve left this part in.

And so our lives continue on … we both turn 80 in 2018, but try to keep going in the face of arthritis and other challenges to our well-being ….

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Performance anxiety at a party?

OK , It’s my our 50th wedding anniversary coming up, the symbol for which, we are told by the powers that be, is Gold for 50 married years. The actual date is Dec 11th, but tomorrow we’re having a Golden Wedding celebration, with about 50 people in a nice little venue with a catered lunch and free drinks for all.

Except not free yours truly of course! My do, my pockets. Really happy to do so, and never thrown something like this before, so I’m a bit nervous, although I’ve played in bands for many of these in the distant past, when I did play the drums. OK – really nervous. Like – something will go wrong. I’ll forget people’s names. I’ll make a fool of myself in the speech. I’ll drop my dinner. Spill my drinks

My family’s done everything – venue, invitations, RSVPs, arrangements, decorations, and so on. but I’m still nervous.

Y’know, it’s as though I’m getting married all over again. Ridiculous, of course. I’m a perfectly competent 77 year old man with an academic career behind me, three successful children, four grandkids, and so on.

I’m taking a bottle of Valium with me.

It’s to do with music. Many of the invitees are musicians, all of whom I know and with whom I’ve played many times. I’m nervous that I couldn’t invite all that I know, because there are limits, and I had to make choices. I’m worried that someone will feel left out. God, this is annoying!!

And I’m taking my digital keyboard and amp and stuff, and I’ve got a drummer mate who’s going to all the trouble to bring his kit, and a bass player, and others with instruments and yadayadayada! And we’ll play our jazz and ballads. Some will sing, and we’ll have a bloody good time, as a matter of fact.

But I’m still nervous. There’s always the Valium!

I’ll make mistakes on the piano. I won’t know the tunes and feel like an idiot!! None of this will actually happen, but I’m afraid it will and that’s bad enough. In fact I won’t need the Valium, because I’ll do well, and everyone will have a great time. Lots of people there will never have heard me play at all, and certainly not the jazz stuff in which I’m involved, and that will be quite an experience for them. And me.

All of the musos are characters, and are very entertaining, and really good players and singers. The musos like to jam, too. And this is for people who know nothing about jazz and so on. But that’s why I’ve invited them all there at once, so they can all meet each other. The showbiz group can meet the family, and the family can meet the fungi people, and the family can meet people I went to school with, and the latter will meet some of the whole damn bunch of friends we’ve been so lucky to acquire as we pass through our lives.

I’m nervous, too, because I wonder whether people will mingle easily, and introduce each other, because I certainly won’t have time to. And I ended that with a preposition, which you’re not s’posed to do but I don’t care.

And I’m selfish, because I haven’t even mentioned my dear wife yet. but she’s watching me type this, and if she hadn’t, I might have forgotten about her completely.

Because performance anxiety is so self-centred, isn’t it?! Typical of me. Hopelessly self-centred. Narcissistic. Like all performers, probably.

And that’s OK.

But it’s OK. the day will be good. Nothing will go ‘wrong’, and if it does, it won’t matter. Because life is to be lived, and “is fired at us point blank”. My performance anxiety has gone now, because I feel so much better with Glenyce by my side. (Can’t find a marriage photo on this computer!) And isn’t that what a Golden Wedding anniversary is all about?

I know the anxiety will be there again tomorrow. It’s a permanent companion. Maybe, a good friend.

Bring the day on! Carpe diem!!!

Comfort? – or Art?

This article shows design-winning seats implemented in a so-called micro-park in London. I don’t know about you, but those seats look damned uncomfortable. To me, it looks as though it would corrugate your derrière. And speaking as a 77 year old chappie with broad-based arthritis, those backs would ultimately be painful.

If so, what is it that makes otherwise sensible people be overcome by the cute or artistic side of things rather than comfort? Fashion gazumps common sense. I’ve watched this all my life – whether it’s clothing, hairdos, furniture, appliances, or garden seating.

Is it just me??