au suivant, au suivant....

I've been doing my injections now for a little over five years.  That's more than 250 times that I have gone through the weekly ritual of mixing the Avonex in its little vial with the distilled water in the syringe, screwed on the huge scary needle and shoved the whole thing into the thigh muscle of one of my legs.

I've never missed a week.  Occasionally, I will forget one evening, but I have so far always remembered the next day.  Mostly. I inject myself on a Tuesday night.  I'm not supposed to vary that day by more than a day or so either side, so unless I'm travelling or something like that, I'll just try to stick to a Tuesday because it just seems easier not to keep shifting it about.  There's no real logic behind picking that day, only that it's the day I had my appointment at the hospital where the MS nurse showed me how to do it and off I went.

It's not that difficult and I've injected myself across the world, the most memorable time probably being sat outside a tent in Etosha National Park in Namibia, the same day that we had been almost supernaturally lucky and seen an astonishing array of animals up-close, including a leopard from about 2m.

I think it's fair to say that I've got used to the whole process.  I'm supposed to alternate legs every week, and in the beginning I used to take each box of four syringes and write "1 - L", "2 - R", "3 - L", "4 - R" on the packs so I would always remember.  I don't bother any more.  Now I just try and work out which leg I used last week by the bruising the injection often leaves.  I suppose I have to plan a bit more now too: I have to remember to carry my doctor's letter if I'm taking syringes onto a plane (cabin baggage only as the water in the syringe might freeze in the hold), I have to arrange to take delivery of the drugs (which are quite valuable and get couriered to me), and I have to make sure I have enough.  The NHS has been amazing.  Each jab is worth several hundred quid, and they usually give them to me in boxes of four, but when we were away in 2010, they actually gave me about four months supply in advance to take to the southern hemisphere.... a little bag that was probably worth more than everything else we had between us in our campervan.

By all accounts, I'm one of the lucky ones and I tolerate the injection well.  Lots of people experience side-effects that are so bad that they stop taking the drug altogether as they would rather face the possible consequences of their MS.  For me, I take some paracetamol, some ibuprofen and inject myself at night so I can sleep through the worst.  Occasionally I get a headache, and the next day I often wake up feeling as though someone is pushing me back down into the mattress, but apart from that, I just get on with things.  It's a part of my normal routine.  It's no big deal.

Except that, really it is.

I start thinking about my next injection at some point around Sunday evening.  I don't really like injecting myself very much, and the thought of doing it starts to creep into my thoughts several days before the actual injection.  I don't like to have too much planned on the night of an injection, and I often find exercise a bit of a struggle the day after because I simply don't have the energy.  In fact, I can  often feel the damage where the needle has been, deep in my thigh muscle, with every step I take as I go out running over the next week, and the following week the pain is in the other leg.  From start to finish, the injection process only takes me a couple of minutes, but there's always a slight hesitation as I hold the needle, poised, above my leg.  I know from experience that it's best to give it a bit of a run-up so that it goes into your muscle before you've really had a chance to think about it, but my brain always applies the brakes and I end up pushing it in slowly.  Sometimes, I hit a nerve and jerk straight out, having to start the whole process again; sometimes I'll scratch a vein and start to bleed; sometimes it's weirdly hard to push the plunger down, as if something is blocking the end of the needle.

Then it's done.  I mop up, put the syringe into a sharps bin and move on with my life.  In my head, the countdown to the next one has already begun.

Actually, is this just a middle class problem?  I have MS, but I'm relatively symptom free, I get supplied with an expensive drug free of charge and have it couriered to me, I tolerate it well and have relatively few side-effects.  What the hell have I got to be complaining about?

everyone seems to know the score....

I've been very much enjoying the magic of the World Cup over the last few days.  Global coverage and the financial muscle of the big European teams means that there aren't many players we don't know, but there's still something undeniably magical about this event.  We've been having sweepstakes and prediction competitions at work (I've variously drawn Ecuador, Ghana and Algeria, so I'm not expecting much of a return there) and it's great to get home to watch a game with my tea.  I'm not even that bothered about how England do.  Yes, of course it would be great if we managed to string a few performances together and had a bit of a run in the competition.... but I've been watching England for long enough to know not to expect that.

One thing has been bothering me though: the cost.  When the UK was awarded the 2012 Olympics, there was non-stop moaning for several years about how much the games were costing us to run.  Much of that moaning disappeared when the event was such an enormous success, but the fundamental truth remained: how could we spend that much money (around £9bn) on something so frivolous when our economy is in recession and so many people are genuinely struggling to make ends meet?

It's much more incongruous in Brazil.  Yes, the size of their economy has now overtaken that of the UK and they are now something like the sixth largest economy in the world, but how many slums do you see on the outskirts of major British cities to compare with the favelas in Brazil?  In a population of 200m people, the average annual salary is something less than £5000.  The average salary in the UK is £26,500... but I'd wager the poorest person in the UK is substantially better off than the poorest person in Brazil.

So how can they justify an expenditure of $11bn on a World Cup (with billions more money to be spent staging the 2016 Rio Olympic Games)?  That's approximately equivalent to one whole year of the cost of Brazil's welfare programme, the bolsa familia.  A whole year.  I know that football is a religion to the people of Brazil, and I'm sure that they will look back on this tournament the way that we Brits look back on the 2012 Olympics.... well, they will if they win, anyway.... but wouldn't more people benefit from the welfare payments and a direct reduction in poverty and hardship?

The study above, published this spring, suggests that the Brazilian people viewed the World Cup with similar scepticism to public perception of the 2012 Olympics before the Queen parachuted into the Olympic Stadium with James Bond and all bets were off.  Now that the tournament has started, I'm sure the host nation will forget all that and just focus on the football.  It's perhaps worth noting at this point that South Africa, hosts of the 2010 World Cup, recouped less than 10% of the cost of putting on the tournament (about $2bn.... a number that highlights quite how much money Brazil are spending on this tournament and how it's foolish to think they will make much of it back.

Thinking about these numbers makes me feel uneasy.  The World Cup is brilliant, and for all that us English like to sing about football coming home, Brazil is the spiritual home of the game... but how can a country like Brazil support this in the face of such poverty amongst so many of its population?  We'll sit at home drinking beer and hoping England don't embarrass themselves, and the in-no-way-corrupt executives at FIFA will sit in their marble and lapis luzuli encrusted HQ in Switzerland (or their luxury hotels in Brazil) and count their backhanders, but what of the legacy?  This may yet be the best World Cup ever (even as the Mexico hold the hosts to a 0-0 draw as I speak)... but at what cost?  Is it really worth it?  Aren't we better than this?  Can we really, honestly say that the money couldn't be better spent?

Middle class guilt, right?  Written as I watch a game from the comfort of my own home.  Never mind, I'm sure the 2018 World Cup in Russia and the 2022 tournament in Quatar will be both be humanitarian blockbusters where money will be purely secondary to football and the advancement of mankind.... right?  Right?

only words....

Someone called me a spastic in the office the other day.  She was referring to my inability to come out and join them for a run by saying that "I was a bit spasticated".  It would be going too far to say that I was shocked by the choice of words, but I was certainly a little surprised.  I don't think anyone has called me that since I was at school.

Of course, back then, being called a "spaz" or a "joey", usually accompanied by the appropriate facial expression, was entirely commonplace.  It's all Blue Peter's fault, of course:

"In 1981, the last year of his life, Joey Deacon was featured on the children's magazine programme Blue Peter for the International Year of the Disabled. He was presented as an example of a man who achieved a lot in spite of his disabilities. Despite the sensitive way in which Blue Peter covered his life, the impact was not as intended. The sights and sounds of Deacon's distinctive speech and movements had a lasting impact on young viewers, who quickly learnt to imitate them. His name and mannerisms quickly became a label of ridicule in school playgrounds across the country".

No kidding.

I have no idea if it's true, but the story goes that the Spastic Society changed their name to Scope to try and escape the playground association, but all that happened is that subsequent generations of schoolchildren simply belmed at their mates and said "Scope" instead of "Spastic" at them.

Kids, eh?

I don't know if it's simply because I'm older or if we actually live in more enlightened times, but, on the whole, this kind of casual bigotry is far less commonplace than it used to be.  Back in the day, we were just kids and we didn't really know any better, but language is important and words can hurt.  The elimination of this kind of casual, unknowing prejudice from most people's everyday vernacular is an entirely good thing.  After the huge success of the Paralympics, it seems entirely possible that the average person's understanding of disabilities like cerebral palsy is much greater than it used to be, and surely we're all the better as a tolerant, accepting society for that... or at least heading in the right direction.

That said, I actually used the word "flid" in conversation last week too.  It's a word that I haven't used in more than 25 years, but one that we used to use all the time to mock someone for being a bit of a weakling.  I was talking about a colleague who always seems to be getting colds, and I joked to someone else that, "back at school, we used to call someone like that a flid".

No sooner had the words dropped out of my mouth than I realised, probably for the first time ever, the derivation of that word and I felt thoroughly ashamed of myself.  I hadn't used the word in years, but every time I had used it, I had been completely ignorant of what it actually meant.  Yeah.  Ignorant.  There's no better way of putting it.  I didn't know any better.  Well, now I do know and I won't be using it again.  Once in two decades is still once too often.

Words have power.  Choose them wisely.

your ladbroke grove looks turn me on, yeah...

Middle class problems, part LVIII.

When we first got our cat, the RSPCA rescue shelter advised us that it was always better to keep her on dry food and not to get her started on wet food.  Fine by us.  We went to the supermarket and picked up a big bag of kibbles, assuming that all kibbles were more or less the same.

Fast forward a couple of months, and we were dropping our dear little treasure off at the cat hotel for the first time.  When asked what we fed her, the crazy cat lady who runs the shelter/rescue/cattery told us off in no uncertain terms for scrimping on the kibble we bought.  Supermarket own brand, it seems, is definitely not as healthy for a cat as more expensive brands like Hills Science Plan or Royal Canin.  Stung, and feeling like bad cat owners, not only have we always fed the cat the most expensive dried food since then, we even go to the trouble to buy several different types and to create her a custom kibble mix.  She prefers it fresh, you know.  She can tell.

Anyway.  Here's the middle class problem:

Some empty boxes have been appearing around our office, with a plea for people to put in some sort of cat food that will then be collected together and taken to a local cat rescue so that all the poor little rescue cats can have plenty of food over Christmas.

As a cat-tragic household, we were always going to be making a donation.  On my very next trip to the supermarket, I made my way down the pet food aisle.  I don't have to do a great deal of thinking when shopping for my own cat, other than to make sure it's all organic, fair trade goodness for my little princess.  This time though, I hesitated.  Did I really want to spend £12 on a bag of kibbles to donate, or would it be better for everyone if I just spent £5 buying two big bags of supermarket own brand?

After a moment's consideration, I went for quantity over quality.  Partly this was because the brands that I usually buy aren't on sale in the supermarket and I would have to make a stop off at Pets at Home on the way back home, but mostly it was because I thought that rescue cats probably won't be that fussy and more is better.

I've been feeling guilty about this decision ever since.  I can't help but feel bad about the fact that I have tacitly accepted that a rescue cat is not as important as my own cat.  The rescue are presumably grateful for the free food that will enable them to look after more cats for longer, but meanwhile I'm wringing my hands about the whole thing and agonising that I didn't buy them Royal Canin  Poor little mites.

Ridiculous, but true.

---

In other cat related news, my wife has been pining somewhat for our cat to sleep on the bed a bit more.  Our cat goes through definite phases of where she likes to sleep: at this time of year she likes the beanbag in the living room that is pressed up against the radiator, but she also likes a good lap and has been known to spend time on the nice, scrunchy duvet on our bed (especially when she's dirty and wet and we have clean bed linen).   Like any self-respecting cat, she won't be put, of course, and has to choose to hop on of her own free will.  Of late, she hasn't been hopping on.

...except when C. was in Monte Carlo last week, when the cat made a point of curling up on the bed and having a snooze against my legs.  Now that C. is back, she's stopped.

My wife is starting to take this personally.