Thread 20 - TalkLair: "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness; that is life"

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous Thread 19)

Britain swelters in yet another heatwave.

In the TalkLair, all the curtains are closed against the blazing sun as the denizens lurk like creatures of the night... or maybe we are creatures of the night. But rest assured, despite our scary fangs, the denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Seems quite sensible to me @DeanElderberry - when you can’t face cooking and you’re struggling to eat anything, something very calorie-dense is perfect.

Buckle in for this one! MrG (84, with Alzheimer's) has long had puffy lower eyelids with ingrowing eyelashes. This sometimes annoys him but is sorted out with eye-drops/eye baths. He complained about it (2 years ago) to the optometrist and she referred him to Ophthalmology, who finally saw him a couple of months ago.

The consultant was very full of himself (and, from the look of him, very full of botox) and came up with three options: carry on as we were, botox as a temporary solution repeatable every 6 months or so, or surgery. He was quite triumphant when I said that my choice would be the first one and he was able to announce that as I don't have a health-and-welfare power of attorney, HE would decide and HE decided on the third option. This is apparently called a "best interests" decision.

Nothing happened until last week, when we got an appointment for a pre-surgery phone call. So I made an appointment with our very sane GP who looked at the problem, rolled his (own) eyes, agreed that MrG would be unable to not rub his eyes and dislodge the stitches. and suggested that I should call the consultant's secretary and have a word. He also said that if they still insisted on doing it, I should tell them I wouldn't be bringing him in or taking him home.

So I spoke to his secretary, who was 100% sympathetic and said "Hang on ... I see he has booked a 90 minute slot under local anaesthetic and discharge as soon as that wears off." We agreed that the man is an idiot.

It doesn't fill you with faith, does it?

It did fill me with gratitude for the sanity of our GP (who knows his patients well) and of the consultant's secretary (who clearly knows her boss).

I've never come across a consultant that stupid before.

If you're looking to boost your faith in health care professionals, to be fair, I don't think MN is your ideal reading. The few, minor interactions I have had (thus far!) with the NHS have all been very satisfactory, so I feel I should count myself doubly fortunate.

Ha! One of the things I learned in Gorizia (Italy) was that if you had a cardio issue, you needed to get yourself to Udine, which is world-class. But if you had a stroke, Trieste was the place to go!

I would basically say that if you're in East Kent, it may be worth a trip to France.

I might forward that advice to my DS, who lives in Kent. And also the stuff I learnt on another thread: if your kids are sick, don't take them to the doc's yourself, get your DH to take them; he'll get much better results.

Sorry to hear about MrG @Gonners . Thank goodness you managed to head that one off at the pass.

This makes for entertaining reading.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/further_education/5581007-is-it-normal-for-parents-to-be-so-involved-at-uni?

I would have shrivelled up and DIED OF EMBARRASSMENT if my parents had behaved like that. Instead, they went off for a lovely nostalgic walk (they'd met at the same uni) and came back with sticky buns so we could all have tea together.

Hi Kuc, by co-incidence, our refugee girl has been learning Korean for several months. I only found out the other day, as Mum comes down for an hour sometimes, when daughter does an online English course and I asked,

"English lesson?"

I think my mum may have driven me to university at the start of my first term and again at the start of second year but that was the limit of her involvement really.

I do remember people’s dads coming in to help install work in my final year at art school though. I was surprised to discover that not having a dad would suddenly matter in my 30s but I borrowed one from a friend so it all worked out fine in the end.

I don’t remember my parents being involved at all other than taking me there at the beginning of my first two years and possibly picking me up at the end of them. I got married just before the beginning of my third year and I think we were on our own after that. The last time I saw my lovely dad was at my graduation ceremony - he was so delighted and proud. There were only two of us who got firsts in my course that year and alphabetically my name came before the other guy’s, so it was at the top of the list. He carried a copy of it around with him! Sadly he died of a heart attack only a couple of months later, at the age of only 58.

When I went to Singapore for A-levels, I was put on a train with one suitcase. That was a "soft landing" though, as there was a whole cohort of us, we were supported by the previous year's cohort who really helped us to settle in at the beginning, and obviously it was very similar in language and culture. We didn't have internet back then, so I'd write home to my parents and friends occasionally and there was one phone in the hostel that could be used in emergencies.

When I came to the UK for my degree, I was put on an aeroplane with one suitcase. My parents had been persuaded to get a modem and a computer, plus most of my friends had discovered email by this time. Even so, we still mostly wrote letters. I remember feeling awfully lost and lonely and bewildered at time, especially my first winter. But the experience can't have traumatised me that much, seeing as I'm still here several decades later.

My mum drove me to some university interviews, because our local station had 1 train an hour and didn't go anywhere useful without multiple changes (apart from Cambridge, which she also drove me to because she fancied a day out there). But I was just dropped somewhere in the correct city and left to it. Once I started I got a lift with luggage on day one of the year and the last day for years 1 and 2. Year 3 was furnished and right next to Euston station, so no lift.

These days MrBint's place has almost as many tours and settling in sessions for parents as it does for students.

We went out this afternoon to our local indy cinema to see Pressure, which is basically about the weather for the D-Day landings but has an excellent cast and was surprisingly engaging!

The ulterior motive for this was to avoid a phone call from the arrogant Mr Cutting, who was scheduled to ring for a "pre-something-or-other assessment". Sure enough, we came home to 2 missed calls on MrG's mobile (which I had told him to leave at home) and 2 on the landline. I don't know what his next move will be, but await it with interest. As his secretary promised to tell him we'd said no (and I believe her), perhaps he'll turn up at the door, scalpel in hand? The NHS has already texted to ask why he "missed his appointment" and I answered something or other - probably "other" ... that he wasn't aware he had an appointment. This is true, as I assumed it had been cancelled.

I really have had enough of this.

Excellent avoidance skills.

If further measures are needed, you could try hiding in a herring barrel like Katherina von Bora. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_von_Bora I'd have paid more attention in history lessons if they'd told us about things like this rather than just the nailing posters to doors

Yeeha! Harry the Tree Man and his sidekicks came today and cut back all the bushes and (formerly) small trees in our garden which had gone absolutely berserk over spring and summer. I told them to really go for it, and they did. Obviously at the moment it looks a bit tragic, but at least you can see the wood for the trees - sorry about that! - and if anything doesn't survive, that's fine. The chap who does the garden (formerly finance director of a well-known PLC, now blissfully happy) will be here next week to tidy up a bit. I have very little interest in gardening, so may just give him a free hand.

Harry the Tree Man looks about 40-ish and so was very probably named after the prince of that name, poor chap.

Heh! I am likewise no gardener, and I could do with a Harry to deal with my monstrous hedge, which seems to need trimming on an hourly basis. And that's just to get out of the back door!

The answer to your problem, moto, is to wander around the neighbourhood and knock on the door of anyone whose hedges look less than uncontrolled. The woman across the side-road (we live on a corner) has her back garden trees sorted out from time to time - they also sort out a very decorative flowering creeper that tends to engulf her roof. So although I didn't know her, I knocked on her door. We bonded over the fact that her next-door neighbour had died unexpectedly. This was a very elderly woman I only spoke to twice - once out of courtesy to tell her she'd put out the wrong bin (she didn't believe me) and once when she came round to complain about parking (we don't have a car).

Gosh, I said, how sad that Mary's dead, and by the way, who does your heavy garden work?

Nice segue there @Gonners :-)

I am very much enjoying the looking after neighbours' suitcases thread.

Hah, I just marked that for Watching because I'm now desperate for the explanation

@Gonners MrG’s experience with the arrogant ophthalmologist sounds like a total nightmare. By contrast, the absolute best NHS experience here was the no nonsense retinal therapy unit at Moorfields when my mum needed treatment for macular degeneration. Every decision seemed to be about what was best for the patient and if that meant finding a winding path through the rules then so be it.

The explanation was brilliant and utterly mad!