Success and reward

I did it! I gave the lecture and it was, well, sort of OK. I didn’t freeze, turn to jelly or have a panic attack. I didn’t get a round of applause either, nor any questions from the students, but no one fell asleep and I think they actually absorbed some information, and I count that as a pretty decent achievement for 8:30 on a Monday morning.

I hadn’t realized how much giving the lecture would take out of me. I was ratty for days before giving the lecture and drained for days afterwards. It was good to prove (mainly to myself) that I could do it, but considering the effort involved I’m not sure I’ll volunteer to do it again.

A few days later I had an appointment with My Neurologist. What to tell her? What to ask? Things have been on a more or less even keel for the past month or two. The L-dopa is not quite as effective as it was, sleeping is still less than perfect, but generally I am content enough. We adjusted the medication a bit so I now take a controlled release Sinemet (L-Dopa) at night which stops me waking myself up by twitching, and I still take a sleeping pill to combat the mild REM-sleep disorder. The combination seems to work fairly well for me.

Marie is more sceptical. I don’t leap out of bed in the morning, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I go to bed earlier and earlier, plus I take naps during the day - so I suppose I’m not that much fun to be around. Apathy, I think, or is it lethargy? One would be down to me, the other a common symptom of the disease. The jury remains out.

I have managed to work up some enthusiasm for the book I am writing, though. I’ve been rummaging around the internet for data on the fluid dynamics of the large intestine - no really, it’s fascinating stuff and there does not seem to have been much work done on it, although the basic physics seem to be fairly simple(ish). Anyhow, I’ve now got an interesting set of equations and suspect that if I torture them for long enough they might yield something useful.

In the much shorter term, we had been thinking of taking a short last-minute holiday – partly to see if this would agree with us as we have never taken a charter holiday together before, and generally expect and enjoy rather different things holiday-wise. In principle, I’d be happy to turn up at the airport some day and see what is on offer, but we decided to be a bit more conventional. Egypt’s Red Sea coast and snorkeling appealed to both of us – sun, beaches, warm(ish) water, and on the all inclusive packages even the drinks are free. There was a time when this would have been very attractive to me, but my total consumption of alcohol for the year to departure date was one beer, which was 100% more than Marie (oh, we are such fun-loving people to hang with...)

In the end, we booked using a method called hotel bingo. The deal was we did not get told which hotel we would be at BUT we were guaranteed a 5-star week for the price of a 4-star holiday. It worked well. We were met at the airport, shepherded onto a bus, and when we got to the hotel were fitted with a plastic bracelet which gave us free access copious quantities of food and drink. Two surprises: I took far more advantage of the latter than I had expected, and the other guests took far less, which together made for rather an idyllic time.

We had worried that we might get bored stiff sitting round the pool all day doing nothing, but we weren’t and we didn’t. We booked 3 trips: an outing in a ‘submarine’ to look at the spectacular coral reefs, a boat trip to the nearby marine national park Ras Mohammed where we snorkeled at three sites, and a jeep trip across the desert to another great snorkeling site.

I restricted myself to two episodes of snorkeling. It was spectacular, and our guide took pity on me and appointed himself my outboard motor. So I held on to a rubber ring while he swam ahead dragging me though the water at impressive speeds – I could have water skied behind the bloke. Anyhow, after the first two dives I decided enough was enough. While gravity made getting into the water ever so easy, the reverse was a bit more challenging...

Anyhow, we are now back in the flat land where it is damp and chilly, but where the cat was ecstatically happy to see us. Ahhh.