6 June 2011

I forgot to mention yesterday but while I was at Lord’s yesterday, driving around in my wheelchair, one of the feet extensions caught a rubbish bag and broke the top of its mount so that the support would no longer stay in place. It was obviously necessary that I had some sort of support for my foot so, and at my suggestion, Mark (Jenkins) ingenuously fashioned a short wire cylinder made from the wire which secured one of our many champagne corks. It did the trick after a fashion. I rang Hollies Wheelchairs yesterday and they promised to send round and engineer this morning to look at it. The main thing is that they must not take the chair away because every fine summer’s day is valuable to me at this stage.

. I’m sorry to say that we had another disaster last evening. I had noticed that my legs seemed to have been getting slowly weaker and yesterday morning, having been raised by the bed to my feet onto my frame, one of my legs temporary gave way but I was able to prevent myself from falling to the floor. In the evening, having been raised out of my chair by Paula and ‘my lovely’, in attempting to shuffle around to start my walk to bed, both legs collapsed and the girls were left fighting to prevent me from completely sinking to the floor. In doing so I was at an almost horizontal position with a very tight belt around my middle and started to panic because I could simply not breathe and really felt that I was going to expire. The girls cleverly managed to get me sitting on the floor then ‘my lovely’ went off and dialled 999, as we had been instructed in such emergencies. Within 10 min or so the paramedics were here and quickly got me seated in my chair again from whence, by using the hoist into the mobile wheelchair, the panic was over. However, it really looks as though I have come to the end of using my legs even for the shortest of walks, which is extremely disappointing as I had genuinely thought I could go on for another two or three months at least maybe we will have to ask the local physiotherapist to come and assess my legs before we finally give up.. In addition, we will have to have work out a completely new carer regime for getting me up, showered, dressed and into my study chair and back to bed in the evenings.

Althea came after lunch to do my nails.