12 June 2012
It being a Tuesday you might expect me to be driving round the golf course talking to my geriatrics club member friends. Of course, you would be right and I await with bated breath, the five-day weather forecast, which shows me that it is going to be warm and sunny next Tuesday. Sadly, there have been very few this year. Cancelled last week due to the Queens Diamond Jubilee and this week it is a course maintenance day or something of the sort, and for that reason there is no easy and we are this week!.
I am quite keen to get back to my routine ‘ Tuesdays is geriatric golf day’ If nothing else I want to test the strength I have left in my arms to steer the electric wheelchair. I always knew that I was getting perceptibly weaker as time passed. I could no longer operate my laptop, even then, mostly is by voice activation, if I did not have the use of my one splinted finger.
I shall have to be more diligent in finding voice commands to substitute for the ‘one finger’ corrections.
I have noticed this weakness creeping up on me in other directions. For example, if I lean too far forward. I do not have enough strength left in my stomach muscles to straighten myself up. Similarly, when I’m working on the laptop and I have to lean over to the right, in order to access a particular key, sometimes I cannot get back to an upright position and have to sound my alarm for assistance.
What I have found most frustrating of all is the lack of strength in my fingers. I cannot even depress a key on the keyboard, unless it is with the splinted finger. Until now I have been lazy and taken the easy way out, but whilst I still have some strength that I really must try to find commands which will enable me to operate the laptop without touching it at all. I know it is possible, it is just a matter of educating myself.
Our two visitors, Kay and Tony Dunn, postponed from yesterday came this afternoon. Kay is our old friend, whose husband, tragically died some years ago, allegedly, having attended surgery with the pain in his chest, was sent home by the Doctor, who suggested it was angina, and told to take some aspirin and come back on Monday. He died on Sunday from a massive heart attack! At least that is the story that went round at the time.
Smiler was of a similar age to Kay’s two boys, Tom and Mark and has continued this friendship, albeit, one or other of them, only rarely due to the boys both having married and having a family to consider as well as living some distance away from each other.