‘Carer Fills The Dosset Box’

After yesterday’s trip I have to accept I can no longer just wait for my right knee to heal itself. Today, apart from a drive to the GP’s, I have furniture walked, with not a glimmer of polish. Given that Jackie is awaiting surgery on her left knee, she has speculated that we might do quite well in a three-legged race.

Once again, I am grateful that we live where we do. A phone call to the GP surgery in the morning resulted in an emergency appointment with the excellent Dr Simon Moody-Jones; medication prescribed, and collected; a recommendation that I dig out a stick I had used before the previous surgery; and back home with a completed application form for a perhaps optimistically termed walk-in x-ray in the afternoon; all in time for Bargain Hunt at 12.30.

A Dosset box is designed to contain medication marked to help people remember whether they have taken their pills or not. Little compartments are laid out according to days of the week and intervals in the days. The idea is that carers can fill them for patients otherwise unable to carry out the procedure. Whilst in hospital after my hip replacement five and a half years ago, I thought it amusing to tell a nurse that I had such a box, because we thought it a good idea for anyone. Jackie was fascinated to read in the notes on the clipboard at the foot of the bed, that ‘carer fills Dosset box’.

Obviously taking this allocated role to heart, she inserted Co-codamol for the pain, Naproxen for the swelling, and Omeprazole to counteract potential stomach damage from the Naproxen, to see me through the week ahead.

I am not sure quite what I said to earn the silent inverted gesture that went with it.

This afternoon we were in and out of Lymington Hospital’s X-ray unit in about twenty minutes, most of which was occupied by me walking from the car.

On our return I was delighted to receive an alert informing me that, under a blog post entitled ‘Dissection of a Wedding Party’, my friend Alex Schneideman on www.alexschneideman.net has produced enlarged images of individual portraits of the members of the group in my ‘Revealing The Ancestors’ post. Alex’s site is well worth a look.

We had never thought of Kenwood as a producer of dishwashers when we bought one on special offer from Curry’s. We had an initial problem getting it going but that was fixed under guarantee. What has always been metaphorically, and today literally, a pain has been that the tray runners don’t operate smoothly and are held in place by plastic wheels which frequently fall off into the rear nether regions of the machine, and are very difficult to manoeuvre back into their correct positions. A fiddly enough process at the best of times, today, feeling as if one of the knives had also fallen from its container and lodged itself in my knee, I had to give up and hand the job of recovery to Jackie.

She was then able to load up the dishwasher, normally my job, with the pots, crockery, and cutlery from our delicious evening meal of her lamb jalfrezi, egg fried rice, and vegetable samosas. Jackie drank T’Sing Tao and I drank Kingfisher.