23/11/19 (2)

One of those days today. Woke up to find the hot water not working - looks as if we need a new boiler valve to handle diverting the flow between hot water and heating. At the moment we have red hot radiatiors (well, nearly) and barely lukewarm water. Plumber / heating engineer coming on Tuesday. Until then we have an immersion heater and my shower heats its own water, so it's not a crisis. Then there was some sort of washing machine problem that I never got around to understanding  but I think it's solved itself.

I'd made a stupid mistake with a Tesco online order and booked it for next week rather than this, so I had to go off and do the shopping the old way. Meanwhile Sue is finding the recovery a bit harder than expected, still feeling quite washed-out and sore in the chest. It's still early days and we're hoping that will improve.

I got home, unpacked the shopping, and collapsed in my chair downstairs with my swollen ankles up on the footstool to drain the fluid away, and stayed there half-asleep for hours. Now I've come upstairs they've swollen up again!

I should be able to collect a diuretic from the GP pharmacy on Monday afternoon. Hope that will work, because this is really getting quite bad. Not sore or painful, just very obvious and keeps reminding me that things aren't the way they should be. And while on that subject, first sachet of Laxido this evening in the hope that it proves more potent than Senna...

Dry, flaky skin esp. on my hands - probably caused by the steroids. More finger and thumb splits than I ever get at this time of year - usually they're not a big problem until temperatures are consistently well below 10C and we're not quite there yet. The cancer nurses gave me a tube of Pliazon which seems pretty good but isn't helping the finger splits much. I'm not sure anything does, apart from time. My usual approach of a blob of vaseline and a plaster over the top doesn't seem much good this time.