22/07/20 Complicated day, with Zometa

A bit of a complicated day yesterday. Speaking of "normal life", my plan for the morning was to make a loaf of soda bread with the buttermilk I saved from butter-making a few days ago. It's been sitting in the fridge ever since, and coming to the end of the time I could reasonably use it.

Sue had to take one of the cats to the vet for her annual booster injection before breakfast, but when she tried to start her car to drive home the battery failed. So I had to drive out with some jump leads to do a rescue and that raised two more problems (apart from a very late breakfast which rather messed up my pill schedule). The first was waiting for somebody else to finish inside the vet surgery and to move her car out so that I could get mine into the right position, and the second was that everything is so small and tightly-packed in these modern engines that my jump leads, which have thick insulation all around the clamps, couldn't find places to clamp on securely, or at all. 

We solved that problem with the help of another driver and got Sue's car going. This is the second battery failure in the last few months, so we think it's time for a new one. Surprisingly the Chelmsford Hyundai dealer doesn't keep them in stock so this will take a while for them to check it out and get a new battery in. The alternative is to go to Halfords but perhaps understandably there is a reluctance to deal with them at the moment. Perhaps I should look at ordering a new battery online and fitting it myself. Bound to be cheaper than the dealer...

In the meantime, looking at ordering new jump leads with smaller clamps on the ends. Until we get a new battery Sue really needs to carry a pair of leads that will work without being too difficult to use.

All that took up so much of the morning that I didn't have the time for soda bread. The buttermilk went down the sink. I'll try again next time.

The afternoon was filled by going to Springfield for my four-weekly Zometa drip - no problems there, all went as smoothly as usual - followed by getting home in time for tea and the regular online backgammon hour. Nothing is allowed to disturb that!

 Tomorrow - i.e. later today - we have some people coming to buy (I hope) our two Raleigh e-bikes and the carrier rack. We've had a much better response from Gumtree than I've ever had before selling e-bikes, which has a couple of times ended up giving them away for free on "freecycling" sites. It will be a bit of a wrench to see them go because we've had a lot of enjoyment from e-biking over the years but with my increased fracture risk from myeloma I can't risk a broken pelvis or similar interfering with my cancer treatment, so that era has to come to an end.

While at Springfield I collected a new batch of pills for the next month. There's a small problem with Lenalidomide where I should take 25mg daily for the first three weeks of each cycle, and a new cycle starts in the morning with 20mg of dex and a return to Lenalidomide after a week off. The Springfield pharmacy is out of 25mg Lenalidomide so I've got some 10mg and 15mg capsules which will last for a couple of weeks but I'll need something more for the third week. Just hoping that this is a minor stumble and not an indication of a serious supply problem for Lenalidomide / Revlemid. I haven't heard of anybody else having trouble with their routine supplies. The pharmacy say they'll post me enough to get through to the end of this cycle when more stock comes in, and I hope they're right.

So, as usual, it's been a combination of "normal life" or something close to it, and myeloma / covid life with its gift for turning up unforeseen problems to solve. The important ting is that life goes on and I still feel up to solving problems rather than ignoring them. That's what matters.