Sue and I had just finished one job yesterday - cleaning out the blanket weed from the pump in the small fishpond near the house - when she spotted oil leaking from the pipework at the bottom of the oil tank. Our (excellent) gardener had been cutting hedges etc. back in that area earlier so it seems likely that he may have inadvertently caused some damage. Anyway, I had a quick try at tightening things up but everything seemed tight enough so with oil dripping out at about one drip a second I put an old cat litter tray underneath to catch the oil and 'phoned our oil tank people. I had a strong feeling that going any further on a DIY basis might be unwise, with about 1000 litres of heating oil on the wrong side of the leak... Some things are best left to professionals. Being a Saturday, of course they were closed until Monday but the message included an emergency mobile number which I rang, and that produced an engineer inside two hours. He took one look at it, decided that "the valve was cracked", told me it couldn't be left like that and went back to base (luckily, only a few miles away) to collect a pump and a spare tank to hold the oil he would need to pump out of ours. Once he'd emptied our tank he tackled the valve replacement and the old one just came off in his hand. If I had tried that I'd have had a thousand litres of oil doing its best to escape and contaminate the ground and water underneath... Very very expensive clean-up required!
All sorted now, at the small cost of 420 GBP. And the relevance to this blog, which is supposed to be about the day-to-day experience of living with myeloma - not a lot, but it's the recent theme about how you have to keep on dealing with everyday life and problems and just push the disease into the background. Living with a terminal (eventually) cancer doesn't mean filling every day with awareness of it and of what the future may hold. You have to do that, but you also have to keep it in balance with day-to-day life as long as you have some of that left. And I still have plenty of it.
One more thing. When dealing with the failing battery in Sue's car a couple of days ago I had trouble getting decent connections because my jump leads have big thick insulation around the clamps that make it hard to find a place to make a contact. My memory of how to use jump leads is negative (earth) first, then positive, and the helpful man who came to our aid clearly thought the same thing. But the modern way seems to be positive side first in order to reduce the chance of an accidental short-circuit. Sue has bought a new set of jump leads with fully exposed clamps which are certainly easier to connect properly but also must increase the accidental short-circuit risk. All very difficult to find a simple rule to recommend, and nothing at all to do with myeloma, apart from how to keep busy all day and not think about the disease.
No comments:
Post a Comment