Today is the first birthday of The Transplant That Never Was. As things have turned out, I'm very pleased that I never had it. I'm still in remission (and hoping the the blood test results due tomorrow won't change that) and new drugs and combinations come along all the time. The transplant option will still be there for a couple of years or so, but there's no doubt that it is no longer the "gold standard" treatment that it once was. Anyway, I've just lost a year of my life to COVID, I don't want to lose another one to the recovery from transplant.
Some good news from an unexpected direction. When I got my first smartwatch several years ago I was a little annoyed to find that it failed to count the steps taken behind a lawnmower - because, I assume, there is no swinging of the arm, just a smooth forward motion. Later, and with a newer watch, the same thing applied to using a walker - it just didn't register the steps. That meant doing complicated work-arounds with my wearable smart ring which calculates "step equivalents" from a combination of GPS, height and stride length data, and whatever it can get from blood flow up one finger as measured by the three sensors on its inner surface. It's supposed to send its results to Google Fit and Samsung Health, and one of them passes results on to another app for the Muscles4Myeloma "challenge".For a reason I haven't fathomed, that works perfectly sometimes, not at all at other times, or gives obviously absurd results occasionally. But now...
My watch installed some new software for itself yesterday, and when I looked expecting the usual low count for the day, I found a much more realistic number well into the thousands. It seems that it is now capable of registering steps behind a walker (or even a lawnmower?) That's progress for you!
For our walk today we had the first trip of the new season to Marks Hall Arboretum:
And a rare thing, a selfie of your author:
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