In November 2011, I started feeling more tired than usual. Extremely fatigued in fact. As I'll be 83 this year I'm quite used to having an hour's sleep in the afternoon (particularly if I've had a good lunch and a glass or two of red wine.) But this was an unheathy sort of fatigue. I felt tired and unwell. Then I became aware of pain in my right side. Or rather, not in my right side but on the skin under my ribs on the right side. I looked in the mirror on my wardrobe and saw I had developed a long sweep of what looked light reddish bruises stretching from under my ribs round to my back.
I'm luck that I have a diligent young doctor who doesn't mine making house calls to elderly patients. When he came to examine me, he diagnosed shingles very quickly. "It'll take several weeks to heal" he said "but at least we've caught it and diagnosed it quickly so you can start on antivirals straight away."
I started taking the medication within 3 days of getting the first symptoms and apparently, with shingles, the earlier you start treatment the better. What I didn't know at the time was that shingles is very common in people over 80 and that very often it leads on to another painful condition - post-shingles neuralgia.
Anyway, for six weeks I was housebound. I was so tired that I stayed in bed most of the day. If I got up in the morning and made tea and ate some breakfast, I'd need to go back to bed by about 10am. Friends and family came in to help me - to make meals for me, offer a cup of tea or just chat. But mostly I needed to be alone. Shingles makes you feel pretty awful and you just need to doze and sleep to recover.
A lot of people, including a friend who is a retired doctor, asked me if the illness was very painful. Shingles is apparently often extremely painful as it makes your nerve endings flare up with inflammation. At first, I mostly felt discomfort rather than real pain. But that changed and after six weeks I really needed painkillers. My doctor prescribed me a medication that I found out was actually an anti-depressant. Not only that, but my daughter read the instruction leaflet and saw that a side-effect of the drug was feeling suicidal. "Right" she said "you're not taking these. You might be in pain but we're not having you throw yourself off the balcony!"
So we went into town, to Guildford, to Boots to see if the pharmacist could recommend something better. One complication is that I take Warfarin for a heart arrhythmia. If you take Warfarin you can't take aspirin or any other anti-coagulant because you risk making your blood too thin. If that happens and you cut yourself, you can lose a lot of blood. And even if you don't cut yourself, thin blood can make you feel very fatigued. And fatigue was already one of the strongest symptoms of shingles that I was experiencing....
The Boots pharmacist sold me some sort of painkiller which she said wasn't contraindicated with Warfarin. But it didn't seem to make any difference. I still had the pain - a sort of inflammation - a burning pain. The marks on my side were still evident after several weeks too.
My generation went through the second world war so I suppose we learnt not to make a fuss about things unless they're really important. I knew that the pain of shingles wasn't dangerous or life-threatening so that made it easier to tolerate. After six weeks stuck in my flat, I slowly started to go out once in a while. I could still get very tired and the pain was still there but I had a little more energy and regained my interest in life. By Christmas 2011, I was feeling quite a lot better and spent the holiday with my daughter and her family in London. We ate well and drank plenty of champagne and wine so I'd have to say I was on the road to recovery.
Still, it's January 2012 now and I still have the red marks on my side and some residual pain. My doctor told me that once an older person recovers from shingles they're quite likely to suffer from post-shingles neuralgia and it appears that's what I've got. It means the nerves in my skin continue to be inflamed and cause pain. It's a flipping nuisance sometimes. At 82, I really want to enjoy the time I have left and so I hope for good health. Some days I feel like I'm falling apart. I'm partially sighted, have various aches and pains, a heart condition for which I take Warfarin and Digoxin, and arthritis which sometimes bugs me and sometimes doesn't.
On the other hand, I'm soon off to visit my daughter for a few days and then in May the family has the wedding of my oldest granddaughter to look forward to. I've stocked up on talking books as I love reading but can't see well enough these days. And I have family I love and plenty of good friends. So all in all, I'm not complaining about shingles or post-shingles neuralgia. I'll file them under those little things that are sent to try us.
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est internet use by older people. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est internet use by older people. Afficher tous les articles
mardi 24 janvier 2012
lundi 8 novembre 2010
Computers for the Over 80s - Internet, Google, Adsense, Facebook
Because I'm elderly - 81 and nearly 2 months as I write - I'm not brilliant with computers. I saw an article in a paper the other day that made me laugh. It was an article titled something like "Silver Surfers" and it was about people over 50 using the internet. For heaven's sake. My daughters are both over 50 and I wouldn't call them silver surfers. I don't think either of them has a grey hair. They're young!
Even I'm not a silver surfer - what a patronising phrase. I colour my hair. (Only a bit, with washout colour, not with peroxide or anything. I left that behind in the '50s.)
Anyway. I use the internet and I have a PC in my home study and I use the internet at both my daughters' houses too, when I'm visiting. At the start, before I'd ever used a computer, my daughters bought me a PC and I went on a short course in Guildford to learn how to use Word and email and look around the internet. I didn't do anything very adventurous; the idea was just to use email mostly to stay in contact with family members. At first I had no idea that if you had a query or question or wanted information on any topic under the sun you could just key it ito Google and get hundreds of results. My two daughters, son-in-law and grandson gradually showed me all the different things I could do.
I'm still fairly basic in what I do with the PC and the internet though. There's a lot I don't understand and a limit to what I want to learn. Facebook, for example, holds no interest for me whatsoever. All the Word commands frustrate me a bit too. Sometimes the text becomes small all of a sudden and I have no idea which key I pressed or how to make the text larger. And the other day I got something up on the screen that I couldn't understand and a message appeared beside it saying "What's this?" I was baffled. How would I know what it was? How would I answer the question even if I knew the answer? One of my granddaughters explained later that it wasn't asking me what the thing was - rather I should have clicked on the icon to get more information. A lot of computer "thinking" is lost on me. There are lots of websites that I can't find my way around too. I fly several times a year as one of my daughters lives in France, but she always books my flights. I haven't used the Flybe website myself to buy a ticket. I'm worried about giving bank details online.
My daughters helped me start this blog after one of them asked me lots of questions about my childhood. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. I knew perfectly well what blogs were because they're referred to everywhere now - on the BBC, in the papers - but I had no idea I could just write one. They helped me start this and helped me register me for Adsense, explaining that you get paid for blogs if people read them. I'll believe it when I see it.
All this is in order to say that although I'm not very good with computers I had a pretty good IT idea the other day. I was in a pub in Shere, in Surrey, the White Horse - and got talking to two elderly men who it turned out were from Lancashire, like me. When they were young, they had friends who went to school in Kirkham. We didn't talk for very long but I guess if we'd gone through a list of names we would have known some people in common.
So I wonder if Google or some internet company couldn't make a sort of IT Contact Board or Message Board in a mobile phone where you'd note lots of people you know, and so would other people, and you'd get signals when someone was nearby who knew people in common. It could be quite interesting. Imagine if you're young and you get a signal that someone in the same cafe or train as you knows your boss. The Message Board would indicate the people around you and which person you had the "match" with. You'd chat and perhaps find out information on your boss from someone who used to work for him. Or from his daughter. Or ex-wife! Or imagine you get a signal and find that someone knows your daughter or friend or neighbour. It could be a god way of extending social and work networks. It could also be dangerous of course. Imagine your daughter finds out that a brassy blonde in the bar where she's sitting has listed her husband as one of her contacts...
It could also be used as a proper Message Board. Say a train is cancelled you could put out a message saying you could give three people a lift to the West End of London, for example. Their phones would tell them where you were, so they could approach you. Or if you were outside a concert with a spare ticket, you could signal that to everyone too.
This is the only computing idea I've ever had and I expect someone will tell me that all that is already possible with some mobile phone or other, or iPod or Google phone. Never mind. I think it's not a bad idea and it just goes to show that even at my age, if you learn something new, like internet use, it'll get you thinking and give you new ideas. Even if someone else has had them first.
Even I'm not a silver surfer - what a patronising phrase. I colour my hair. (Only a bit, with washout colour, not with peroxide or anything. I left that behind in the '50s.)
Anyway. I use the internet and I have a PC in my home study and I use the internet at both my daughters' houses too, when I'm visiting. At the start, before I'd ever used a computer, my daughters bought me a PC and I went on a short course in Guildford to learn how to use Word and email and look around the internet. I didn't do anything very adventurous; the idea was just to use email mostly to stay in contact with family members. At first I had no idea that if you had a query or question or wanted information on any topic under the sun you could just key it ito Google and get hundreds of results. My two daughters, son-in-law and grandson gradually showed me all the different things I could do.
I'm still fairly basic in what I do with the PC and the internet though. There's a lot I don't understand and a limit to what I want to learn. Facebook, for example, holds no interest for me whatsoever. All the Word commands frustrate me a bit too. Sometimes the text becomes small all of a sudden and I have no idea which key I pressed or how to make the text larger. And the other day I got something up on the screen that I couldn't understand and a message appeared beside it saying "What's this?" I was baffled. How would I know what it was? How would I answer the question even if I knew the answer? One of my granddaughters explained later that it wasn't asking me what the thing was - rather I should have clicked on the icon to get more information. A lot of computer "thinking" is lost on me. There are lots of websites that I can't find my way around too. I fly several times a year as one of my daughters lives in France, but she always books my flights. I haven't used the Flybe website myself to buy a ticket. I'm worried about giving bank details online.
My daughters helped me start this blog after one of them asked me lots of questions about my childhood. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. I knew perfectly well what blogs were because they're referred to everywhere now - on the BBC, in the papers - but I had no idea I could just write one. They helped me start this and helped me register me for Adsense, explaining that you get paid for blogs if people read them. I'll believe it when I see it.
All this is in order to say that although I'm not very good with computers I had a pretty good IT idea the other day. I was in a pub in Shere, in Surrey, the White Horse - and got talking to two elderly men who it turned out were from Lancashire, like me. When they were young, they had friends who went to school in Kirkham. We didn't talk for very long but I guess if we'd gone through a list of names we would have known some people in common.
So I wonder if Google or some internet company couldn't make a sort of IT Contact Board or Message Board in a mobile phone where you'd note lots of people you know, and so would other people, and you'd get signals when someone was nearby who knew people in common. It could be quite interesting. Imagine if you're young and you get a signal that someone in the same cafe or train as you knows your boss. The Message Board would indicate the people around you and which person you had the "match" with. You'd chat and perhaps find out information on your boss from someone who used to work for him. Or from his daughter. Or ex-wife! Or imagine you get a signal and find that someone knows your daughter or friend or neighbour. It could be a god way of extending social and work networks. It could also be dangerous of course. Imagine your daughter finds out that a brassy blonde in the bar where she's sitting has listed her husband as one of her contacts...
It could also be used as a proper Message Board. Say a train is cancelled you could put out a message saying you could give three people a lift to the West End of London, for example. Their phones would tell them where you were, so they could approach you. Or if you were outside a concert with a spare ticket, you could signal that to everyone too.
This is the only computing idea I've ever had and I expect someone will tell me that all that is already possible with some mobile phone or other, or iPod or Google phone. Never mind. I think it's not a bad idea and it just goes to show that even at my age, if you learn something new, like internet use, it'll get you thinking and give you new ideas. Even if someone else has had them first.
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