I just had to mention this. We were going out in the car the other morning, I forget where, but it doesn't matter. We were going out at the Saxon Street exit. We saw a man in one of those hi-vis jackets. He had some sort of paint spray device in his hands. I had to look twice. He'd been spraying paint around some of the potholes around the entrance. We've been mentioning the fact that the road on which we live is full of potholes and the fact that they need repairing. Most are along the centre, the point where the two sections of the tarmac meet. No doubt this was a cheap method of constructing road surfaces back when the estate was built, must've been in the 1970's. But the 'seams' (I can think of no better way to describe it.) are coming apart. It's like driving in some sort of Rift Valley. The surface is worse when you come round from the Marlborough Street entrance where we usually come back from Oncology or other hospital appointments. It's just really awful. So, at a later time when we came back home we saw the man (and no doubt a partner in crime) had been really busy as there was some considerable amount of spray paint along the road which would be to show the workmen where to fill in the holes. But the fact is, most of the road surface needs completely resurfacing and not merely patched. It needs doing properly and not just a 'quick fix.' Saying that, some sort of repair is better than none at all, and it's far better to do it in the summer because if it's left until the winter, when it's likely to freeze, the road surface will break up even more.
Another bright and sunny morning. We went to the oncology department for gone 10 o'clock. The place was virtually deserted and Carol was dealt with for her final blood test. They are reducing some of the chemotherapy to help prevent her numbing fingers which should help.
We went to the Shell filling station in Grafton Street on the way back from the hospital. It's surprising how far you can go without filling the Renault. It seems very economical, thankfully.
We were scheduled to go to Churchill Hospital in Oxford for Carol's 3.30 p.m. P.E.T. scan and we were all set up to go. Then we got a telephone call to say that they had a cancellation and could we make 2 p.m.? We could, and were out of the house within 15 minutes. We took the SatNav (which has been christened Dora, after Dora The Explorer, but it was quite difficult to set it up as we were driving along, but we stopped in a lay-bay on Standing Way and managed to get the postcode of the Churchill and then set off in earnest to get to Oxford on time.
We got to the hospital with barely 10 minutes to spare. The problem was parking, as is generally the case. We drove around the site and found several carparks, but full. Not a single space. Then we drove around to what must have been the furthest point of the site and managed to find two spaces and then rushed round to the reception area. We walked through the hospital to where Carol had her first P.E.T. scan. You have to telephone a special number to register your arrival. Why no human on these reception desks? Is it a way of not employing a human to do this job? You don't always manage to get through. Making things quite frustrating and stressful. Why not have a computer touch screen as they have at our doctors' surgery or at the In-Patient clinics at Milton Keynes hospital. Not that they always work successfully. Just as we were waiting and I was about to settle down to sit and wait in the waiting room, a small nurse turned up to tell us we needed to be in another building, possibly because one of the scanners wasn't working. So she led us outside and we got to this other building and had to enter using a keypad on the door. Carol had to fill in a form before she was taken through to the scanner and I was left to my own devices for a good two and a half hours.
What amuses me is that, because they inject you with a radioactive substance so that the scanner can do it's job properly, patients who are injected with this substance are not supposed to mix with other people for a few hours afterwards. They use separate toilet facilities and so on, and must not sit in the waiting area after being scanned. Last time Carol had the journey back to Milton Keynes in that awful ambulance, driving at speed and being treated more like a sack of potatoes than as a patient with feeling and at the same time very uncomfortable. You aren't supposed to sit next to anyone more than six feet apart or something. But then she was right next to me all the way out of the hospital, walking along the corridors and out to the carpark and then sitting next to me in the car. A rather crazy ruling, did it not matter about me becoming contaminated by radioactive material? Taking Health and Safety rules too far and I bet the radioactivity had far less strength than is already in the environment, in, say, a luminous watch face or other electronic gadgetry. What about a computer screen, such as the MacBook Air I'm using to write this?
Having left the scanning department we walked towards the entrance along a long corridor. Hospitals always seem to have endless corridors. I know they have lots of departments and they need to be linked together, but endless corridors are just, well, endless. Then when we got outside, having been into the coffee shop to have lattes and a nice iced bun, we were confronted by the prospect of wrestling with a parking ticket machine. We extricated the ticket which was issued when we entered the car park when we arrived, but we didn't have sufficient change to put into the machine to pay. It was similar to the system in Milton Keynes hospital, whereby you put your parking ticket into the machine and it tells you how much to pay on a digital screen and then either pay with coins or use your debit or credit card. Simple. We went into the reception area to see if we could find an A.T.M. but the one in W.H.Smith was either out of order or had no cash in it. Nowhere else would come up with a solution to our problem. Smith's also didn't do 'cash-back' which some shops do. We went back to the ticket machine and spoke to the gentleman who was on the end of a switchboard somewhere in cyber-space and said he'd let us out with paying. Which was what happened when we eventually got back to the car and drove out, with the barrier lifting when we spoke into the machine.
By the time we got out onto the roads of Oxford and were driving back to Milton Keynes, things were getting very busy. The traffic was building up as people were leaving work to return home. We decided to stop to have something to eat at a K.F.C. on one of the main roundabouts on the outskirts of Oxford. The point where the A44 meets the A34. The build-up of traffic was quite intense and it took us some time to wend our way round the roundabout and get into the carpark near a Travel Lodge and next door to the Peartree park-and-ride carpark which we've used on a couple of occasions when we've visited Oxford in the past. It was a relief to be out of the traffic and to sit down and have something to eat. Carol hadn't been able to eat or drink since breakfast (she'd had something to eat at about 8 o'clock and then she had a KitKat chocolate bar which I'd bought at the Shell garage when we'd bought diesel there.
By the time we'd finished in K.F.C. the roads were calming down and we got on the A34 and then onto the M40 for a few miles until we reached the road back towards Buckingham and then home to Milton Keynes.
Another bright and sunny morning. We went to the oncology department for gone 10 o'clock. The place was virtually deserted and Carol was dealt with for her final blood test. They are reducing some of the chemotherapy to help prevent her numbing fingers which should help.
We went to the Shell filling station in Grafton Street on the way back from the hospital. It's surprising how far you can go without filling the Renault. It seems very economical, thankfully.
We were scheduled to go to Churchill Hospital in Oxford for Carol's 3.30 p.m. P.E.T. scan and we were all set up to go. Then we got a telephone call to say that they had a cancellation and could we make 2 p.m.? We could, and were out of the house within 15 minutes. We took the SatNav (which has been christened Dora, after Dora The Explorer, but it was quite difficult to set it up as we were driving along, but we stopped in a lay-bay on Standing Way and managed to get the postcode of the Churchill and then set off in earnest to get to Oxford on time.
We got to the hospital with barely 10 minutes to spare. The problem was parking, as is generally the case. We drove around the site and found several carparks, but full. Not a single space. Then we drove around to what must have been the furthest point of the site and managed to find two spaces and then rushed round to the reception area. We walked through the hospital to where Carol had her first P.E.T. scan. You have to telephone a special number to register your arrival. Why no human on these reception desks? Is it a way of not employing a human to do this job? You don't always manage to get through. Making things quite frustrating and stressful. Why not have a computer touch screen as they have at our doctors' surgery or at the In-Patient clinics at Milton Keynes hospital. Not that they always work successfully. Just as we were waiting and I was about to settle down to sit and wait in the waiting room, a small nurse turned up to tell us we needed to be in another building, possibly because one of the scanners wasn't working. So she led us outside and we got to this other building and had to enter using a keypad on the door. Carol had to fill in a form before she was taken through to the scanner and I was left to my own devices for a good two and a half hours.
What amuses me is that, because they inject you with a radioactive substance so that the scanner can do it's job properly, patients who are injected with this substance are not supposed to mix with other people for a few hours afterwards. They use separate toilet facilities and so on, and must not sit in the waiting area after being scanned. Last time Carol had the journey back to Milton Keynes in that awful ambulance, driving at speed and being treated more like a sack of potatoes than as a patient with feeling and at the same time very uncomfortable. You aren't supposed to sit next to anyone more than six feet apart or something. But then she was right next to me all the way out of the hospital, walking along the corridors and out to the carpark and then sitting next to me in the car. A rather crazy ruling, did it not matter about me becoming contaminated by radioactive material? Taking Health and Safety rules too far and I bet the radioactivity had far less strength than is already in the environment, in, say, a luminous watch face or other electronic gadgetry. What about a computer screen, such as the MacBook Air I'm using to write this?
Having left the scanning department we walked towards the entrance along a long corridor. Hospitals always seem to have endless corridors. I know they have lots of departments and they need to be linked together, but endless corridors are just, well, endless. Then when we got outside, having been into the coffee shop to have lattes and a nice iced bun, we were confronted by the prospect of wrestling with a parking ticket machine. We extricated the ticket which was issued when we entered the car park when we arrived, but we didn't have sufficient change to put into the machine to pay. It was similar to the system in Milton Keynes hospital, whereby you put your parking ticket into the machine and it tells you how much to pay on a digital screen and then either pay with coins or use your debit or credit card. Simple. We went into the reception area to see if we could find an A.T.M. but the one in W.H.Smith was either out of order or had no cash in it. Nowhere else would come up with a solution to our problem. Smith's also didn't do 'cash-back' which some shops do. We went back to the ticket machine and spoke to the gentleman who was on the end of a switchboard somewhere in cyber-space and said he'd let us out with paying. Which was what happened when we eventually got back to the car and drove out, with the barrier lifting when we spoke into the machine.
By the time we got out onto the roads of Oxford and were driving back to Milton Keynes, things were getting very busy. The traffic was building up as people were leaving work to return home. We decided to stop to have something to eat at a K.F.C. on one of the main roundabouts on the outskirts of Oxford. The point where the A44 meets the A34. The build-up of traffic was quite intense and it took us some time to wend our way round the roundabout and get into the carpark near a Travel Lodge and next door to the Peartree park-and-ride carpark which we've used on a couple of occasions when we've visited Oxford in the past. It was a relief to be out of the traffic and to sit down and have something to eat. Carol hadn't been able to eat or drink since breakfast (she'd had something to eat at about 8 o'clock and then she had a KitKat chocolate bar which I'd bought at the Shell garage when we'd bought diesel there.
By the time we'd finished in K.F.C. the roads were calming down and we got on the A34 and then onto the M40 for a few miles until we reached the road back towards Buckingham and then home to Milton Keynes.
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