As previously detailed in the hereabouts, I have a mild addiction to Studio 60. Not only that, pretty much all the drama on TV that really passes muster (read: gets on my Sky+ series link) can be found with an American accent on one of the 4 channels. (That’s not as in “one of four channels” because that’s just stupid: I have Sky and therefore a zillion channels, most of them pap. One of the 4 channels meaning Channel 4, E4, More4 or Another4*)

What this means, apart from the fact that I’m essentially paying my television licence fee in order to sit and watch dramas from the other side of the Atlantic whilst my money gets frittered away on 2 Pints of Lager and a Packet of God-Awful Soap Operas, is that I spend most of my viewing time fast-forwarding between ComparetheMarket.com idents which would appear to crop up almost randomly within any given Channel 4 show.

I fully suspect that were I, in my late-afternoon stupor, to sit and watch an entire hour of Richard and Judy, I would find that they’ve replaced the You Say, We Steal Your Money feature with Same Car, Dramatic Difference.

It’s not even really the fact that by the time you’ve seen them for the 44,352nd time they get a bit repetitive, same-y and repetitive. It’s the arbitrary way in which they are shoe-horned into the programs that really gets my goat (if I had a goat).

I know it’s unfair to blame it on ComparetheMarket.com, but hey – we live in a world where it’s necessary for Blue Peter presenters to apologise for the mistakes made by THEIR BOSSES to the littl’uns who wouldn’t even understand what they’d done wrong if they had it explained to them Very. Slowly. Seriously – if you’re old enough to understand what they did wrong, you shouldn’t be watching Blue Peter by now anyway. Go put your hoodie on and sit on a street corner with the rest of the degenerate youth of today.

The timing of the ad breaks in Channel 4 dramas is so ridiculously out-of-place as to be almost comical. I say “almost” because despite it’s cosey up nicely to the mistress of mirth, I still find myself throwing objects at the screen every time they break the flow of a scene to blare 5 more minutes of capitalist propaganda (too far – sorry, go all high-horse Marxist in the middle of my rant there…). It’s getting worse, too. Last night it was the TV remote, which threatened serious damage. Tonight I damn near through K at it.

I KNOW the Americans have a very weird system of throwing ads in almost willy-nilly, but at least they do it at moments that feel right to the show – in fact, all shows on Network TV in America are written AROUND the ad breaks, they actually plan for them when they’re knocking out the scripts.

So why oh why oh why oh why and a few more why of whys can’t Channel 4 either ride shotgun with the Americans and surrender to their ad patterns or – at the very least – work the ads into a sensible spot in the drama.

I’ve lost count of the number of times an episode of Brothers and Sisters has stomped all over the emotional denouement of a scene to go to commercials mid-thought, when there is a fade-to-black which pops up within 2 minutes of the return of the break. Would it kill them to hold off on the ads for another 120 seconds? Would the regulators go bananas? Would their ad clients be raging on the phone? I’m going to guess not – if for no other reason than I chose to heap all of my scorn for the shoddy ad-break practices of Channel 4 Television onto ComparetheMarket.com who have the misfortune of having spend hudreds of thousands of pounds on a sponsorship package for shows which get ruined by arbitrary commercial breaks thrown in by editors with no sense of emotional beats or story arcs.

So come on, people, sort yourselves out. We clearly can’t all enjoy US TV series ad-less, like Heroes on BBC 2, but at the very least we can stop the ad breaks being quite so unflinchingly (or is that flinchingly?) annoying.

I’m starting the Campaign for Correct Placement of Ad Breaks (or, rather more niftily, I think, CFCPOAB) today – to run right alongside Save My Remote Control.

*May or may not be a real 4 channel.

I feel like I should be doing a great, big week-long catch up on here, but I don’t seem to have the impetus to go back over the whole of last week and work out what happened or didn’t.  I seem to remember largely feeling pretty knackered, thanks, no doubt, to the IV’s.

The good news is that they really did the trick and we got on top of the infection before it could develop properly.  My CRP at the start of the course was at 89, which had reduced to just 33 after 7 days, which is good going.  The extreme fighting going on is probably the major cause of the tiredness, too, alongside the drug doses.

I also feel like I should be entertaining you all with a blow-by-blow account of my troubles with Sky, but I think I’m so tired of all this malfunctioning technology and maladjusted people on the end of helplines that I can’t even bring myself to muster up a random thread of expletives to describe the situation.

The IV’s finished on Tuesday and I was up at Oxford yesterday for a quick post-IV once-over.  The best news of the 2 weeks (and recent past) is that my weight is now up to a rather impressive 54.4kg – the heaviest I’ve ever been.  I’m hoping that I can keep it on and keep adding to it even as I slowly start to reduce my steroids.   My lung function had improved greatly, too, back up to 0.8/1.3 after dipping down to 0.6/1.1.  It may not sound like much, but when you consider that’s a  25% drop in lung-function,  it goes to show why I may not have been feeling my best.

I have continued, on-and-off, to look at and sporadically work on new projects and a couple of old ones, although clearly a lack of internet access is a bit of a hindrance to most productivity.  Of course, being offline and having nothing else to use my computer for, you’d have expected, I guess, that I would make some significant progress on the screenplay.  Rather impressively, however, that’s not the case at all, and it’s sitting just as untouched today as it was when I lost the internet connection 10 days ago.

Only I could manage to ignore a chance to turn a technological disadvantage into an advantage – looking the mis-guided gift horse in the mouth, as it were.

There’s not much else to add, really – I suppose it’s been a bit of a boring week or so, or certainly that anything interesting that has happened seems far too long-winded for me to dredge back up right now.  I’m still tired.

Ho hum, let’s keep rolling along and see what tomorrow brings.  Sorry for being boring today.

This isn’t actually a proper post, but I do have my internet back (more on that tomorrow) and thought I’d point you here to a letter I had published in the Guardian Media Section today.  It’s not often I big myself up, but I’m really rather proud of this chappie.

Just a quick note to all the regular readers who may be getting a little antsy at the lack of updates.  Full story and update when I can get online properly.

All queries should be addressed in writing to Why Can’t Sky Sort Out My Smegging Broadband, The Stupid Annoying Lazy Bunch Of Muppets c/o Sky or seriouslyhowhardisittosendoutamodem@sky.com.

Emails and blog messages welcome, but I won’t read or reply to them until I a) get my broadband up and running or b) get back over to Mum and Dad’s to check the accounts again.

Current mood: flippin’ furious.  Current status: disconnected.  Current bun: yes, please.

Stay smiley. 

I’m in an advanced state of “how to deal with the dude at the window?”.

For reasons un-bloggable, the living room is currently out of bounds, so I’m holed-up, not unhappily, in the study, surfing the ‘net a little to catch up on some of my favourite, but not every-day sites.  Whilst I browse, the familiar clinking bang hits the wall and the half-creak, half-screech of a man climbing a ladder grows ever louder in my ear.

Sure enough, miliseconds later, armed with cloth and long wipey thing which has no discernable purpose beyond making it look like they’re actually doing something, a man appears at the window.

So now I’m stuck in that awkward zoo-like state of strangeness wherein you don’t know if it’s appropriate to turn and acknowledge him or just to ignore him.  You’re perfectly well aware that he’s there and he knows that you’re aware of it, too.  But where do you look once you’ve turned to look at him?

If you do acknowledge him, in what way and for how long?  Obviously, being in a first-floor flat, opening the window for a quick “how do you do?” isn’t going to be a warmly welcomed idea, and communicating through double glazing is hard enough when you can wave and shout and point at things, but given his donkey-on-a-pole status with buckets, chamois and wipeys everywhere seems a likely impossibility.

Is it rude to ignore someone who’s closer to you than it’s natural for one man to be to another if they’re not considering amourous relations or celebrating a sporting triumph?  Does the pane of clear sheeting between you justify the pretense of ignorance?

I figure that most people opt not to acknowledge their window cleaners if they have something sufficiently distracting to legitimately hold their attention away from the window (say, writing a blog or performing micro-surgery on a wasp unlucky enough to die slap-bang in the middle of the desk).  This conclusion leads me to believe that if I, being so occupied, were in fact to turn to acknowledge the presence of the ladderman, I would in fact so startle him as to risk his ability to maintain his balance and thus his position some 3 metres off the ground.  Not wishing him to become too prematurely re-aquainted with the earth, I decide on grounds of health and safety to ignore him completely and settle back, contented with my  caring and considered manner in dealing with the problem, into constructing my witticisms.

For some reason, though, I can’t escape the feeling that he’s just climbed down and moved on the next window whilst muttering to his mate, “That miserable git up there has nothing better to do than pull the wings off flies and yet he can’t even muster up a wave while I clean his bleedin’ windows.”

I’m in a very weird situation with my body at the moment.

On the one hand, it’s reeling from the effects of the infection and is suffering the usual IV hangover that comes with the first few days of pumping extremely high doses of pretty hard and powerful drugs into your system.  On the other hand it’s simultaneously feeling a huge surge of energy and general boost that comes from having large doses of steroids crammed in on top of everything.

It can’t decide whether to be super-tired or super-energised and it’s seemed to settle on some sort of manically-driven half-way house, where I feel like I can take on the world if only I could have a 10 minute cat nap first…

Still, the main thing is that whatever’s happening, it’s definitely doing the right thing.  Without a doubt I feel hugely better than I did earlier in the week, tiredness aside, and I know that if my appetite is returning (or back with a vengeance) – even if it is steroid-related – then I’m definitely on the mend.

I’ve never been particularly good at recognising (or acknowledging is a better term, I suppose) the signs of an on-coming infection, so I’m quite pleased not only that I picked up on it properly this time, but reacted in the right way by getting myself to Oxford as soon as I could and not just waiting around for my next appointment, by which time it could have taken much greater hold and really started to kick my butt.

I was back at Oxford yesterday for a physio session, which is also a cunning ruse on the part of the team to give me a quick, unofficial once-over to see if there has been any improvement.  They think we don’t know these things, but we really do.  Still, cunning or not, it was reassuring to know that the team all felt I was looking better.  Being multi- rather than mono-syllabic must have helped.

Strangely, this period of minor health-hiccup has coincided with a bright spark of inspiration and I’ve finally broken the back of the script I’ve been working on for the last few months.  I’m now 70 pages in, about 20 pages from the end – at a guess – and it’s all coming together beautifully.  I actually can’t wait to sit in front of the computer and bash out the next six pages each day and often feel like I could do more, had I the alertness to keep focused for long enough.

Still, I’m hoping to have finished my first draft by the end of the weekend and to have redrafted within the week.  The stages between my first and second drafts are very quick – it’s pretty much a read through and polish with a couple of additional scenes, at which point I’ll then sit and work through it much more slowly and may seek out a couple of opinions from people who will give me good, honest notes.

Funnily enough, a great friend of mine for whom I am nominally writing the script, happened to text me on Wednesday to see how I was doing (health-wise, not script-wise) and it was the same day that the whole things became clear and concise in my head, so maybe there’s a spooky little connection thing going on in my head there, somewhere.  Whatever it is, I’m really enjoying it.

After waking completely breathless, despite still being on my NIV (which is quite hard to be breathless on) and finding myself standing in the bathroom fighting for air and trying to cough and clear my chest at the same time, it became apparent that my sleep/breathing/NIV difficulties were, quite simply, down to a big ol’ infection which I’ve obviously been brewing for a good few days now.

Horrible as it is and horrible as I feel, it’s good to know the causes of all the disruption in my patterns. I went to Oxford yesterday not looking for answers, but knowing that “all” I needed was a swift course of anti-biotics (hopefully the same ones as last time, otherwise things get complicated with sensitivities and allergies) and some extra physio.

Monday night was the worst night I’ve had in quite a while – waking at 1.30am with breathlessness and a large mucus plug on my right side and the complimentary headache which comes with it all, I then spent the rest of the night trying to find a comfortable and non-distressing way to sleep, which I managed for short, 20-minute spells on-and-off for the next 5 or 6 hours. Needless to say by the time I got up I was more exhausted than when I went to bed.

In Oxford I was pretty spectacularly monosyllabic with my team – which curiously meant I think they knew exactly what was going on; they know me pretty much inside out now. I felt really sorry for them, though, because I was so exhausted and feeling so sorry for myself that I really wasn’t much cop as a human being yesterday – offering hardly anything beyond the necessary replies to medical enquiries.

Still, I escaped the dreaded thought of ending up on the ward (which would just about have finished me off, I think) and came home with my first few doses of IV’s to draw up and the promise of my full delivery arriving some time later today.

The only minor hitch of non-planned IV starting is that I didn’t have time to get a preparation dose of steroids down me, which means I’m in for a couple of days of joint and muscle pain as my body reacts to the IV Meropenem before the oral pred [prednisolone, steroid] kicks in properly. I’ve also now got a nice collection of ulcers on my tongue in protest at the toxins being shoved into my blood stream. Can’t blame my body really, can you? I think I’d protest, too.

Reacting to IV’s is pretty much a common-or-garden response for me and is weirdly reassuring, because if my body is feeling it then you can bet that the bugs are, too. It may take a little longer to kill them off, but I know things will turn around soon. It means having to put up with a few days of tiredness (which was there anyway) and soreness, but at least now there’s the knowledge that things will start to improve by the weekend, rather than merely a looming sense of something not being right.

I’m off to do today’s first session of physio, then to take myself back to bed to sleep off my morning dose, in time to get up and repeat the dose and do another physio session. I do love being on IV’s…

NOTE: For the stats-lovers amongst you, my Lung Function yesterday was 0.6/1.1 (that’s roughly 15/20% according to this site), my Sats were 90% – not very impressive. My weight, however, was a massive 53kgs (fully clothed), so I guess that’s my silver lining.

Like all good sequels, Headaches have come back with a vengeance, making sure to be bigger and better than before.

Having thought myself a chronic hypochondriac before the weekend, three straight mornings of horrible, horrible headaches have convinced me that it’s not just a little something to make me paranoid, but that there’s definitely something up.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what it is.

The headaches would appear to be CO2 related (as with last time), which would suggest that Neve isn’t doing enough work, or isn’t working efficiently enough to clear it off while I sleep. However, the headaches are also coinciding with an uncomfortable amount of neck and back pain, too, which may mean that it’s not anything to do with my O2/CO2/Neve settings at all.

I spoke to my physio at Oxford today, who suggested adjusting my NIV settings for the night and seeing if it made a difference (it didn’t last night, but she recommended trying it again tonight) and then said she’d arrange for the docs to see me tomorrow. I was supposed to be joining her for an exercise sesh tomorrow, but that feels a little way off at the moment, so we figured we should use the appointment to get myself checked over by the team rather than wait for my clinic appointment on Thursday – if I am coming down with something, we need to make sure we nip it in the bud ASAP.

It’s a little demoralising looking at the prospect of another 2 weeks of IV’s less than 3 weeks after I finished the last course, but I’ve got so little room to play with now that it’s no longer an option to just “wait and see how things pan out”.

The worst part of it at the moment, really, is not knowing what they are or what’s causing them. If I was sure of their origin, it’d be easier to gear myself up for a fight to get rid of them, but until I know where they come from, it’s just a case of sticking them out. They are usually gone by the early afternoon and then I don’t feel too bad.

Whatever is causing them, it’s a pretty safe bet that it’s all been kicked off by the seeds of an infection knocking around down there, so antibiotics would appear inevitable.  We can only hope that something obvious presents itself in the next 24 hours or that once the antibiotics take care of the bugs, everything settles back down to normal.  Fingers crossed, anyway.

The good news is my tiredness seems to have lifted, mostly. The bad news is that I woke up this morning with a roaring headache and couldn’t shake it for most of the day.

I’ve noticed that being chronically ill gives you a bizarre form of semi-hypochondria: every little tweak of a muscle, snuffle or sneeze suddenly seems laden with horrible possibilities.

This morning’s headache, for example. More likely than not, it was a simple, common or garden headache of the type we all wake up with from time to time. To my slightly addled brain, however, it could be a recurrence of the old CO2 headaches I used to get before I started on my NIV overnight. The issue there being that since I’m not actually using overnight NIV, it would imply that my lungs have deteriorated further and the NIV isn’t working hard enough to clear the CO2 from my lungs while I sleep.

The chances of this being the case – considering there are no obvious other signs of major chest complaint (no significant drop in lung-function, no increase in volume of sputum etc) – are pretty low, but it doesn’t stop my brain working the scenarios over in my head almost constantly.

Most importantly, I guess, is the fact that I can see my slightly skewed look at things and take a bit of a step back from it. I’m not fretting my head off about it, but it is still playing on my mind a little. I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly tonight and wake up tomorrow with no problems at all, and I’ll feel foolish for even letting the thought cross my mind. But when you’re sitting on such unstable ground, you get a little hyper-sensitive.

I shall be trying to get back into my exercise regime again tomorrow, having missed almost a week now through tiredness. I shall also be attempting to get back into the screenplay again, having failed to match yesterday’s 10 pages with any pages at all today. I’m a bit hit-and-miss, me.

On the plus side for today, K’s little 2 year-old niece and 15-month old nephew (I’m sure I’ll have got that wrong now, I bet I get shot for it, too) came over for a visit today, which was just gorgeous as they were both in such fantastic moods. Even though I was feel really rough with my head banging and pretty short of breath, I managed to have a lot of fun. Luckily, I could play mostly sat down on the sofa or the floor and not move around much (I left policing duties to K and their Mum, who would race after the little one as he crawled off at top speed to reek havoc in other rooms).

I spent most of the time being either a fairy or a ballerina. I’m not quite sure what that suggests our niece thinks about me, but I’d like to think it means she understands that I’ve got a wonderful imagination, just like her.

Even when you’re feeling tired and rough, there’s something truly infectious about children’s laughter – it reminded me what I used to love about working with the Youth Theatre. Having a child’s simple outlook on life is so rare and so delightful, to focus 100% on what’s going on right now with no thought for the history or what comes next.

With two children as gorgeous and laughter as infectious as theirs, it’s impossible to say I’ve had a bad day.

“We do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”
Native American Proverb

There must be something about being tired and a little bit down on yourself that sets the inspiration glands working over time, as I napped this afternoon and got up to find myself sat in front of the computer churning out 10 pages of my screenplay.  Even I’m impressed.