I don’t know if the long day  just took its toll, or if the nurse used some caustic cleaning agent, or if the mushy peas on my fish and chips supper were to blame, but I didn’t sleep last night.  The itching from the new dressing was awful, the surgical pain was worse and the damp was aggravating my nerve pain.  At 5am I could be found, much to Samson’s disgust, drinking tea, reading the paper and listening to Vanessa Feltz – I know!!  Sam’s expression said it all.  So today I have felt very like I remember after I returned home from a night shift.

The surgical pain is starting to settle – shame it has to start again next week.  Another definite downside to a longer trial is that the time being unable to bath or shower increases and today my head was starting to itch.  What is a girl to do on a bad hair day?  I couldn’t bend over a bath tub, so my lovely friend and hairdresser Bev came to the rescue with a wash and blow dry at her house.  It wasn’t easy positioning myself at the hairdresser’s basin, but I tried really hard to use some of the coping techniques learnt on the course and as usual Bev made me look, or my hair at least, a million dollars.

I think that I’m getting to grips with the Stim controller and have found which levels suit me.  We are instructed with this particular stimulator to alternate between 2 hours on and 2 hours switched off, and then to switch it off at night.  I will write a “page” detailing how the stimulator works and some more technical info.  However when we left the house yesterday, the boys were in the kitchen discussing what would happen if they were to connect their poor old mum to the transformers for the kitchen lights.  This really would give me a bad hair day!  The last words I heard as we were leaving were “how quickly would that fry the brain?”.

NOTE TO SELF: do not leave controllers anyway near UCL electronic engineering student son!  We won’t have heard the last of this!