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Wednesday 21 January 2015

A bump in the road

I spoke to Talktalk today about the progress of my order, and it's bad news. Openreach (what you and I think of as BT) think that there might be a blockage in the pipe carrying lines along my road. To investigate this, they have to open a manhole and poke about. To open the manhole, they have to temporarily block the road, because the manhole is in the middle of the road. To temporarily block the road, they have to apply to the Buckinghamshire Highways Authority. And that could take weeks.

Worse - if there is a blockage, then it's a bigger job, and they'll have to apply again, to close the road for some while. And that could take months.

On the other hand, some very good news.

I had a small bleeding patch on my leg, which, after some months, wouldn't heal properly. Eventually, I took it to the doctor, who referred me to a clinic. There, I allowed a dab of cotton wool to be applied - this will be shown to a dog that's being trained to detect cancer. They don't know if this is going to be a useful test, but it's clearly worth trying, given the cost of the expreiment and the huge benefit if it's useful.

Then on to a surgical nurse, who said she was going to take a sample. And she gave me a local anasthetic, then carved off what I thought was an unnecessarily large chunk of skin, and sent it away for testing.

The test came back today, it's a "clear cell acanthoma" and is completely benign. The treatment, according to the web, is you give it a bit of a scrape and then it heals naturally, which is what has happened. Very good news!


4 comments:

  1. Umm...why is your blog the first I'm hearing of this? I glad you're ok.
    Lots of love
    Daugher. 2

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. see Alan, Typical kids, just never listen to what you say :)

      Delete
  2. I didn't tell the daughters because it was always 99.9% certain that it was a trivial scrape on my leg. But the action of telling them would have got them worried. Some things it's better not to know.

    ReplyDelete