Engrenage

Well, gentle reader, I think it is safe to say that the Cheerful Fairy is Frumeplla no more. Of course my rippling gorgeousness could use some work; always room for improvement, dontyaknow, etc.

I refer of course not only to my efforts to improve my physique, bowl over the residents of Strumpetville with my lovliness... yeah, anyway, I refer not only to that; I refer to my wider health.

Since a week last Sunday my illness returned with a vengeance: I lost three pounds over the course of the weekend, and felt pretty run down since then. It's calmed down but co-incidentally I had a hospital appointment last Thursday to follow me up.

There is something rather special about having a good doctor, and you may take good to mean intelligent; erudite; interested; or just good at lateral thinking. However, the nice lady who saw me had clearly decided this is a bit too much and the best thing to do would be to do a series of tests from scratch. Hence I spent much of the morning having blood tests and other... examinations, going round and round the hospital beaten only to the various departments by the electronic missive explaining what is required.

And, yes, and at the end of it all I have – Te Deum to be composed in honour of this momentous occasion – a diagnosis.

Intestinal spirochaetosis.

Yum.

Spirochetes are a nasty class of bacteria not routinely tested for, and as an anaerobic bug, not prone to surviving in samples exposed to air. Hence it can be hard to find. It is a class of bacteraemia that counts among its number humanity's friends, syphilis and lime disease. It is an opportunistic infection and will quite often attack people with HIV, or other sexually transmitted diseases. Although it is not sexually transmitted the bacteria are much more common among gay men (30 to 50%) than straight men (two to five per cent) for reasons unknown to science!

Well, the next step is to get some antibiotics (metronidazole in my case) for a short while and with luck my roller coaster love affair with Armitage Shanks will be over. Interestingly – in a Freudian there-are-no-accidents kind of way – I can't drink whilst on the antibiotics and for a short while afterward. That ought to be interesting...

Anyway, once I'm better I need I think to review my healthy living regime. I wasn't able to go to the gym whilst very ill and of course as before it consumed my body mass rather than body fat, so I'm perceptibly weaker than I was before. Still, it is good to take the opportunity to capitalise on the fact my ribs are showing through. I want my flat tummy!

Overall it's good to have a diagnosis; though on some level the amount of stuff to deal with right now approaches new heights or tiresomeness. I look forward to it being over... and thus this is progress of a sort.