Mixed Ramble No 1 For 2020

 I am writing to update my readers on several points of news in regards to myself.

Continuing on the Skin Cancer trail, I wanted to update my friends on what has been going on.  This morning (Monday in Australia) I had my head wound checked and re-dressed. The doctor and nurse also looked at the graft site from whence they took the graft for my latest SCC wound. There have been some big limitations to my walking programme from the graft injury. The injury made it so much harder to walk as much as I would like to. The pictures I have included are not completely up to date as I took some more this morning we will share later.

Some time ago, prior to the recent operation, we had attempted to get what has been known for a long time as Domicilliary Nursing to come and re-dress my post-cancer wounds.at home.  Initially, we were fobbed off to the local GP's nurse to show Louise how to re-dress my head wound every couple of days. She did it very well, back then but I need more of this now I have had another operation on the area.

We are not sure how the nurse at the hospital achieved it, this time but we finally have been called to arrange for the nurse to come every couple of days to our home to re-dress my head wound! Possibly the hospital nurse told the service I could not walk very far, so I was not able to use public transport to get to the doctor's surgery as that involved 600 meters walk, twice; to and from the bus on both ends. (Totalling more than 2kms all up.) Also a shorter walk from the bus on the other end to the doctor's rooms. We did not let on that Louise had been managing to fix me up before but from her power chair, it was too hard to do any more of this hard work. 

After this all heals up, I will commence the 4 times a week for 4 weeks of Radiotherapy, due to the aggressive nature of cancer that has been removed and might return.

Being a Type 2 Diabetic my Dietitian wanted to help me with some weight loss and recommended some meal substitution. Optifast made by the Nestle company is a collection of shakes, soups and desserts that are low joule and Gluten-Free. These will help me get the weight off as I usurp them for most lunches when I am home. It is just a pity that my walking has been stymied because of the graft injury to my leg, hindering the walks that I love. I have had to increase the Insulin doses to try and get my blood sugar levels down replacing the lowering of same I also achieved by walking. 

The Optifast is not cheap and it was a real relief to learn I was qualified for Government support for my meal replacement. I appreciate the government funding of the meal replacement under our "My Aged Care*" programme. However, while I get the funding, I would still like to manage the said funding the best way possible but there is not much difference between bulk buying pricing and "over- the - counter" individual packet pricing. I could still try and get a better price over the counter on the different elements of Optifast and get reimbursed through my *MAC Service provider. Funny thing is I can get bulk cartons of mixed shakes and so on but they won't do bulk mixed soups which would be nice.

The shakes come in Vanilla, Strawberry, Banana, Mocha and Coffee. There are Desserts as well in Lemon and Chocolate and I am not sure what other options they come in. The Soups come in Vegetable, Chicken and Tomato.

I am interested to know if things happen in other countries the way they do in Australia regarding queer practises of different Supermarket chains. I realize the competition is more prevalent in the USA seeing you have probably ten times Australia's population to provide more options for the public in supermarkets.

I have recently become more aware of the restriction of particular brands of groceries to different chains of supermarkets in Australia. Apart from their "store" brands of course. Another thing that goes on, is that, even amongst particular chains, not all of their stores carry the same lines in the individual stores. I will accept that in different parts of our city and state, certain products sell more in some places than others and I guess retailers don't want space taken up on their shelves with products that are not selling. Of course, there is that other theory about wholesalers paying higher fees to supermarkets for better positions on the shelves as well. Never mind stores moving stock around to different parts of the store so the poor old customer has to hunt them down and in the process get to see other products they might decide to buy, A marketing ploy, of course.

As I close, I wanted to talk about one other thing that my international readers may not have been aware of. That is the tussle between one of our Supermarket chains, Woolworths and the Apple Computer company. If you look at the pictures of the two major supermarkets, you will see how much similar the Woolworth's newest Logo looks to the Apple Logo. The W of Woolworths (see the green card picture)is so similar to the Apple Logo there was a big legal fight for quite a while over it. I think Woolowroths won their case to continue using their logo as Woolworths, while also being into poker or slot machine manufacture, sadly, has nothing to do with the computer industry.