1) Spike the Kooka demands steak at Dick and Mary's 2) The Doctors' Sellers pop in for a cuppa and cake

3) Jade sings My Funny Valentine at Lex and Petrina's 4) Mike is puzzled to find himself in Box Hill's Casualty dept.
Oh, for crap's sake - not again!
5.12.10 - The onset of Christmas has a few plusses amongst the minuses, one of them, which is both a plus and a minus, being the social calender. I tend to favour the family events on the calender, so I happily accepted Dick's invitation to come up to Warrandyte on Thursday night to polish off one of three enormous steaks that Mary had bought from the Victoria Market that week. Inevitably they were so enormous that none of us could actually finish them, but since I last saw the other Rudds, they've been adopted by a couple of Kookas that can magically divine the appropriate moment to drop in and polish off any meaty scraps. (pic 1) Of course, strictly speaking one shouldn't cultivate such behaviour in case some sort of dependence develops, but on the surface it seems to be a wholesomely symbiotic and environmentally sound relationship.
I was startled at home the next evening to receive an aborted phone call from Dr Warren Sellers, so I had to ring him back to find out wazzup with the Wazz. He and Marg (pic 2) were down at Mentone eating fish 'n' chips when he accidentally called me, so I invited them round for a cuppa on their way home. It transpired that Warren had had a medical incident the previous week that required him to attend a hospital casualty ward to check out some mysterious goings-on with his ticker, and as a result he'd scored a couple of weeks off work . All is tickety-boo in the Wazzer ticker dept. as it turns out, and over the rest of the evening we had a good chat about this and that, (some of which is recalled in this month's Pith & Wind), before catching them up with the latest episode of QI that I'd (naturally) captured on IQ.
Saturday was Chris' 43rd (!) birthday, so I drove up to the Cuckoo Restaurant to help him celebrate that - and join the various Alkira houses to celebrate the end of the year. In fact, they're having Chris' actual birthday celebration next weekend, but I'm going to be in SA, so sadly I'll miss it.
Mary's niece Petrina (Dorrington) had called a late party for Saturday night, and she'd taken advantage of an offer by Jade Leonard (pic 3) to provide the 'lounge music' as part of Jade's plan to work every night between now and Christmas taking her music to the people. Jade looks all of thirteen years old, but could easily be twice that or more, I suppose. She certainly had a sophisticated taste in music that belied her apparent, and perhaps even actual, years. There was as nice bit of synchronicity when I was thinking it would be neat if she played My Funny Valentine next - and, blow me down, she did!
I guess I had about three flutes of bubbly and a couple of sips of red over the night before electing to head off home. I collapsed in front of the telly and then poured myself a lime cordial. It was at this point I noticed I was feeling distinctly odd, and an hour later I knew I was having an atrial fibrillation (AF) episode.
It was quite severe and at four o'clock I was still awake and reluctantly decided I should take one of the digoxin tablets I'd saved from the last AF incident in March.
I'm not sure that it did a lot for my heartbeat, but it did enough for me to grab a couple of hours of sleep at least. In the morning my pulse was very faint and still racing madly, which meant I most likely had drastically low blood pressure, but I knew from previous experience I could tolerate that without significant ill effects and drove myself to the Box Hill Casualty dept at around 10.30. (pic 4) Within half an hour or so they'd given me a comparatively massive dose of digoxin in an effort to slow my heart rate.
The good news is that my normal 'sinus' had been restored within the hour and my life can return to normal again - with a few more tests to come. Ironically, my father-which-art-in-Rotorua called this morning to say he'd just left hospital after experiencing a collapsed lung or two. He's OK, but I'm more determined now that I should make the effort to pay a visit to the folks in NZ early in the New Year.