Wishing everyone Health, Wealth and Happiness for 2026. It’s been a really tough year and so long as I don’t watch the news I can still hope that the new year will bring some peace and joy.
My biggest nightmare had been that my op make no difference at all, unfortunately I hadn’t counted on it making things a whole lot worse. It’s been a slow tough recovery and I am not as good as I was when I went into it. After the New Year they are arranging more imaging and tests to try and figure out what has gone wrong and why I am now hypersensitive to everything, blown up like a beached whale about to give birth to a concrete gargoyle. Heavy, painful and as usual no one knows what the hell is going on. Figure worst case I may end up with a new garden ornament. My photography has been a bit curtailed but I try and get out for a walk as often as I can. The weather is cool and very wet for summer so it’s not as often as I would like.
They say that your gut controls your brain and I swear it does. Memory and focus is toast and I have no idea where time goes. Every now and then I have a good day and it’s like waking up, doesn’t last long but gives me hope when this is done I might get back to being my weird version of normal.
Lake Okataina waterfall – feels like an ancient spiritual site, you can sit on the rocks at the base and just soak it all in. Probably the best photo I have taken recently , a mushroom amongst slime mould
Well it’s been a very long time to reach this point and my biggest fear going in was that they would find nothing and I would have to continue with the pain and discomfort and medical people staring at me saying we don’t know. On check in at Anglesea hospital it felt like I was going to an 80s office block with carpet chosen not to show vomit or other bodily fluids.
The carpetMain receptionView from my room
Needless to say this didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence but they reassured me that as a laparoscopic procedure this would be fast and I would just be staying overnight. The surgeon told me they would be checking for blockages and adhesions and the gynaecologist was just removing ovaries and a small 9mm cyst. Both were giving the impression that if my Rotorua surgeon hadn’t requested this investigation they would not really bother with it.
Fast forward to the next morning – the op was extra long, I have 6 incisions and the 9mm cyst was actually 5cm and attached to the sigmoid colon and they spent almost an hour detaching it. The Meckles diverticulum was in a condition that it had to be removed and part of my bowel resected. The adhesions were so prolific the whole small intestine had to be stripped. Both surgeons told me I really needed surgery and it was just in time, as it was major surgery I stayed 4 nights and I am now on a 6 week recovery program. Being allergic to everything they struggled to find any painkillers that worked for me, ended up overdosing me on oxycontin and ketamine and still had nothing that really reduced the pain. It has taken me till now to start to feel normal and my vision is slowly returning. After the overdose everything was blurry. It’s going to be a slow journey, I am on a very restricted diet and every time I do anything I have the consequences which makes it feel like one step forward and 2 back. But I am on the other side of it and I hope that once the swelling goes down I may be able to wear normal clothes again and be able to bend without taking three days to recover.
I feel very very lucky and so grateful that my surgeon here ( who was Barney’s surgeon and has become a friend) kept pushing for the investigation, without that I didn’t fit any of the diagnoses, the inside of my gut was perfectly healthy so no one could figure out why I was in so much pain and so distended. The answer for the last 4 years was just wait and see how things go as I got worse and worse.
My surgeon had told me that the symptoms of what he thought was going on were catastrophic bowel blockage and death, thank goodness I didn’t have to wait for the symptoms to finally have this dealt with.
I wrote this over a month ago and thought I published it but there it was languishing in drafts.
It feels like I have reached that age where life keeps reminding me just how fragile we are. I have never focussed so much on my health as it constantly reminds me that I need to. Around me friends and family seem like they are suddenly having to deal with serious health issues or I am getting news of the sudden passing of people I know, often younger than me. Each one makes me stop and just appreciate the time we have and that time to make the most of it is now. I have stopped watching the news and listening to what seems like 12 yr olds with overblown egos trying to ruin the whole world and focussing on what is around me. I have my op finally on November 4th and fingers crossed it will be brief and fast to heal.
I have spent the last week in christchurch with mum and she just gets better and better, she is so much healthier and happier than she has ever been. It’s almost unbelievable, she loves chocolate and forgets she has just had some and is constantly asking for more. At first I would tell her she has already had too much, that she is diabetic and she shouldn’t have so much, her argument is she would prefer to die of consuming too much chocolate than of boredom. I think she is right, she has always eaten too much chocolate and at almost 92 all the warnings seem irrelevant. Why not do and have what you love and enjoy the day.
So before I head to Hamilton on Monday I am going to go down a steep and tricky gorge with 5 river crossings to photograph Beech Strawberries which are about 1 or 2 cm and only around for a couple of weeks. My wonderful fungi buddies went down there a few days ago to make sure they are there so I would get to see them before I am out of action.
My christchurch visit also had a bit of excitement. I took my old camera and lenses which I have struggled to use for macro photography ( it’s not recommended for it) and traded it in on a new Olympus Om1 which is one of the best cameras around for macro. It will take me a while to learn how to use it but watch this space.
Before I headed off to christchurch I managed to get to Whirinaki which is one of my favourite places, old growth untouched forest, its energy, the bird life and the huge trees make you want to just sit and soak it all in.
Just phone photos but the magnolias are magnificent, this is just a few minutes walk from my house and it’s a memorial tree trust with each tree being a memorial for someone who has passed. It’s a wonderful place to walk in all seasons but right now the tui’s are out in the cherry blossoms getting drunk and scrapping ( I am sure photos to come) the magnolias are out in all their glory and the daffodils coming up in bunches. I love spring with all the colourful surprises and watery sunshine.
I tried to make this a wee video but I think my blog has a few restrictions. If I did manage I would have added Yanti Neils – Simple Joys – it makes me smile
We thought we would experiment with having mum come up and visit me instead of me going to Christchurch. The concern with her dementia was if she could cope with being in a strange place with no cues that she recognised. Apparently this can trigger increased confusion, so the task was to try and minimise the opportunities for this and try and give her some new experiences. I started with making sure anything I had of hers was out and visible and I made a big notice in her bedroom to say she is at my house and she is on holiday. Ian (brother) flew up with her and she coped very well with the flight. Once here she just loved being around us and someone feeding her chocolate and nice meals. She contentedly took my chair looking out at the view and loved every minute of her holiday. My friend Lee introduced her to her chickens and we visited bubbling mud, small excursions but enough. Just 4 days but we noticed she was becoming more lucid and remembering things that had just happened. Having Ian here meant I could get groceries and manage normally but if he wasn’t here it would become overwhelming very quickly to not be able to leave her alone for a moment. Back in christchurch she knows her home well and I can escape for an hour or two but here it’s a different story. I think I could manage about 10 days so the plan is for me to go back to chch in October and then bring her back with me for maybe a week. She just loved the company more than anything and she always tells me she feels better each time I come down and stay with her. I wish there was a magic solution but it is so full on 10 days every 6 weeks is almost as much as I can handle. At 91 she is healthy and mobile (short distances) pretty good really.
It’s was May and now suddenly it’s August and nothings changed. Procrastination plus, I have become highly skilled at not doing all the things I really should be doing or could be doing and succeeding spectacularly at getting absolutely nothing done. I keep waiting for something interesting to happen and nope, keep looking and nothing has changed.
I am still waiting for them to schedule the op, they have talked to me and talked amoung themselves but so far nothing is happening. I am convinced I will get a call and they will tell me it’s tomorrow and can I drive to Hamilton and be there at 6am. It seems to be the way thing work. So while I am waiting I have been out fungalling when I can and doing very little else. It’s been a super wet winter, not necessarily cold but just torrential downpours and atmospheric rivers just dumping on us. It wipes out the fungi and wipes me out with endless grey wet days.
Gardening has been hard and there is heaps of cleanup to do from winter. The local council trimmed some large street trees and chipped them. They are in huge piles and available to the public, 26 bags later the weeds are covered and the whole garden looks much better. My theory is the weeds that manage to come through the chips will be much easier to pull – who knows if thats true but it works for me. Now how to find a vege garden quick fix.
Good news is that mum is doing well, I went down for 10 days mid June. I had a cough before I went down and almost cancelled but it improved so went ahead with the trip. It got much worse while I was in Christchurch but luckily mum didn’t catch it. Got back and finally went to doc – Bronchitis and they hit me with everything just in case I was going to have surgery. Got better, then worse again, another antibiotic and steroid treatment and finally after almost 50 days I got rid of it. Then they discovered the steroids had given me some serious side effects. They are still trying to figure out how to manage that.
The other good news is that Stu is in remission and the hard work he has put in seems to be keeping the cancer from spreading. He has transformed his body and looks 10 years younger. It’s really inspiring, I couldn’t do it but I can incorporate some of the things he is doing and it feels like spring is the time to do it with all its new growth and new beginnings.
So tuning out the politics, both here and internationally is the first step, it is hard but I am learning to detach from the constant shock, anger and feeling of helplessness at most of the shenanigans and learning to laugh at as much of it as I can. I challenge myself to notice what is wonderful around me and focus on that even if it’s just the neighbours cat deciding to sleep on my head on cold nights. Next step is more exercise which is easier as it’s warming up. State of mind and state of body are inextricably linked so definitely time to work on both. Fingers crossed my next update will have so more good news.
Cold morning thermal activity looking out over Lake Rotorua
I can’t believe my last post was in February, so much has happened and time just seems to fly by. I drove back from my Christchurch excursion and the day after I got back I ended up in ED ( emergency department for the US guys) with a partial bowel blockage, well that was just the beginning of ED visits which have culminated in MRI scans and cat scans, ultrasounds and more. Bottom line they found a congenital condition and a mass – now trying to coordinate surgeons and find a way to get a gynaecologist and a general surgeon to operate at the same time. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. I head off tomorrow to Hamilton (about an hour and half from here) to hopefully take the next step.
In the mean time it’s finally the start of fungi season, way later than usual this year with a super dry summer, we finally got some big rain events and suddenly the fungi are coming up. Fungi hunting gets me out in absolutely breathtaking native forest and although the walks are only 3 -4 kilometres I take about 3 hours to do it as I spend most of my time lying on the ground. The places I go are off the grid with no cell service and often crazy pothole filled mud tracks to get in so I always got with fellow fungal fanatics. When you are out fungalling whole world is focussed on the 2mm tiny mushroom on the far side of a rotting log covered in spiderwebs and teetering on the edge of a ravine. I am so thankful to have the space away from all the world’s craziness.
Hard to belief it’s almost march, time passes so quickly, I intend to do an update then it’s two weeks later and I have not even given it another thought. Things have been interesting 🤔 I think that’s the best way to put it.
January I headed down to Christchurch in the wee car for mums 91st. Hard to believe it was not that long ago we were not sure she would make it to 90, now she is probably in the best health she has been in the last 10+ years. The trip down was fun, stayed the night in Raetihi near Ohakune in a tiny house, I think it was only minimally larger than the car. The bed was up a ladder and you crawled over the floor to get in as the ceiling height was less than a meter. But taking a break meant I could take my time heading down to Wellington. It was also going to be Yifei’s 9th birthday while I was in christchurch and I was bringing her a special mouse and documenting miss mousse’s trip to see her.
For mums birthday we all got together and had a picnic at Kaituna Valley which was where would come as kids for family picnic’s what feels like 100 years ago. As a gift for mum each of us took a piece of her black and white artwork and coloured it for her. She loved it and had a wonderful day out. It was the day before her actual birthday which was the Monday. On Monday she kept noticing the date and happily telling me it was her birthday every few minutes. She didn’t remember anything of the day before so was hopefully looking for presents. Luckily I had saved a present for her and by cutting all the chocolate up in very small pieces I was able to give her birthday chocolate ever time she would look at the date on the huge display we have in the kitchen and suddenly discover it was her birthday. She is a chocoholic and forgets she has had one and demands another one. Then of course she couldn’t remember how old she was. I eventually started telling her she was 103 and she would stare at me and say No I Am Not! So she did know she wasn’t 103, then I would give her some paper and pencil so she could work it out, she still does remember what year she was born. This was done to lots of laughs and giggles and she thoroughly enjoyed her day.
Ohh chocolate With SIL Kaye At Japanese restaurant rocking new sunnies
Getting ready for the trip back to Rotorua I thought maybe I could try and fix the broken window motor on the passenger side. First a trip to the wreckers who listed the same model car but a year older. The yard was like stepping onto a movie set, a couple of hard case characters at the entrance were just the beginning. Found the car, eventually, found the motor and $30 later I was feeling like this might just work. An hour later covered in black sticky stuff, dirt, grease and assorted stains I found I had learned two things, don’t wear light coloured clothing to a wrecking yard and a 2011 window motor is never going to fit a 2012 car.
I stuffed the wee car full of lots of mums project stuff, more to clear a space at her place so I can eventually graduate from the couch to an actual bed than knowing what I will do with all the stuff and I hit the road. I love road trips and the drive to Picton is always a pleasure. I had been unwell most of my time in chch so I was pretty tired and I decided for the first time ever to book a cabin on the ferry since it was going to be an early start. It was perfect, I got a nap and didn’t have to keep taking my stuff with me and losing my seat every time I got up and as the weather was so bad we had a longer than usual trip, rock and rolling all the way. Now I have had a cabin I can never go back!
Finally back, started to relax and suddenly in the middle of the night got a free ride in one of the nice new ambulances up to ED. I would say that I was a 10/10 pain and more than a little concerned at this point. Bowel blockage – eek! A few days later they decide I could go home but wasn’t out of the woods, it was over a week with another trip to ED before things were functioning normally. Luckily for me I had spent way too much time with one of the surgeons who had worked with Barney and he agreed to follow up with me. Normally with a resolved blockage they basically do nothing, just wait and see if it happens again. Thats hard as you don’t know what to eat, what not to eat, what to do, there is no way you ever want to have it happen again and you feel helpless. Dr Griffith has arranged an MRI in two weeks which I think is as much to put my mind at rest as it is to find out if there are any physical issues that would put me at risk of further blocks. I am very grateful, it’s like if I have the data I can accept the plan, but if it’s just a … well yeah it could happen again next week or in another 25 years …that’s hard to deal with. So I then trot back to the cardiologist who did the ablation and he says he thinks it’s a success in that it has resolved the atrial tachycardia which was the electrical issue. But the fact I am still getting heart rates over 190 with mild exercise apparently that’s a plumbing issue and I have to go back to the beginning and find another cardiologist that specialises in that and that I need to wait till at least 6 month from my ablation. I probably don’t need to mention that these last couple of months have been a trifle stressful. And as always the solution to stress is walks in the forest and of course mushrooms. This has been the driest worst start to a mushroom season that anyone can remember. Normally right now it’s full on colour, what’s out there is sparse but there are a few gems and I will keep hunting them down 😎
A bug A fungi that eats bugs NZ Shitake Yes it is a fungi in an eggshell
It doesn’t feel like Christmas, it been wet and windy and suddenly hot then wet again. Looks like we will have some rain tomorrow for Christmas Day, it’s summer but nothing like the hot dry summer we have been threatened with. I have not been up to much at all, the ablation looked like it worked for about a week but now I have a whole different problem that has been getting worse and worse. I finally got some new meds that didn’t work so I doubled the dose today and finally had a whole day that I could move around without consequences. Fingers crossed I will be ok to drive to christchurch for mums birthday. 91 is another milestone not to be missed.
I made a fruit cake, my first ever Christmas cake and as anyone who knows me I am not much of a cake baker. This one tastes great but crumbles and is more like a pudding, but hey it is my homage to Christmas and will get nibbled away at over the next few weeks.
I am looking forward to heading down to chch, it’s a long drive but I love road trips. Mum misses her car and there is no spare cars for my two week visit so I get to drive. 2 days down and 2 days back. Only thing that could be better is if I could stretch it out to 3 or 4 days and stop at all the places I would like to on the way.
So it’s been a bit of a journey with this heart stuff and I didn’t realise how much I had just got used to it until I got some new meds and felt I had suddenly woken up, my brain was clear for the first time in a long time. I stopped the meds last week and had my heart ablation op on tuesday. Basically they told me they would 3d map my heart and identify which nerve bundles were firing that shouldn’t be and they would zap them. I think I was led to expect it was something that would take maybe 30 min and I would be awake but hardly notice. After 3 hours, painful and uncomfortable and listening to the surgeon being taught the new equipment with my pain helping him understand what didn’t work, I also found out that fentanyl does not work for me as pain relief. But it’s done and I survived. It’s day 3 afterwards and I am having a few side effects that are a bit challenging so the journey continues.
It’s not fungi season here but I was anxious to get out in the bush before the op as I knew that it would be a few weeks before I could manage the terrain again. We were so lucky, Whirinaki is such a special, old growth forest and we found mushies 👏👏 I am particularly lucky that my friend Lee has been coaching me on taking macro photos and invited me on the walk.
Then for the op we had to drive to Hamilton, about an hour and half from here. Being worried about getting caught with road works or an accident we ended up getting there over hour and half early. So had a lovely visit to the botanical gardens, I just had my phone but the roses were spectacular, covered in dew and fragrant. I couldn’t resist a couple of photos.
The Traveling Kiwi 