from my mail box this morning !!!

Dear Mr. Watkins,
As a member a few Genealogy mailing lists, I'm impressed with the way you structure your answers to the questions that people post.
Some of the sites you have sent people to, have also been a help to me. I thank you for this.
Quiet a few months ago I gave someone a site to find a relative. An email came back with "love you love you thank you thank you" etc. etc. It's a good feeling to know that we are all out there helping each other.
If their was an award for top Genealogist Volunteer on the net you would be up for it.

Thanks again

best wishes

Xxxx
Perth
Western Australia

Thank you - what a nice start to my day !

I have just got up at 600am
4 nights ago I tried sleeping without my CPAP machine
because it was getting so noisy with the bearings worn out, and a theoretical risk of overheating and consequent fire - or plastic fumes in my lungs.

I had a horrible night , repeatedly waking up gasping for breath.

In the afternoon I went to Heartlands Hospital accident and emergency and asked for help
breathlessness was my presenting symptom, clutching my dying machine in its grey padded carry-case in my hand.

By the time I was processed the Respiration Physiology department was closed for the night, and I was unable to borrow a replacemnt machine.

The young A & E doctor suggested sending me home for the night
"please may I speak to your superior" was my response and I was given a bed and 5 litres oxygen a minute(?)
for the night. After settling for sleep I was woken up at 1130pm and moved to an overflow ward for the rest of the night where a most helpful male nurse from Belfast looked after us.

The O2 was not much help and having missed tea and supper, two cups of tea and a salad sandwich was all I got, I was half fasting and had all sorts of strange food related dreams - toast and a toaster was in one :-)

A little night walking ensused and another cup of tea. A high carb breakfast of "forbidden" foods like toasted white bread, wih butter and marmalade, and cornflakes, restored me for an hour then I ahd tolie down again. A Danish hospital would have served high fibre rye bread and slices of cheese.

I was a little "manic" talking my head off - as do people who live alone, The three of the other five patients were all due for discharge. Two with gale related industries. One had watched his greenhouse being demolished by the strong wind, unfortunately he must have been downwind, and he was hit on the head by a pane of glass which smashed on his head and the shards cut him and severed a tendon in his hand.

Another was a heart by-pass patient who had gone out and (too) vigourously started sawing boughs off a fallen tree which had landed on his back fence. As the heart specialists say "he dropped" - but not dead but woke up back in hospital. I said well getting old is like having an old car one thing or the other is always going wrong, and he added "with a wonky engine too "

In the bed next to me was an older man about 88 who was missing his cigarettes having abstained for 4 or 5 days. A "healthy" long term cigarette smoker aged about 85 and I tried to shock him into staying off cigarettes by pointing out the circulation problems regularly cause older smokers with poor circulation to have legs cut off daily in hospitals. My mother gave up smoking in her sixties.

Another man had an abcess in his jaw and the failed dental treatment meant he had a broken jaw. That brought back memories of my stay in Millbank military hospital, now demolished (and replaced by the Turner Gallery behind the TATE!) where I met an army cook who had had a terrorists bullet through his jaw in the Malayan (or Burmese?) jungle. His jaws were wired together and he was healing nicely.

Well enough of medical matters which should really be in the BLOOG