It’s odd that only just before Christmas I was talking to my mate Pete about dogs being put down. He works in air-conditioning and sometimes in vet’s practices, he often sees people going in with a dog on a lead then leaving with just a lead. I said I really wasn’t looking forward to that day.

And then it happened. That day came, and it wasn’t even the dog I was expecting.

Over Christmas Dillon had a seizure. He jumped off the couch and looked like he was about to throw up. I quickly ushered him into the garden expecting him to puke everywhere. But what happened next will stay with me for a long time. He fell onto his side and just started twitching. His paws were just moving randomly, and his head was jerking up and down. All I could do was watch. It lasted about five minutes, then suddenly stopped. He got up and just stood there. It was kind of like an animal version of ‘shell shock’, like he didn’t really know where he was. During those five minutes, ‘Dillon’ left the planet. His personality, his traits, all vanished. What was left was a functioning dog of sorts, but it wasn’t really Dillon. He recovered to the point that he came inside but wouldn’t settle. I stayed with him until I fell asleep on the couch. I took him to the vets as soon as I awoke. The vet prescribed epilepsy pills and presented a four hundred quid bill. I took him home. He spent the next few days mainly walking aimlessly and sleeping. He was well enough though to go on a few really nice walks through the nature reserve. I hope he was able to remember those and enjoy them. He was called back into the vets after some more tests, but he was beginning to twitch and look very unsteady on his feet. He also manged to walk clean through the water bowl and into a wall. That was the last time I saw him awake. He had another seizure when he was at the vets and they tried everything to try and bring him round, but the amount of medication required to stop him twitching was causing him just to sleep. There was no way forward. I made a very hard decision, to just let him sleep permanently. The vets were wonderful. I got to sit in the cage with him and spend as much time as I needed. I removed his harness which he still had on from when I took him in the car. I’d already removed his collar and little neckerchief before I took him to the vets, I think at that point I’d already given up hope, even if the vets thought otherwise. I spent a good half hour with him, he was just lying on his side, breathing gently but his head was twitching. I stroked him gently; he had his thick winter coat. I never realised how big he actually was, until seeing him spread out on his side. He already had a catheter in his leg. I filled in all the consent forms. I made the joke of, ‘Dillon I’m signing your life away’. I’m not sure the vet appreciated my weird sense of humour, but really it was more of a pain control mechanism. She brought in two vials, one was just saline, the other was purple, a shade of colour I will never forget. Phenobarbital. And there was a lot of it. I’d brought a crème egg in with me. I’d bought a couple a few years back for this exact moment. Probably well past their sell by date. I bit the top off and scooped out some of the filling onto my little finger. Dillon duly licked it off. That was his last ever meal, he got to sample chocolate and crème egg filling. And with me stroking him the vet started squeezing the syringe. It can’t have been more than 10cc’s and he just stopped breathing. She continued to squeeze until the syringe was empty, but Dillon, what was left of him, had gone. I had a couple of minutes with my dead dog and then left, just carrying his harness. I did what I always do and just went for a walk.

 What if I’d noticed a week or so earlier that the drawl he had when he came in from outside wasn’t normal? I’d just rejected it as probably something he’d eaten. What if I’d taken him to the vets then and got him on epilepsy medication? What if after he’d had his first seizure, I continued with the epilepsy treatment and got more pills from the vets, would he still be here now? The most likely probability is he had a brain tumour, or a bleed on the brain. The prognosis was set in stone, nothing would have changed the eventual outcome, but I will always have this nagging, ‘What if?’.

But it is the same with all things. What if Mark went for a pee before getting on his moped and got run over by a Scania? What if Nat nagged her doctor a bit more and got a scan much earlier? What if I’d been a better husband and not treated Jamie so much like an owned object? Life is all about decisions, sometimes I feel I certainly don’t make the right ones.

On Sundays I always tried to take Sasha out for an extra walk through the nature reserve. She’s fifteen. I always expected that when she passed, I would then take Dillon. He was thirteen. I always expected Sasha to pass first; the focus was always on her. But in the background Dillon was getting older, he was turning into an old man. He always looked at me when I came back with Sasha, I know he would have enjoyed that walk also.

I wasn’t the best dog dad. I’m sure I had plenty of fun times with Dillon, yet all that springs to mind is the times I shouted at him for eating cardboard, or for getting under my feet and being in the bloody way.

Could I have played with him more, could have we gone on more walks, could we have spent more time together? The answer to all those questions is of course yes. But here is the problem. Life just gets in the way. I couldn’t dedicate my entire life to dogs; other things just had to be done.

And now I’m just left with Sasha. She’s been in the unfortunate position of not just being abandoned once, but twice. She was a rescue after being dumped at the age of one. She was at that age an almighty pain in the ass and remained that way for a considerable number of years. She was abandoned a second time when my ex. husband left me. Several years passed before she stopped running up the stairs after her walk to see if Jamie was there. Now she’s just an old lady, with a weak bladder and very unsteady on her feet. You can still throw a ball, and she will trot off and fetch it for you. But she has the look in her eyes of, ‘Why didn’t you throw it a bit more when I was more able to chase it?’.

Fifteen years ago, I made a commitment to look after her until she’s dead (so did my ex. husband, but that’s another story). I will fulfil that promise. She’s not my biggest fan and we kind of tolerate each other, but she was always Jamie’s dog, there is no great bond between us. But she still enjoys her walks and loves her food. Long may that continue.

In a parallel universe I’d still be with Jamie and Sasha and Dillon would both be still around.

Now as I’m very much into my autumn years, it’s important to plan for the future, but also very important to enjoy the ‘now’. Appreciate the things and people around you today as they may not be here tomorrow.

I think this has also somewhat helped to ‘thaw’ the relationship with my mother. I spent Christmas day with her and my sister, and to be perfectly honest it was ‘fine’. Actually, it was probably better than ‘fine’, it was ‘good’. For something I was dreading it actually turned out to be a really good day. I think maybe when I was growing up, ‘life’ probably just got in her way, I kind of get that now.

As I sit here in Gran Canaria sipping the last of my cocktail, I raise the glass to you, ‘Dillon’. I’m sorry I wasn’t great and didn’t do as much with you as I could have. That’s one regret I’m going to have to live with forever.

Dedicated to ‘Dillon’, you were a good boy, I’ll miss you and love you forever.

And only because FaceBook reminded me about it did I remember, and that wasn’t until the early evening. Well it was a good excuse for a party I guess. Shame about the eventual outcome. Did I ever recover from it? I guess not really. Not the party, I recovered from that fairly quickly, wasn’t even tipsy, kept chatting to people and leaving pints everywhere. Considering the quality of the bash, it was actually fairly cheap. Never did use the chocolate fountain, and the DJ was crap.

Am I content? That’s a mildly ironic comment. I think I just have to be. My hand has been dealt, I have no further aspirations or desires, I’m just waiting for the inevitability of death, but just trying to pass the time in between in the most inappropriate way possible, whilst paying very little tax. I think of what could have been, if we were still together. Maybe we would still be having fun, maybe we wouldn’t. The time we were together we did indeed have a lot of fun, we travelled to many places, went on an awful lot of rollercoasters and I spent an awful lot of money, while my ex. just used to steel all my AA batteries. He seems content now, and honestly I do wish him well, even if I do think he can be a pompous prick at times. I wouldn’t fancy him now, definitely a bear rather than a twink.

So what for me? Well, I’ve got a holiday coming up, Greece, never been before, oddly not looking forward to it in the slightest, even thought about cancelling it on several occasions. But it’s paid for, so I guess I need to stick with it. I’m sure it will be fine, I’m just somewhat apprehensive about going somewhere different. I’ve never really had a shit holiday, I guess the closest I’ve come is actually some visits to Gran Canaria, where I’ve been bored.

Oddly I look around me and all my friends have some ailment or another. Just this instant one has said he has blood cancer and is currently being treated for it. I just hope he has a better outcome than the last person I knew with it, as I went to his funeral last year. Another is basically on a death wish. He drinks probably close to two hundred units a week, gets zero exercise and has a shit ton of problems, yet he’s still here. I have another ‘friend’ who has now ostracised me because I didn’t want a demo of his science project, I honestly thought more of him, but that’s a post for another time. Not the post I was planning on writing, maybe that will come next week.

Still, always that death thing to look forward to in the mean time.

I took off a sock the other evening, the back of it had completely worn through. I tossed it in the bin, its days of covering my feet were over. Then I had a thought, nostalgia cutting in, what memories could this sock tell? How many thousands of miles has it covered? What adventures did it accompany me on? Did it ever visit the States? Did it get stuck up a mountain on the verge of death? How many dog walks? Was it there on my wedding day, or the day my divorce came through? Had it travelled to the Canary Islands, Weymouth or just the local pub?

It’s surprising how such trivial items can trigger memories. I look around me, many of my friends are now in the winter of their lives, I’m still thankfully I think in the autumn of mine. My target age is eighty-three, that gives me thirty years. Four of which I’m still working, okay, only part time thankfully, plus it keeps me out of trouble and I enjoy it. I don’t think I’m going for any more major life changes. I’m fairly content and now accelerating rapidly towards death. Do I want another relationship? I don’t honestly think so. I’ve been there and done that. I think I’m now very much destined to be single, but I can live with that. I don’t have enough wardrobe space to spare for a start. I need to do a bit more travelling, but apart from that I think I’m pretty much done.

I’ve lived a life that’s full, I travelled each and every highway, and more, much more than this, I did it my way.

As for that sock, it will go in the recycling, maybe it’s only on the beginning of a new journey.

The anticipation was one thing, the fear of failure was another.

I was at the point of three options, drink, pop Zopiclone or just not sleep. I was pretty much resigned to the fact that I would die by either alcoholism, drug overdose or insomnia.

So I took the pill, thirty minutes before bed. My anxiety was through the roof. I had zero expectations. To be honest I was probably almost wishing it didn’t work for some strange reason. But hey, I turned the light out in great anticipation of being awake for the next seven hours.

I was asleep within sixteen minutes. I did get up for a pee a few hours later but then I was back to sleep again pretty instantly.

Meh it was a one off. Popped a pill again on the Tuesday and the Wednesday. It worked again, asleep within minutes. No weird dreams or side effects. I just slept.

So is it the answer? Well it’s early days yet. I’ve only taken it on three occasions, but on each of those it has worked. I’m looking forward to trying it again over the next few weeks.

If it continues to work I will have to find something else to die of.

So I finally managed to get a telephone appointment with the doctor. This was not the same patronising bitch who insisted that I was an alcoholic, who I spoke to about eighteen months ago. Although the surgery made their best attempt at trying to get me to have an appointment with her again. No. After taking advice from another doctor I had an appointment with the senior partner of the surgery.

This was Doctor Young. His opening gambit was not, ‘you drink too much’. A good start. Actually he did something very unusual, he listened. He did ask about my relationship with alcohol, but never once did he accuse me of being an alcoholic or having a dependence. If anything, he thought that my alcohol consumption was actually well under control, if somewhat high, but was happy that I was fully aware of this. We discussed all the usual things, CBTi, and sleep hygiene and all that crap. He was, actually, very nice. They don’t like prescribing ‘Zopiclone’ for more than a couple of weeks, it can be addictive and it can become tolerable, to the point it has zero effectiveness. But, I took took it for around four years, and it worked every time. I took it last Tuesday, it still worked within thirty minutes.

We then kind of hit the end of the conversation, the ‘Where do we go from here moment’. Oddly, we were both on the same page, the exact same internet page. Both looking at ‘Daridorexant’. I couldn’t pronounce it, he didn’t’t have a bloody clue what it did. He corrected my pronunciation, I filled him in on its use and effects. We agreed to give it a blast. I think he was interested in it effectiveness and what side effects, if any, it had. I was willing to give feedback and was quite eager to try.

I had the prescription on the Tuesday, popped in to pharmacy, ‘It’ll be here tomorrow’. It wasn’t. ‘It’ll be here tomorrow’. Almost gave up at this point, went to just collect the prescription and they actually had it.

So now I have the magic drug. Will it work? I don’t know. The problem is the anticipation may outweigh its effectiveness. You build yourself up so much for the ‘wonder drug’, and then only to be disappointed.

Tomorrow I will know. Roll on tomorrow.

So I have this ‘retro’ arcade machine, probably got it about eleven years ago now. About six months ago I spent ages writing various utilities to update the game list, now has around seven thousand games, basically every arcade game ever up to the millennium. All mostly work and play fine. I got a Chinese hard drive with pretty much every console game on it up to about the last ten years, managed to purge pretty much everything I wanted over to the arcade machine, plus I have all the console games ready to play on this drive.

I’ve now also got ‘The Spectrum’ which is a perfect emulation of the old ‘Speccy’, including all the rubber keys. Comes with a load of games, plus I got a USB drive with about forty-thousand more on it.

But do you know what? The games are crap. Colour clash, awful sound, glitchy sprites and appalling game play. Am I taken back to my childhood self, no.

I can’t go back to a time when I was fourteen years old, at ‘Spellbound amusements’ on ‘Whiteladies Road’, where every lunchtime was spent living off a king sized Mars bar and piling up ten pence’s on the screen of ‘Dragons Lair’.

You can recreate the tech, but you can’t recreate the memories.

Okay, so it’s been a while. Melatonin wasn’t the answer, like the other drugs, it made me drowsy but it didn’t make me sleep. I tried GABA as well as that was supposed to help in combination, but again, made me drowsy, didn’t make me sleep.

Did some experiments, the interesting thing is, analysing the sleep patterns, comparing when I’m drinking, to when I’m not drinking and when I’m taking Zopiclone, there is no difference. I’m actually sleeping the same, the difference is when I’ve been drinking or taken Zopiclone I don’t remember being awake.

So have an appointment in the coming week with the senior partner at the doctors. There is a new drug out which looks interesting, it removes ‘wakefulness’, so definitely worth a try. Hopefully that will work out okay. Next week is looking interesting overall, let’s see how it pans out.

So after last week of wearing a Melatonin patch, taking a sleeping tablet (antihistamine) and some other sleeping tablet (mainly herbal junk), then being completely wide awake at 3AM I decided to try something a bit different. I know that Zopiclone works, but isn’t reall a long term solution, so decided to give Melatonin another blast, but this time in tablet form. I think the patches did something, but not really enough so going for the main ingrediant. Yes, it was prescribed, albiet from a rather questionable source. The leaflet says it is to be used to treat ‘jet-lag’ in adults, but more interestingly it says, ‘Insomnia in children and adolescents (6 to 17 years old) with ADHD’.

I’ll do a post at 3AM if I’m still awake.