Woodturning to date                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          I  photographed these to see what they look like on the blog. The box on the left was just an accident from start to finish. The piece of cherry was due to be thrown away because of the cracks. I decided to practice turning a hollow form and it turned out unusual, to say the least. I then decided I would make a lid and turn it into a box.

As you can see, there is a collar of sycamore to the bottom of the lid. Remember that old adage about measuring twice and cutting once, well I wish that I had remembered it, the lid fell through into the box the first time!!!

The Zebrano platter above was a surprise when I turned it. No one told me that Zebrano stinks like dog Sh** when you are turning and sanding it. The smell hung around the workshop for days even with the application of a smelly spray from Avon. I dont think I will turn any more Zebrano for a bit.

The fruit is Yew, Beech, Purple heart and Laburnum. The natural edged fruit bowl is from a bit of local windfall spalted beech.

The little box at the top, Walnut I think, was made for a competition in our local club. When I turned up on club night and saw all the great pieces everyone had brought, I went to take my box back to the car but was spotted by the club secretary as I was sneaking out. He made me put it back on the table. I couldn't believe it when it got second prize in the amateur section.

My Fight with a gall stone

It all started just over a couple of years ago, I think. I started to suffer pains in my chest. They were quite severe and my Doctor sent me to the hospital to check out my heart.
After a few tests the Doctors finally agreed that my heart was as strong as an ox??. Though, this did not take the pain away.
After a couple of hours the pain receded, and I got on with my life as they say.

This was the start of a recurring problem and this year, after 6 months of a mild niggling sort of pain but with nasty flare ups of the sort that makes you wonder if you time had come. Then finally, it got so bad that I was taken to Hospital with severe abdominal pain.
Within hours I was sent for an ultra sound scan and the diagnosis was Gall Stones!

Almost immediately the request went out to the prayer group and my situation was lifted to the Lord in prayer.

As the pain receded, I started to look about, as you do, wondering what everyone was in for. I was a surgical ward, as I found out and everyone was in there for an operation.

In the bed next to me was a young lad of about eighteen. You get chatting when there is not much else to do just lying there and he told me that his name was Oliver and that he was living in a garage!! He said he had a dog and that he couldn’t stay in digs with a pet, so he decided that he would rough it until he found somewhere else.
As we were chatting the nurse came in and asked him if he needed a quiet room to take his medicine. !!!
They never asked me this when they inserted a suppository!!!!??

He declined anyway and she brought in a beaker of green slimy looking liquid. It looked revolting, and he didn’t drink it for some time, though he kept glancing at it. He finally drank it down and a few minutes later he fell asleep.

The next day he told me that he was a heroin addict and that the green goo was his heroin substitute. The reason he was in hospital was to have a needle removed from his vein where it had broken off.
They took him away for his operation and I prayed for him. What a waste of so much potential.

He came back to the ward and lay sleeping till morning. He then got out of bed and started dressing I chatted to him and he said he had to go as he didn’t like hospitals and his dog needed feeding. He was walking from the ward when the nurse caught him and made him go back to the bed. He was adamant that he would not stay and that he was going. She said that he should wait until the doctor had seen him or at least until she had got him some medication to go with. He was pacing up and down at the side of the bed and seemed very agitated. I spoke to him and told him that I was a Christian and that I felt that I should pray for him, would he mind if I did. He laughed and said I could if I wanted.
The ward was full of visitors by this time and I don’t remember what I prayed as I felt the Lord lead me but as I said Amen, I realised all the ward had listened to the prayer and there was silence and then a great rush of sound as they all started talking again.
I had never done anything like this before but it felt so right. I could not change Oliver’s life but God could and I knew that was all I needed to do.
Oliver walked out of the ward and out of my life probably, with the visitors. Every one of the visitors smiled at me and said goodbye as they walked out, perhaps God had used that prayer for someone else. I’ll never know but I hope so.

Because my pancreas was inflamed, I was kept in hospital for a week on antibiotics and pain killers until everything settled down and I was sent home and told to take pain killers if the pain came back
The surgeon, an Indian gentleman, informed me that I would have to have the gall bladder removed at some time but he couldn’t tell me when it would be done but that I would be put on the waiting list.

Over the next 3 months the pain returned every week, usually at the weekend, but I noticed that the time in between the bad pain was getting shorter and shorter. My weight loss had increased as I was only eating once or twice a day and that was as fat free as I could make it. I had dropped from 16 stone to 14 stone in three months!! I thought about my friends that had cancer and the way that they had wasted away until the end. I wondered if this was my time to meet Jesus.

I knew that all the church was praying for me and that the surgeons would bring forward the operation and I felt thankful and expectant. I was sure that the Lord would answer all the prayers, but I know that his timing is not my timing.

I don’t think I am afraid to die. I have every confidence in the risen Lord and his promise of life everlasting. What worries me is that my daughter is not ready to lose her father or my wife, her husband. I know that the Lord will look after them and keep them safe but I don’t want to put them through such a time until my daughter is a lot older and can come to terms with it.

My wife worked in a Hospice when I met her and had to deal with people dying and with the relatives of the patients. She helped them come to terms with the loss of loved ones and her faith kept her strong. But I think it would be harder for her if I died
I wonder how I would cope if the roles were reversed. I pray to the Lord that he will keep us strong as family and let me be with them for a while longer.



---oOo---


It was a Tuesday morning and I felt terrible. I was constipated from the painkillers and I felt like something was eating me from the inside. My daughter knew that I was in pain and left for school without making a fuss, in fact I didn’t get out of bed until my wife had gone to work. I took the pain killers prescribed and they dulled down the pain for a while. All the day I hardly ate or drank. For lunch I had a slice of toast spread with honey, and struggled to keep it down, as I was feeling nauseous from the pain and the tablets.

As the day wore on the pain came back even more and at 3.30 I took more tablets and went to bed.
The pain kept getting worse and my wife, who was back from work, started to worry that this time the pain was not going to go away.

I started to feel very sick and staggered to the bathroom trying to get my dentures out on the way. I just made it to the toilet bowl and I lost the piece of toast I had for lunch. Everything was spinning and I hung on the toilet bowl to stop it swinging away. I was still hung onto it when my wife came in and found me.

“I’m calling the doctor” she said, “this is bloody rediculess “.
Having no teeth in and cuddling the toilet bowl, I felt at a distinct disadvantage and didn’t think that any argument would help. I mumbled something to the effect that the doctor would have gone home as it was quite late. “ I will get one! They aren’t going to fob me off “ she said.
She called the surgery emergency number and after a wait the doctor called her back. I don’t quite know what she said to him, but he agreed that she should call for an ambulance.

I was getting quite concerned by this time as the pain was getting worse.
Over the year as the bouts of pain had got more frequent, my pain threshold had risen and
I could cope with quite severe bouts of pain with a couple of co-codomal and a Suduko problem to solve. I would pray to the lord to get me through the bad time and he always brought me through. I kept saying to myself “AND IT CAME TO PASS” and it always did.
This night things were different. I could tell that something had changed as the pain was constant and did not pulse as it usually did but just kept hurting more and more.

My hands and feet were frozen as my body channelled all the blood away from my extremities and I could not stop shivering. As I shivered the pain seemed to grind through my body.
My wife came back and said that the ambulance was coming and could I manage to get down the stairs while she packed me a bag.??? Can you believe how organised she is?

I struggled down stairs and had just sat down on the bottom step when the ambulance arrived. Thank God for cheerful ambulance drivers. They were two girls (well, ladies, but both were a lot younger than me.) and they jollied me into the ambulance and set off. Blue light going, and a siren through the road junctions, just like Casualty!.
I was past caring about all the excitement for our avenue, as this must have been the third time that they had seen me off with the ambulance over the last year.

They strapped me into a chair in the ambulance and proceeded to stick needles in me and check my blood pressure and such. The injected me with something to stop me being sick and than gave me something for the pain. They shoved a mask on my face with oxygen to breathe and said hold on.
They kept asking if I was OK? I was till the injection they gave me for the pain hit. All of a sudden I couldn’t sit up, my skin started to drip moisture and I couldn’t focus on anything.

The girl in the back with me, shouted to the driver to pull over and come and give her a hand in the back. The next thing I knew they were lifting me from the chair to the stretcher and strapping me down. I don’t know what was in that injection but it took me by surprise.
A few hours later, in hospital, they were asking me what I thought of the pain killing drug they had given me in the ambulance as they were checking to see if it was effective. I can’t say what I told them but I think I would have preferred the pain.

There is something quite demoralising being wheeled into a hospital on a stretcher, wearing only a pair of pajamas a fixed smile and being lined up in the corridor while someone comes to process you. I looked around and I could see that I was not the worst of the people on the stretchers, if volume was anything to go by. I could see though that one old lady looked very ill and she was not conscious
I was parked in a little annex and when the nurse realised I wasn’t at death’s door she dived off to see if anyone was worse than me.
After about half an hour the pain started to return and I was feeling pretty miserable. A young doctor poked his head around the curtain and said “Are we in pain?” my instant rejoinder was “ I don’t know about you but I ******* am!”
I’m glad he had a sense of humour, because he laughed and said “OK, well we can fix that.” He left and quickly returned with his syringe and gave me another injection.
He didn’t say what was in it but whatever it was, it stopped me bothering about the pain and I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I knew was that a nurse woke me up to tell me that I was being kept in hospital and that they were taking me to a ward where a bed was waiting for me.
I sat up and started to get off the trolley but the nurse stopped me and told me that they would get a porter to wheel me on the trolley to the ward.

You would think that this was a bit over the top but off we went. The only trouble was that the trolley had a squeaky wheel. I don’t know if you remember that episode of “Open all Hours “ with Ronny Barker and GGG Granville. Well it sounded like his delivery bicycle and the porter was not impressed. Every time we passed a ward nurses station he would say sorry. We must have woken every ward between ER and the second floor.
He wheeled me into the ward and it was empty!!! I thought that there was a problem in hospitals with a shortage of beds but I had choice of any one from six.


I rolled off the trolly onto the bed and was immediately surrounded by nurses. I think they must have been desperate for a patient as I was drained of blood, tempertured and blood pressured, all within a few minutes. I was tucked in and asked all about my life’s history, all carefully written and recorded and parked at the bottom of the bed.
They then all left and went back to their magazines or whatever nurses do when the only have one patient.

Everything was quiet in the ward and I lay back on the bed. The pain was starting to recede and quite honestly I started to feel that I was there under false pretences. I knew that I had gall stones and that I needed an operation to remove them but I had been waiting 4 months for a date which didn’t seem to be forthcoming. I knew that everyone at Elim church would be praying for me and I felt the Lord was with me. I had confidence that I would have the operation when I needed it and that it would be as soon as possible. The Lord has his hand on this and I know he cares for me.

I fell asleep.

I was woken by the arrival of another patient about 2.00am and another later on. The ward was filling up!.

At 7.15am I was woken by the nurses to have breakfast and a few more tests. They took more blood! If they keep taking it from that arm it’s going to be empty!
Between breakfast and 10am the ward was filled, so much for empty beds and the nurses were all running to keep up with the admission forms and all the testing that they had to do. I could see that they had a pattern of work and that everything was the same for each patient as they arrived.

I dozed in the bed and on checking the cupboard at the bedside, I found a new testament left by the Gideons, at least I had something to read. I spent an hour reading and was surprised when I noticed a nurse closing the curtains around my bed. Did she think I was worse than I thought I was?

No, The curtain swished aside and the bed was surrounded by about half a dozen people. Had the Gideons come for their bible? Was I at deaths door or was it Jehova’s witnesses come to convert me?.

A very tall man introduced himself and his colleagues’ to me. He was the consultant for abdominal problems and he told me that they had been looking at my notes and that I needed my gall bladder removed. It seems we were all in agreement and I asked him when it would be done. “We’ll see how you go with the pain killers” he said “ The consultant looking after your case is out of the country for a few days and we should wait till he comes back”
I laid back in the bed as I realised that I would be going home again and back to the rounds of pain and recovery. The doctors left to go on with their round and I started to pray. “Lord”, I asked “ Please give me the strength to carry on. Give me the peace to not fall out with my wife and not to shout at my daughter.”
I accepted that I would not be operated on and that I would be going home that day.



Imagine my surprise when an hour later, the consultant walked back into my ward and straight to my bed.
“When did you last eat?” he said.
“ I had a piece of toast at 7.30 this morning”
“O.K I’ll do you this afternoon and we’ll take the gall bladder out. Is that OK.” He said.
Was that OK???
Praise the Lord, Thank you Jesus.
I nodded and lay back on the bed with a big grin on my face. God is so good, he knew that I was so tired of the pain and he had listened to my prayer and all those who were praying for me.

I was operated on that afternoon and I woke up from the operation with my wife holding my hand and the certainty that the pain was gone. I was sore but the pain was gone.
I don’t remember my wife going as I must have gone back to sleep.
I woke up with the ward all dark and the sure knowledge that I had to get to the toilet quick. The problem was that I had a drip into my arm, Thank the Lord that I had asked for the bed next to the toilet.
The drip was hung on a mobile stand so I swung out of bed and holding onto the drip wobbled to the loo. This was the first of many trips over the night. I found out later that I was on my second bag of fluid for the drip and that it had only one way of getting out of me.
At 7.30 the nurse came to me and said “ We must get you out of bed today and get you moving”. I hadn’t the heart to tell her about my marathon during the night.

About eleven in the morning, the surgeon came back to see me and explain what he had done. “ I have had to take a little more than your gall bladder “ he said. Well that got my attention I can tell you. “I have had to take some of your liver as well, as the gall bladder was impacted into it. In fact your liver looks like a shark has had a bite of it.”
“Do I really need to know that?” I said, but he just laughed and walked off.

That day, as I gradually felt better and better I started to get to know the other patients in the ward and I realised that I would probably never see them again after I had left hospital. Though we were all together discussing intimate parts our anatomy with each other and comparing wounds. There is no privacy in the ward as the screens around the beds do not stop the sound of conversation. You just think it is private.

Imagine my surprise when the irascible old man in the bed next to me got a church visitor. He had never mentioned that he was a Christian even though he must have seen me reading the New Testament. They drew the curtains around the bed and the lady started to pray for him, as she prayed I joined her with my prayers for his recovery.

It struck me that I, as a Christian, should have been aware of his faith but I never had any idea. Was I so wrapped up in my own problems that I had excluded everyone else. Had I not shown my faith so that others could see it and respond to it. God has a wonderful knack of bringing things to your notice when you least expect it and making you question yourself.
Thank you Lord.
The next day the surgeon came to see me again and to check on my recovery. He was very pleased with my progress and told me that I could go home the next day. Praise the Lord!!!

Over the last three weeks I have gained in strength and even managed to go to the induction of our new Pastor. I ate cream scones with no pain to follow and thoroughly enjoyed the service.
Most days, I take the dogs on 5 mile walk and never feel too tired. God is good to me.