where would you like to be right now?

I don’t usually fall for adverts.  I like to think that I am immune to what Vance Packard once described as the ‘hidden persuaders’.  But in this case the persuader was centre stage.

My INR is all over the place - it rarely stays stable for long.  (INR is a measure of how quickly blood clots).  As a result I am usually at my GP’s surgery every couple of weeks for a blood test.  It’s a right pain.  It messes up holidays, or other things I could be doing instead of sitting in a waiting room.  In the 5 days before we left for OZ I had to have my blood tested twice.  The prospect of not having a blood test for 6 weeks, coupled with an unstable INR, caused some concern for my GP as well as me.

I keep thinking that there has got to be a simpler, less inconvenient way.  

Our surgery has suddenly gone hi-tech and instead of taking blood samples with a needle in a vein, it’s now done with a finger prick and a hand-held INR analyser.  As I look at the one in the nurse’s hand I wonder if they are available on the open market.  

An internet search reveals a press release from NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) stating that people on long-term anticoagulant therapy should be allowed - nay - encouraged - to measure their own INR levels at a time and place of their own choosing if they so wish.  Not only that - if they get really good at it, they should be allowed to control their own doses of warfarin (against an agreed protocol).  

Now if you’re not on warfarin this probably means nothing to you.  But as someone who’s spent much of the past 9 years in and out of hospitals and surgeries - the chance to take back some sort of control over my life is an enormous deal.  It’s really, really BIG.

Another search brings me to the following scene; a bedroom, a hint of blue outside the window and on the bed, a passport, a panama hat, white golfing shoes (male), a string of pearls and a pink cardigan.  Smack bang in the middle is a small blue and gray device.  Just like the one in the GP’s surgery.  The strap line reads - where would you like to be right now?

I assume they’re not talking to cross-dressing golfers, but someone like me; someone who does not want my life from now on to be dictated by the need to make an appointment for a blood test every couple of weeks.

I talk to my GP and we agree a plan; I’ll have three more blood tests with the nurse and measure my own INR levels at the same time.  If they agree, I’m free to do my thing.  I’ll phone the surgery with the results and they’ll work out the appropriate dosage of warfarin. 

This is a big step because everyone is nervous about warfarin - it’s a very cheap and effective way of preventing strokes - but it’s dangerous if the dose is too high.  It is rat poison after all.  Then in a few months time, once my GP is confident that I know what I’m doing, I’ll move on to stage 2, which is to work out my own warfarin dose rather than phone the surgery.

I go back to website and in answer to the question, shout out ‘I want to be in that bedroom looking over the sea, with my very own hand-held INR device’ - then scroll down past the advert and click on ‘buy’.  


And here it is, in my own blip-vert.