Ajovy 2

I picked up my second automatic syringe of Ajovy¹ from the pharmacy last Wednesday. When I came to inject, I removed the needle guard but for some reason, I thought that too much of the syringe had been revealed. A moment later, the syringe started squirting its contents over the kitchen table and on the floor. My dose had been wasted.

Fortunately, the next day I had an appointment with my GP on other matters (mainly cleaning up the mess regarding my stomach pains and reducing the dosage of omepradex back to 20 mg daily) and I took with me the syringe so that I could discard it in the clinic's 'sharps' bucket. I told the nurse what happened and she reckoned that I could get a new syringe from the pharmacy; I doubted this as the pharmacy has a special order for me and so there won't be any extra syringes.

I mentioned this to the GP who said that if I phone the pharmaceutical company's service line, I could probably get a replacement syringe. She gave me a new prescription and signed it. When I got through to the support, I explained what happened and eventually was passed on to a nurse who went through all that had happened. She asked for the prescription which I had scanned in the mean time and said that a pharmacy would deliver a new syringe on Sunday. She also wanted to be online with me when I injected, something that I forgot.

The pharmacy got in touch with me on Sunday and said that the earliest that they could deliver was Tuesday (ie today). This morning the dog started barking with apparently no reason, meaning that there was a delivery man outside. He gave me the syringe that had been solidly packed in a cool box and I gave him the paperwork and the old syringe.

When I came to inject, I though that the needle guard was a simple piece of transparent plastic guarding the head, but when I came to remove it, the same part that was removed last week came free. I then pressed the syringe to my belly and I heard the click that meant that the syringe was now working. It looks like the only thing wrong with the original syringe was my expectations. Presumably next month will be much smoother.

Does the medication work? My 'headache log' has three entries for September and in two cases, I noted that rizatriptan didn't seem to make any difference so these headaches might well be 'dehydration headaches' caused by the hot weather. I'll see what happens this month.

Internal links
[1] 2137

---

This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
412	06/10/2011	Rest in peace	RIP
980	06/10/2016	Health update	Health, Theanine, Donating blood
1533	06/10/2022	Weight and bp confirmed	Health
1673	06/10/2023	Belated discovery in Delphi: defining indexes on calculated fields	Delphi, ClientDataSet
2011	06/10/2025	Correcting CoPilot Prolog	Programming, Prolog, CoPilot

The end of the 2026 swimming season

After the debacle of the rechargable counter¹, I decided to order a simple mechanical counter. This may not be waterproof but it should be more successful than its predecessor. Obviously it's not going to arrive before the end of this season; maybe I'll try it out in the shower.

Our swimming pool is never open on Sundays, at least not to members. It's probably a day of cleaning, but it's also a day for outside groups to use the pool. As a result, Monday swims are often more vigorous because of the day of rest. As I had been swimming 40 lengths for the past few days, this Monday I felt that I could not only equal that number but even improve on it, swimming 42 lengths. This is a new record!

After I came home and entered the data into my database, I calculated  how many lengths I would need to swim in order to have an average swim of 26 lengths for the entire season, assuming that there were three more opportunities to swim. The answer was 100 lengths, but I had forgotten that there were actually four more opportunities to swim before the pool closes (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday). Obviously in this case, I needed to swim another 126 lengths, or on average 31.5 lengths per swim.

So on Wednesday I set out to swim at least 32 lengths in order to reduce the target for the remaining swims. I wasn't expecting any trouble as again I had had a day of rest between Monday's record swim and Wednesday. What I hadn't taken into account was the fact that the air temperature had decreased by about 6°C since Monday; the evenings are cool (no more air conditioner) and so the water doesn't warm up during the day. In other words, it was very cold swimming on Wednesday! I forced myself to swim 36 lengths but it was a real struggle from the very beginning. As a result, the target dropped to 90 lengths and 3 swims = 30 lengths/swim. This is definitely possible, even in the cold water. I may forego swimming on one day.

The water wasn't any warmer on Thursday but maybe I was more acclimatised. Without doubt, the cold saps strength from the muscles making it harder to swim. Another 36 lengths, so at this point 1792 lengths have been swum over 69 swims, giving an average of 25.97 lengths/swim.

This left me today (Friday) with a target of 28 lengths. I felt initially as if the swimming were a cricket test match, where 100-150 runs were needed in the fourth innings in order to win the match. Definitely attainable and not too hard. But somewhere between 6 to 10 lenghts, I realised that I still needed   to swim those 28 lengths and so I had better apply myself. As I've probably written several times before, swimming is in no small amount a psychological exercise: I had set myself a target of 28 lengths, and when that target had been reached, I had no interest in swimming any more. I am not going to swim tomorrow.

Here is a breakdown of this year's swimming - the average number of lengths swum per month. It's a bit difficult to make out the legends, but basically the average increased every month (except for October which was a bit less than September but more than August). This year I had a slow start which brought down the average.

And now for the annual data

Year	Number of swims	Total lengths	Average ln/sw
2019	16	438	27.38
2020	24	562	23.42
2022	29	567	19.55
2023	31	561	18.10
2024	34	710	20.88
2025	33	620	18.79
2026	70	1820	26.00

This year's data speaks for itself in comparison to previous years.

Internal links
[1] 2147

---

This day in blog history:

Blog #	Date	Title	Tags
409	02/10/2011	Holiday cooking	Cooking
1341	02/10/2020	Weight at the beginning of October	Health
1832	02/10/2024	Apples, honey and missiles	Jewish holidays, Israel, Musical group