enicalyth
12th Jan 2007, 13:24
Disqualifying conditions can arise and it would be a wise pilot or aspirant who gives some thought to the matter. The “E” got felled by a stroke and as soon as "it" is well enough to travel its coming home with KO Sally where we are going to stick together like glue and b*gger everything else. At the suggestion of my good and excellent mate Old Smokey, I’ll tell you all a story.
I make no bones about flying being a career best entered at the earliest opportunity. The reasons being it’s not as easy as you might think to learn the necessary skills and hold down a job/marriage/balanced life; reality might differ from preconceptions and the job is conditional and always under review. Turf is green on both sides of the fence but it has a brown side too. You can always go from green to green and back again. But once you are on the brown side of the turf you’re there for keeps. To mix metaphors if your ship is sinking you should step into a fully provisioned lifeboat, you don’t jump into a liferaft. You might even miss. Life is up to you and down to experience so let me let me run over a few things based on experience.
My background is pretty conventional with a few twists. I joined the air force, made a pretty undistinguished fist of it, left and took up civil flying at first with some pretty ropey outfits, suffered some set backs with companies that collapsed and concluded with heavy log-haul before retiring to join a well-known airframe manufacturer as an analyst.
I am disqualified from flying because of cerebrovascular disease – a stroke. I put this down to a) losing the plot in safeguarding my health and b) a stupid and unrealistic choice of second career for an older and outdated man. Please take heed.
You cannot cure a stroke, you can only at best adapt because part of the brain dies. Another part of the brain may try to compensate but it’s like having second-hand Rose in second-hand clothes teaching an old dog new tricks.
The severity of the consequences depend on which part of the brain and how much of it suffered. The quicker the patient is correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated the better. A stroke is therefore a full-on medical emergency. Call the emergency services, RING that bell.
Some of the most potent drugs available for treatment themselves carry significant risk towards the liver and kidneys. This is no time to be in need of a “detox”.
Eat and drink sensibly based on proper advice, not opinion or hearsay. Balance is not solely a matter of the diet sheet but keeping things in proportion and not see-sawing from one extreme to the other. A glass of wine and a slice of birthdaycake isn’t going to kill you – it’s hardly overindulgence – but frowning and looking down on others all your life is quite a good recipe for disaster too. Tee-hee can be better than tee-tee.
Actually what is a stroke? It is a condition that occurs when the brain loses part of its blood supply and with it oxygen, nutrients and cleansing. This may be because an artery is blocked (ischemia) or is ruptured (hemorrhage). Correct diagnosis of which variety is essential because the root treatment involves either thinning or thickening the blood and these are mutually exclusive. Thinning the blood when it should be thickened and vice versa can prove fatal and at the very least make things worse.
How do you recognise stroke? A sudden weakness of the face, arm or leg, most often on one side of the body is often the first clue that a stroke has occurred. There will often be confusion and trouble with speaking or understanding speech. You may have trouble with seeing in one or both eyes. Your vision may be blurred but actual double vision can be a dead giveaway. If you can walk at all there could well be a lot of dizziness with general loss of coordination and balance. Even simple tasks such as these are beyond you. Can you touch your nose and then another person’s fingertip? Come on, pull a funny face and stick your tongue out? Pinch your eyelids tight shut tight as you can and defeat the attempts of your carer to prise them apart? These sorts of things are clues and all the while the patient is almost certainly conscious. There may or may not be a headache and the sufferer might unwittingly let the bladder go I must add.
As an observer try to note if a patient is salivating or is dry in the mouth, has the tongue been bitten and is the jaw clenched or unclenched. These things help the medical team gain insight.
Strokes mainly affect 60+ year old blokes but they happen young or old, male or female too. Don’t kid yourself, lifestyle has a lot to do with it and not that your granny was fond of treacle scones. Unpleasant though they are then, submit to proper needle in the arm blood tests and not thumb-pricks round at the pharmacy. How else do you know for sure your LDL/HDL balance is within limits? Low density lipoprotein (LDL) is popularly known as “malign” cholesterol whereas high density (HDL) is considered “benign”. Have the tests and heed any prescription but don’t consider medications such as statins as a permit to eat and drink as you like.
Drinking alcohol disturbs the metabolism and worsens your cholesterol count for that reason. It also takes vitamins from your system. Eat starchy food without fat, wholegrain bread, plenty fruit, oily fish in reason. Drink plenty water. Exercise regularly and briskly – three 25 minute workouts per week is recommended for all adults. Walking the dog and strolling to the office or pub don’t count. Staggering back? The very idea.
Know your blood pressure. Whatever your age your base rate should be below 150/85 for good health and anyone who says 100+your age over ninety is talking borrox.
Adapting to change should it come is going to depend on a lot of variables. Because I chose a career early enough for my mistakes not to be disastrous I’m in a better position then many. I’m not in debt, I’ve been careful with money, I’ve been blessed beyond measure with my wife and kids. It probably could have been far better for all of us (and I don’t mean financially) if I’d left the air force and used that experience plus my degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering to have opted for a more family-friendly career than aviation. But I didn’t and my illness was almost but not quite the last straw for the one person I owe everything to.
As its stands I’m a pretty good carpenter. Good enough to provide for us two with what we’ve put by and we’re both keen sailors and very, very chastened with what has happened. We’ve had to look at each other, take a deep breath and not squander thirty something years together. With a following wind we’ve twenty or twenty-five years to look forward to. But probably less thanks to the stuffwit writing this.
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line nor all your tears wash out one jot of it. Look after yourselves, ffolks.
Best Rgds
The “E”
I make no bones about flying being a career best entered at the earliest opportunity. The reasons being it’s not as easy as you might think to learn the necessary skills and hold down a job/marriage/balanced life; reality might differ from preconceptions and the job is conditional and always under review. Turf is green on both sides of the fence but it has a brown side too. You can always go from green to green and back again. But once you are on the brown side of the turf you’re there for keeps. To mix metaphors if your ship is sinking you should step into a fully provisioned lifeboat, you don’t jump into a liferaft. You might even miss. Life is up to you and down to experience so let me let me run over a few things based on experience.
My background is pretty conventional with a few twists. I joined the air force, made a pretty undistinguished fist of it, left and took up civil flying at first with some pretty ropey outfits, suffered some set backs with companies that collapsed and concluded with heavy log-haul before retiring to join a well-known airframe manufacturer as an analyst.
I am disqualified from flying because of cerebrovascular disease – a stroke. I put this down to a) losing the plot in safeguarding my health and b) a stupid and unrealistic choice of second career for an older and outdated man. Please take heed.
You cannot cure a stroke, you can only at best adapt because part of the brain dies. Another part of the brain may try to compensate but it’s like having second-hand Rose in second-hand clothes teaching an old dog new tricks.
The severity of the consequences depend on which part of the brain and how much of it suffered. The quicker the patient is correctly diagnosed and appropriately treated the better. A stroke is therefore a full-on medical emergency. Call the emergency services, RING that bell.
Some of the most potent drugs available for treatment themselves carry significant risk towards the liver and kidneys. This is no time to be in need of a “detox”.
Eat and drink sensibly based on proper advice, not opinion or hearsay. Balance is not solely a matter of the diet sheet but keeping things in proportion and not see-sawing from one extreme to the other. A glass of wine and a slice of birthdaycake isn’t going to kill you – it’s hardly overindulgence – but frowning and looking down on others all your life is quite a good recipe for disaster too. Tee-hee can be better than tee-tee.
Actually what is a stroke? It is a condition that occurs when the brain loses part of its blood supply and with it oxygen, nutrients and cleansing. This may be because an artery is blocked (ischemia) or is ruptured (hemorrhage). Correct diagnosis of which variety is essential because the root treatment involves either thinning or thickening the blood and these are mutually exclusive. Thinning the blood when it should be thickened and vice versa can prove fatal and at the very least make things worse.
How do you recognise stroke? A sudden weakness of the face, arm or leg, most often on one side of the body is often the first clue that a stroke has occurred. There will often be confusion and trouble with speaking or understanding speech. You may have trouble with seeing in one or both eyes. Your vision may be blurred but actual double vision can be a dead giveaway. If you can walk at all there could well be a lot of dizziness with general loss of coordination and balance. Even simple tasks such as these are beyond you. Can you touch your nose and then another person’s fingertip? Come on, pull a funny face and stick your tongue out? Pinch your eyelids tight shut tight as you can and defeat the attempts of your carer to prise them apart? These sorts of things are clues and all the while the patient is almost certainly conscious. There may or may not be a headache and the sufferer might unwittingly let the bladder go I must add.
As an observer try to note if a patient is salivating or is dry in the mouth, has the tongue been bitten and is the jaw clenched or unclenched. These things help the medical team gain insight.
Strokes mainly affect 60+ year old blokes but they happen young or old, male or female too. Don’t kid yourself, lifestyle has a lot to do with it and not that your granny was fond of treacle scones. Unpleasant though they are then, submit to proper needle in the arm blood tests and not thumb-pricks round at the pharmacy. How else do you know for sure your LDL/HDL balance is within limits? Low density lipoprotein (LDL) is popularly known as “malign” cholesterol whereas high density (HDL) is considered “benign”. Have the tests and heed any prescription but don’t consider medications such as statins as a permit to eat and drink as you like.
Drinking alcohol disturbs the metabolism and worsens your cholesterol count for that reason. It also takes vitamins from your system. Eat starchy food without fat, wholegrain bread, plenty fruit, oily fish in reason. Drink plenty water. Exercise regularly and briskly – three 25 minute workouts per week is recommended for all adults. Walking the dog and strolling to the office or pub don’t count. Staggering back? The very idea.
Know your blood pressure. Whatever your age your base rate should be below 150/85 for good health and anyone who says 100+your age over ninety is talking borrox.
Adapting to change should it come is going to depend on a lot of variables. Because I chose a career early enough for my mistakes not to be disastrous I’m in a better position then many. I’m not in debt, I’ve been careful with money, I’ve been blessed beyond measure with my wife and kids. It probably could have been far better for all of us (and I don’t mean financially) if I’d left the air force and used that experience plus my degree in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering to have opted for a more family-friendly career than aviation. But I didn’t and my illness was almost but not quite the last straw for the one person I owe everything to.
As its stands I’m a pretty good carpenter. Good enough to provide for us two with what we’ve put by and we’re both keen sailors and very, very chastened with what has happened. We’ve had to look at each other, take a deep breath and not squander thirty something years together. With a following wind we’ve twenty or twenty-five years to look forward to. But probably less thanks to the stuffwit writing this.
The moving finger writes and having writ moves on; nor all your piety nor wit can lure it back to cancel half a line nor all your tears wash out one jot of it. Look after yourselves, ffolks.
Best Rgds
The “E”