Extreme Everest

Watched an interesting programme tonight about a team of ITU docs who went to Everest this summer to do experiments into how the body functions in a very hypoxic state. Rather interesting for personal reasons, of course, and makes my own little experiment shown here pretty tame - they were doing things like NG tubes and arterial gases but that's all a bit too painful. Anyway, shown here is my stubby finger in my sats probe taken at around 3800m (for the non-medical readers, normal sats are about 99% and these sort of levels would usually get people admitted into ITU in the UK or at least a go on the ventilator. But, being hardcore, I survived sats in the 80s for over 2 weeks! Was slightly concerned when we did the first check after flying into Lhasa without any chance to acclimatise, a couple of the group got down to 75% but we all got a bit better throughout the holiday. Anyway, good to see people doing some better-controlled things but it's still not convinced me to take up mountaineering, would like to go to the Nepal base camp though.

Suppose I should mention the expedition course, can stick up a couple of photos now that I've found the cable to connect camera to computer. Basically as I have already said, it was really good fun and I learnt a lot, not sure how much is directly relevant to my day-to-day job however, for example one of the lectures was about wild animal attacks and I learnt what to do if I were to get attacked by a bear (the lecturer was from the USA and she may not have been quite up on the sort of natural predators locally - "you guys have bears here, right?") We also learnt about altitude, diving and hot and cold climate stuff, but the afternoons were mostly spent doing fun outward-bound things like navigation, abseiling and on the last day we did a big casualty simulation exercise with helicopters and everything!

Getting back to reality seemed pretty tame by comparison, I had a dentist's appointment after getting home and was pleased to hear that my teeth were all fine, so I decided to celebrate in usual fashion by going to buy lots of Haribo to eat, except I didn't in the end as the bloody supermarket has moved everything around in preparation for Christmas so I couldn't find them (rather I was not going to go into the "seasonal goods" aisle to seek them out amid the chocolate reindeer and large tins of biscuits). Good chance to get back on the diet I suppose, having survived all through the course on stodgy school-dinner food, which was nice but not what I tend to eat at home. Been rather lazy since getting back and am having to stop myself buying the new Pringles salt-and-vinegar rice infusions which are my new favourite snack of all time, they are lighter and crunchier than normal Pringles and thus nicer, but evil Sainsburys has them on half-price special offer at the moment so it is taking all my willpower not to buy them. Better go to the gym again tomorrow I think to work off the tube I have consumed this weekend.