Looks like I have been going through a spell of drought where blogging is concerned. By blogging, I meant writing. September was the worst month as I only churned out one post. On the other hand, I have been actively updating my second photoblog that I christened Quick Takes. It features images taken and uploaded with the Samsung Galaxy S II.

Although the camera phone allows very limited control as compared to a conventional digital camera, I enjoy capturing images and post them up on the go. The lack of updates was also due to the fact that I have been spending the past couple of weeks setting up the photoblog and updating the other blogs as well. There was an issue of the image captions not being parsed in the RSS feed that took almost a week of wading through Google and WordPress forums to resolve.

The Digital Awakening’s homepage has been redesigned to include links to the latest posts in my other blogs and Wuan’s photoblog. Some of these have not been updated for a couple of years. I noticed the same trend among bloggers active in Facebook and Twitter who have not been updating their blogs as frequently as they used to. These two microblogging medias have dampened our enthusiasm somewhat for writing longer posts. I guess I need to manage my time better between Facebook, Twitter and my blogs to break this affliction.

Resonance104.4fm is the world’s first radio art station, established by London Musicians’ Collective. The non-profit community radio station broadcasts from Borough High Street in London. On Fridays at 3.30pm GMT, Tim Abbott hosts the half-hourly show called Technical Difficluties which touches on disability issues around the world. Tim (@lightchronic) and I connected with each other in Twitter through Zashnain Zainal(@bedlamfury), a mutual Twitter acquaintance.

Tim invited me to go on the air live interview with him in the show last Friday. That was my first one-on-one live radio show with a station in the United Kingdom. Among the topics we covered were my experience with disability, and the built environment and public transport in Malaysia. I made three pages of notes on the points that I wanted to share prior to the programme. In the end, I did not use any of them as Tim was very good in leading the direction of our conversation and made me feel well at ease to talk openly about those issues. Click here to listen or download the podcast.

The chronic kidney disease has curbed my enthusiasm for good food since I was diagnosed with it in 2004. Mr. Liong, the urologist at Lam Wah Ee Hospital in Penang, gave me an advice that I remembered till today, that I should take good care of my failing kidneys, which if not, would cause a lot of undue hardship to my family when they fail totally and I need to go for dialysis. I took that advice to heart and have been keeping to a strict renal-friendly low-protein, low-sodium and practically low-everything to keep the decline in check.

I pride myself for adhering to having just two matchbox sized portions of meat daily most of the time. I also scrutinise the mineral contents in the food that I eat. As hard as I try, there have been occasions that I allowed temptation to get the better of me with the notion that I should reward myself with some taboo food for depriving myself for so long. So, I would tuck in the food and savour every mouthful like it was my last meal. Food never tasted so good.

And as always, inevitably, the moment I put down the cutlery, I would ask myself if I over-indulged. Did I eat more meat than I should? Was that gravy a tad too salty? I would regret even more should I start to itch and had to take anti-histamine tablets. I did say I stuck to the low-protein diet most of the time. Those other time I did not, I would be trouble over a period of time wondering if I overloaded my kidneys and tipped them over the edge.

I am writing this post because I have a scheduled blood extraction together with an ultrasound of the kidneys, ureters and bladder on Friday, and I am troubled by the few times I ate more than I was allowed to or did not catheterise as often as I should have. This is the same emotional cycle that I go through every time I have to go for blood tests and ultrasound. It would persist until I get the test result when during the scheduled medical appointment two weeks later.