He is a man whose good news is always tempered with bad news. For him, there never seems to be a complete and final interruption to his literal peace of mind, let alone figural. We came across him as we so often do during one of our regular ravine walks a few days back, out with his three Border Collies. He is a man whose entire life has been devoted to challenging his body's physical endurance, given to extreme recreational sports, a man of a highly charged nervous disposition. And he was a man whose choice of professional work as a highly-trained taskforce police agent seemed well chosen to his temperament and ability.

That profession is now closed to him, left partially disabled by a medical condition diagnosed a year earlier. A diagnosis that explained his memory-loss lapses, dizziness, headaches and other symptoms that left him confused and unable to cope with the stringencies of his occupation, let alone his penchant for extreme physical activities. His condition led him to an accident where his collar bone was cracked. That led to an operation to affix a steel plate on his shoulder. That plate was recently removed and the pain he had experienced from that source entirely relieved.

The other operation, to install a shunt from the base of his brain, with a hollow line going down through his body to be attached to a bag to catch the drain from his brain on a continual basis gave him great relief from all those symptoms. But the disabling headaches, aversion to light and to sound returned and each time an invasive action had to be taken to recalibrate the shunt. Until finally, another surgery ensued to replace the shunt with another model capable of finer calibration. Which worked fine briefly before the return of the headaches. On the occasion when we last met, another fine adjustment had been done, and he and his wife were anticipating a several-week excursion to Hawaii, to try to escape from all the stress they'd been suffering.

On their return another surgery has been scheduled, this time to adjust the line carrying the accumulating fluid away from his brain. Turns out the surgeon who had attached the drain to his stomach wall hadn't calculated adequately, and its placement has resulted in a hernia requiring the drain to be re-located. 

One of these stories of personal health woes that makes most ordinary far more common health events look tame in comparison.