I finally seem to be getting rid of the cough which I’ve been suffering with for over four weeks now. There’s been a bug going round and I blame the five year old student. He was in hospital for a couple of weeks, but not before he’d managed to spread the lurgy far and wide. Teaching has been a trial as I have been coughing when I speak. However things do seem to be getting better now. Talking about teaching, I’ve turned a couple of people away in the last week. I’m now at 25 hours, mostly in the evening, and I don’t want it to start creeping into the mornings too. I’ve had a few adults start. There is an exam in June which have a speaking and listening element and they want to practice for the exam. It is surprisingly difficult to do the speaking and listening classes, as it’s important that it doesn’t just end up being a chat.
We’ve had some sad news about Herbie. The vet had thought that the mass in his lungs was an abscess. This is quite common in dogs who have lost their teeth through gum disease, as the germs can go into the body and cause a large ‘mass’ where they accumulate. There were a number of reasons why she thought this, including the fact that the mass on the x-ray looked like a round lump, not noduley like they would expect a tumor to be. However, when Herbie went for a check up and x-ray on Friday, they found that the mass had grown – which it shouldn’t have done if it was an abscess. There’s nothing that can be done, which is such a shame as apart from his chronic cough, he really is in the peak of fitness. He is so much more healthy now than he was when he came to us and is now so mobile and relatively fast on his feet. We just have to remember that even though his time with us may be shorter than we had hoped, had some nice people not saved him from the pound in Seville, he would have been put to sleep months ago.