What's on the menu?

No photography again today - but here's a shot of the Ecuadorian Hillstar breaking off from nectarine flowers at 4,300m to grab a passing insect.

I've now managed to fill in the entry for 18th March - just 3 more days of missing entries to work on .... :-)

So, back to today, but first, those that know me may be aware that about 12 years ago, I was diagnosed with the same progressive Kidney disease that my sister Janet has, and which we both shared with our Mum.  Fortunately for me, mine has not moved forward with anything like the speed that Janet's did so I'm still doing OK although I probably get tired a more quickly than I would otherwise,  and I definitely find that going up hills is quite a bit harder than I feel it ought to be.  Which is one of the reasons why I was in the High Andes now - I'm not too sure for how much longer I might be able to be this active.

Anyway - having been a kidney patient for many years, I was a little surprised to now get an appointment from the renal dieticians to attend a session on diet for chronic kidney disease patients.  It turned out that, funding being what it is, they are only able to offer the service to people in the later stages - which I now am.  

The key messages were (very unsurprisingly) that one should try to reduce one's salt intake and otherwise eat a healthy well balanced diet.  As I already do this, I didn't come back from the clinic with any new information (except that I now know that low sodium salt has potassium in it to replace the missing sodium and that this isn't good for one's kidneys either - so best avoided by me), and felt that the 2 hours plus travel involved were probably a little bit of a waste of my time.  But what was interesting was just how little the others attending seemed to know about food and diet, and where they could find information about salt levels etc.  One poor lady had been just about to buy a very expensive water ionisation machine, because someone had told her that she needed to be drinking more alkaline water (not true by the way).