September 16th, 2025

Last Thursday, Deniz returned from his holiday with his family in Kurdistan. He had found a cheap flight but ended up waiting seven hours at the Istanbul airport in the middle of the night. Needless to say, he was exhausted when I went to pick him up at Zurich airport.

On Sunday evening, we moved his belongings to Olten, where he started his training the very next day. He has a room in the hospital staff building, small, but well equipped, with a balcony that offers a lovely view from the seventh floor.

His first day, on Monday, was difficult. He came back downhearted, convinced he had made the wrong choice. The introduction day involved setting up computers and installing various applications. As he is not particularly confident with IT, and since the instructions were given in the Solothurn dialect, he felt completely out of his depth. He already sometimes struggles to understand Bernese dialect, so the Solothurn variant made things even worse! Fortunately, the lectures, which begin on Wednesday, will be taught in standard German, which should make things much easier for him.

On Thursday evening, I was invited to a book launch. A former colleague, the executive assistant, presented her autobiographical book, accompanied by a fashion show of around twenty robes she had sewn herself using the quilting technique. A deeply personal and moving story, told with great modesty, with the central theme of her never having had children. By the end of the show and her presentation, I noticed several guests wiping away tears. It was a beautiful and touching evening.

And this morning, I had an appointment at the hospital for a Peripheral Angiography MRI, an examination to prepare for the operation scheduled for mid-November. As always with this type of imaging, the noise of the machine is deafening, from high-pitched whistles to loud humming, to relentless hammering. With headphones and some music, it is more bearable, but spending almost two hours in the scanner is still unpleasant, even if it is not painful. To visualise the blood vessels, I was injected with a contrast agent throughout the examination. These images will allow the doctors to assess the state of the connective tissue and decide which surgical technique to use in order to minimise the risk of unwanted bleeding.

And this afternoon, I went back to the gym. I try to go three times a week, although the motivation isn’t always there!