annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Medical I'm doing too much to write about at the moment which is a first. Ideally I'd get down everything that I might want to remember but there's no chance of that right now. I cannot bear being in this house so I'm out all day, knackered by the time I get back, crash out on the sofa till Bloke's gone to bed and only then start to emerge. Maybe I'll try writing about different things each time, just updating what I have to say about them. The main thing right now is ED. On Sunday she was poorly, a nasty swelling near the site of one of her tubes, so the District Nurse was called and she arrived at the same time as me. ED looked bad, a very down-turned mouth and a frown across her forehead. And a big, hard, swollen belly. The nurse didn't like that and there was no accounting for it (the belly) so she said to call 111 and tell them the district nurse said ED should be seen by a doctor. ED was sleepy and I knew it would be hours so I took the dog for a walk round through the town, onto the pier and back along the beach, quick march, left right, left right, don't think, keep going, left right, look at the sky, look at the waves, look at the people. These were the exact same symptoms she had started with when it turned out to be massive kidney stones and septicemia and the hospice and all that and although she survived it then there's no telling where anything is going. I went back to the care home and sat with her, listening to Pick of the Week on Radio 4, fannying around with my big bits of sea glass, trying to make a thing I can't even describe let alone name, and eventually a paramedic turned up - I still haven't discovered which is more knowledgeable - a paramedic or a district nurse, but a doctor outranks them both and we didn't get one of those. The paramedic said, nah, he couldn't say what to do other than that with a belly like that she didn't want to be folded up to sit in her wheelchair so let's organise an ambulance and get her to A&E. Which we did. Ach, I can't even go into it again - she seemed bad, then by about midnight when they were still waiting for test results, she seemed in less pain so they put her on a ward and once she was settled I went home, took sleeping pills, got up early, went back to the hospital, with knitting, sat by her bed while she slept all day and eventually she was chucked out again at about five and we all went home. All the tests had come back clear, she wasn't in pain but she did still have a bloated, hard belly. If she had been in pain or there had been signs of an infection she'd have had a CT scan, but apparently they are like gazillions of X-rays all at once and only for emergencies, which this no longer was. And today she was back to normal and we went out to watch the sun going down over the sea and she had her hair cut. I don't like writing it down because it upsets me, though I do know that avoiding being upset is not a good strategy for keeping well. I was so scared in the hospital, but with nowhere to go with that fear. I had to be the strong mum, because who else does she have? Bloke had come and picked the dog up but didn't make contact to ask how she was doing. In the morning when I told him how she'd been he said she sounded like she was a right fucking mess. Cunt. Something ended there, when he described my vulnerable, precious, darling daughter as a right fucking mess - I'm done with him, just fucking done. He said he was sorry: "I'm sorry, I didn't think." But he did, he had to have thought it to say it. And he can think what he likes but when he says things like that I want to walk away, far far away. But of course I have no money. I am a few quid away from my overdraft limit, again. I need to go to bed, but what I wanted to say was that all the time in the hospital I did mindfulness, by which I mean I paid attention to details of what was around me moment to moment. What I could see, what I could hear, smell, feel with my body and sometimes taste. I allowed myself to get angry with the arseholes who run Costa Coffee, which charges more in the hospital than it does in town, and I did my knitting and chatted in a cheerful fashion to nurses and eventually to the patient in the bed opposite (93, hurt her leg falling off a stool, needs to sell her van but hasn't unpacked it yet from her last trip). I could howl with pain and rage like a banshee but there's no one to hold me, no one at all. No one who isn't either almost overwhelmed with their own shit or who I trust to still be there if I break all over them. Bed now. I am grateful that she's still with us, that I have a bed, a car, a laptop and a little dog snoring on the sofa. And friends reading me here, I thank you. Sleep tight. Back soon. 12:59 a.m. - 14.11.18 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
||||||