Worry often gives a small thing a big shadow - Swedish Proverb

Today was very frustrating, one of those days when everything seems more difficult than it should be. I had a hospital appointment this afternoon, I'd been looking forward to it and dreading it at the same time. I badly needed some answers but I wasn't sure that I was going to like what I heard, so I felt very anxious.

Robbie came with me and since parking at the hospital is challenging at the best of times, I decided to park in a nearby car park and walk the short distance to the hospital. We still have snow but as the hospital is very close to the town centre I was fairly sure that the pavements would be gritted - they weren't! We slipped and slid towards the hospital very slowly indeed, but we made it without any serious problems. The road and pavement leading to the hospital main entrance were treacherous, it beggars belief that the local authority take no responsibility for making sure that roads and paths leading to hospitals, schools and the like are cleared and made safe. Having negotiated the icy pavements I had to pass a huddle of smokers who blocked the pavement just outside the hospital grounds. I was on my way to the chest clinic and the last thing that I needed was their second hand smoke!

I didn't really get the answers I wanted, just lots more questions, more medication. To be fair he did take my problem seriously and he understood how debilitating this cough is, it makes every aspect of my life so much more difficult. He requested lots of tests including an MRI scan, blood tests (I think they took a whole arm full of blood!) and various breathing tests. I have to see the consultant again in 2 months, I really hope the increased medication will help because the thought of putting up with this for another two months makes me feel like giving up. 

We had to go to a different part of the hospital to get my blood tests don so we walked back towards town a different way, but the paths were just as bad and our progress was slow. We walked through St Giles churchyard, it is beautiful at any time of year but the snow against the white snow-laden skies made it look magical, for some reason it made me think of Narnia. I have happy memories of walking through the churchyard with my aunt when I was a child and it looked so beautiful today that I asked Robbie to take some photos for me with his new phone.

Robbie took me to the Cordwainer for something to eat because I had been too anxious to eat much at lunchtime. He likes Wetherspoons food but it didn't really 'float my boat' and it was so dark in there, I like to see what I am eating. It is scary, but I have to admit that I sound more like my grandma every day!
   

Ready to meet my maker?

I expect people will be wondering why there have been no blog posts for a couple of weeks. I have been ill and I just haven't had the stamina to do much more than deal with the daily essentials. The killer cough has continued with no sign of improvement and then about ten days ago the nagging pain under my right arm in the side and back of my chest got a lot worse and I decided that it was time to take myself back to the doctor, because I just couldn't cope. So on the Friday morning I found myself sitting in the waiting room trying my hardest not to cough and hoping that the doctor would understand just how bad I was feeling.

After about five minutes a woman (aged about 70) came into the waiting room and parked herself next to me, we exchanged smiles, I wasn't really in the mood for small talk but the woman had other ideas. She was the sort of person that my mum would describe as 'vaccinated with a gramophone needle' she lacked an 'off button' and she chatted happily without stopping for breath. Within minutes I she had told me about he career as a nurse, her (now ex) husband's insatiable sexual appetite, his misbehaviour with an implausibly large number of women and his even more implausible excuses. She paused for breath and I was just wondering how I could possibly respond without encouraging further conversation when she turned to me and asked if I was ready to meet my maker. I opened my mouth to respond but she didn't give me a chance, she went on to warn me about the evils of America and the signs that suggest to her that the end of the world and the second coming will happen sooner than people expect. She said that she goes to church every day to make sure that she will be ready when the time comes and she warned me to ensure that I didn't not spend eternity in a cold grave. This was my chance to get a word in, I said that I intend to be cremated when the times comes, so I don't anticipate any problems with feeling cold! I knew instantly that I should have stayed quiet, the woman took a huge breath and opened her mouth to respond, but at that moment the doctor opened her door and called my name so I was able to escape.

The doctor said that my chest was clear but because I'd been struggling with the cough for 9 weeks she put me on steroids and a course of antibiotics and sent me for a chest x-ray. So after queueing at the chemist I took myself to the hospital to have an x-ray. Thankfully the other people in the waiting room were not very talkative and after sitting quietly for five minutes I was called in for my x-ray. It was all over very quickly and I could head home and curl up in the chair for a little while. 
The 7 day course of steroids and antibiotics helped a little bit, but the symptoms got worse again as soon as I stopped taking the tablets. The pain under my arm on the right side of my chest has been steadily getting worse too so I when I went back to the doctor  I was desperate for some answers. My x-ray had revealed a rather confusing picture, there was a shadow or something hard to identify on my right lung and something is pushing or pulling my diaphragm up which in turn is restricting the capacity of my right lung. So I am now awaiting an appointment with a consultant to try to work out what is going on and it looks as if I am going to have to put up with this cough for a few more weeks at least.    

A Stressful Week

The last week was one of the most stressful for a long time, there were a number of things going on but mostly we were worried about my mum, she was in hospital all week following her fall. I didn't know which way to turn, I needed to spend time with my mum and support her, but I also needed to help my step father who is ill and frail and not used to being on his own. Then there were the ordinary demands of life to be considered, going to work, feeding the family and trying my best to keep on top of the house work. I seemed to rush from one task to the next with no time to stop and think – perhaps that was a good thing! 

My mum had a deep wound on her head which was surrounded by a large area of severe bruising; they were worried that the force of my mum’s fall may have caused a bleed into the brain. The wait for the brain scan seemed endless, but thankfully it showed that we have hard heads in our family, there was no damage to her brain. More tests were necessary to determine why she blacked out, it seems her blood pressure is very high but at times her pulse becomes dangerously low. This may necessitate a pacemaker, but in the short term she has been sent home to recover from her fall and to stabilise her blood pressure with medication. 

We picked her up from hospital on Friday evening and settled her in at home before going home to pack the car and do all the last minute jobs in preparation for our holiday. I was disconcerted but too tired to argue when Robbie announced that he was packing the Lego men. It left me wondering about his priorities because at that stage he still hadn’t packed his underwear!

“A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old." - Abraham J Heschel

It has been a very difficult few days. On Sunday lunchtime I had a frantic phone call from my step father, my mum had blacked out and fallen on the kitchen floor badly cutting head open - I have never seen so much blood! He had already called an ambulance and I dashed to their house (in a village about 6 miles away) to be with my mum. As I ran down the lane to their house I realised that there was no ambulance there and I assumed that my mum must be already on her way to hospital. When I opened the front door I realised that I was wrong, my mum was sitting on the floor propped against the kitchen units holding a blood soaked towel against her head. The kitchen floor was covered in blood and my step father (who is terminally ill) was standing there ashen faced looking totally helpless.

I did my best to make my mum comfortable and then I rushed around getting everything ready for a trip to the hospital. The ambulance control had told them to leave mum on the floor and to leave the blood as it was. We waited and waited but no ambulance came. After an hour I spoke to the ambulance control they still insisted that I should not move her and they said they would make mum a high priority and an ambulance would be there soon. I told them that I needed to clean up the blood as it was making it impossible to move around the kitchen to look after mum, and when I got off the phone I cleaned the floor. Still no ambulance came and I was very worried about my mum's condition, so I called my brother (who lives in a different county) he came with his car and between us we got mum up (she was very wobbly) put her into the car and took her to the hospital. By the time we left her house we had waited two and a half hours for an ambulance!

At the hospital her condition was taken very seriously, they said her pulse was dangerously low and she was kept on close observation in the resuscitation area. She is still in hospital, they think she may need a pacemaker, but they are still doing tests. I am disgusted that a woman who is over 80 can be left to wait so long for emergency medical care. We will be making a formal complaint, but our first priority is to look after mum.

MRI Scan

Photo by KasugaHuang

I had to have an MRI scan today, it was needed to rule out any other possible causes for my hearing loss, but they are almost certain it is caused by nerve damage. Robbie offered to come with me but I said I would go on my own, after all it was no big deal. I didn't really like the scan. I had to remove all the metal on me or on my clothes, then I had to lay down on a narrow bed with a special area for my head to help me hold my head still. The machine was very noisy so I had to wear ear protectors, but I declined the option of listening to music. The bed was gradually moved into a narrow tube, it made me think of a coffin being buried, so I closed my eyes and thought about my family tree instead. It was incredibly noisy, I didn't like that but I knew it wouldn't last long. The whole process took less than ten minutes, but I felt very dizzy afterwards. It was certainly not as bad as a mammogram but I'm glad it is over.

Lost For Words

My nephew Oliver came out of hospital on Monday evening, I hope he is going to be OK now, he is such a lovely little chap.

Robbie was a little more forthcoming about his delayed return on Sunday, apparently he took himself off on a train ride. Words fail me – but he'd better watch out because I don't think they will fail me for very long!

Dozy!

David is still in hospital in Oxford, so I took my mum and Emily to visit him again, it is a really horrible journey with far too many roundabouts and stops and starts and it takes ages. David was moaning yesterday, a sure sign that he is getting back to his old self! He is having trouble sleeping because of all the noise on the ward.

I haven't really seen much of Robbie over the last couple of days, he leaves for work at about 6am and I don't get back from work until 10.30pm and by then I am so tired that I just want to sleep. Robbie sat down on the sofa soon after I got home and within seconds he was dozing. About ten minutes later he suddenly jolted awake and started talking, I didn't take much notice at first but I became aware that he was giving a detailed account of a plot from a Simpsons episode. As the question 'why?' formed in my head, he stopped talking and looked confused. Then he admitted “I've been rambling haven't I” and he settled down and went back to sleep – a bit like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland!

Better News

The news on my step father was a little better yesterday. So far he is recovering well from his surgery, but he seems to be struggling a bit with his short term memory, he was fairly convinced that it was 1998! Visiting hours are from 3pm-8pm so I took my mum and Emily to Oxford and then my brother picked them up later. David was very relieved to see them because he knew that he was in hospital but he couldn't work out why or what had happened to everyone else and he didn't know if anyone knew where he was. Poor David, at least he seems to be on the mend. I hope they will move him back to Northampton soon because it is a horrible journey to Oxford.

Now that we have better news about David I can focus on writing a bit more about my Birthday. I wrote yesterday about a very random present from Robbie, but the weird clock was relatively normal compared to the card he bought me. When he gave it to me he was really excited and when I first looked at it I thought he had made it himself because it was made of felt scraps, but on closer inspection I found it was a Fuzzy Felts card. His reason for buying it was typically Robbie “well, it's retro” it was a nice thought but it didn't have any words in it and I like nice words in a card. I had a number of other lovely cards and Sam bought me a very funny card, it made me laugh out loud. As for Robbie I think I will get hold of a war time recipe book and make him a meal using only what would have been available in the days of rationing – I wonder if he would be so keen on retro then! I'm not really moaning, he may be weird but when it matters he is fantastic, I don't know how I would have coped with all the worry at the weekend without him there to help.

Difficult Times

This weekend started fairly normally but it took a turn for the worse and we have had a desperately worrying time. Robbie and Sam spent part of Saturday out in the garden doing battle with the fence. They worked hard and they finally dug out the lump of concrete that had been obstructing the fence posts. We now have all the posts in place and just one fence panel missing as Robbie still has to dig out a shrub which is obstructing that part of the fence.

My mum rang during the morning to say that my step father wasn't very well, he had a headache, he had been sick and he was very sleepy. None of those things sound too serious on their own, but I could tell that my mum was worried and I told her to call the doctor. She was given advice by phone and told to ring again if she was still worried. By evening she was worried enough to call again. The doctor came out and David was admitted to hospital, so mum went too. We went to bed but were on call ready to go and fetch my mum when she was ready to go home. She called at about 4am and we went off to fetch her, David was having tests to see if he'd had a stroke. Within an hour or so mum was called back and told that David had been bleeding inside the brain and he was very sick. We took her back and Robbie stayed with her while I got hold of my brother. By 9am he was being prepared for transfer to John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford and within hours he was undergoing brain.

David was doing OK by yesterday evening, but everyone seemed concerned about how I was coping. Yesterday was my birthday, five years ago I spent my birthday sitting with my husband Eric waiting for him to die, sheer willpower kept him alive until the following day. Many years ago my Dad also died just days before my birthday, I know it is just coincidence but it is hardly surprising that September is not my favourite month! I will write about my birthday in my next post.

No Easy Answers

Robbie and I were rather anxious when we went to the hospital to see his consultant yesterday. We were surprised to find that we didn't have to wait very long until Robbie was called into the consulting room. The consultant explained that the MRI scan had been worthwhile because they were able to get some good pictures of Robbies spine and the pictures had been reviewed by a specialist at Oxford. As expected there was clear evidence of the damage caused by his spina bifida and they could see that his spinal cord was significantly longer than normal with less smaller branches coming from it. The good new was that there is nothing on the scan pictures to suggest that there is any tethering of the cord at the moment. There were words of caution too, Robbie should never have a lumbar puncture or any procedure on his lower back because it could cause serious damage. So the messsage was to keep walking, to accept the falling over and the pain as just part of him and to take great care of his lower back because if anything goes wrong with it they will not be able to put it right. It sounds a bit grim and it would have been nice if we could have found a way to stop the falls and to deal with the pain, but we didn't really expect that. I think we just have to be grateful that the news was as good as we could have hoped for. So now he just has to learn to bounce when he falls over and hopefully he will try not to fall in front of a car or a train!

Grounds For Divorce!

Robbie scares me sometimes. On Tuesday evening he was watching How to Look Good Naked, he and Sam love watching it, I can perhaps understand why a 13 year old boy would be interested in women taking their clothes off, but judging by the giggles and the school boy banter, Robbie is still very much in touch with his 'inner child'. On the program the woman's photograph was put on one of those huge advertising posters on the side of a building. I was just thinking that I couldn't imagine anything more embarrassing, when Robbie announced that he would love to have a photo of him naked turned into a huge poster like that. As far as I am concerned that would be grounds for divorce! Can you imagine walking out of the station at New Street or Euston to encounter Robbie larger than life grinning down at you in his birthday suit. It would cause mass hysteria with people fleeing in all directions.

Talking of hysteria, there was a fair bit of that going on yesterday evening. Robbie went for his MRI scan, he was very anxious about it and he got himself in to quite a state before the appointment. Afterwards he was very pleased with himself, to hear him talk you would think he had survived torture. I listened for a while, then I reminded him that it didn't involve any pain, nothing was poked, prodded or pressed. I suggested that if he'd survived a mammogram or certain other intimate procedures I would be much more impressed. At least it is done now and he doesn't need to worry about it anymore. We will not get the results for a while as we have to wait for his consultant to contact him.

The Waiting Game 03.03.08

I went to hospital today. My GP had referred me 'just to be sure' or so she said. That was weeks ago, in fact the symptoms first started to bother me in early December. I'm not good at waiting, and finding myself in limbo land waiting and wondering wasn't helping at all. My appointment came through for late April and it seemed like such a long time to wait, but on Friday they rang to offer me a cancellation. So this morning found me worrying quite unnecessarily about what I should wear for my appointment. I am constantly amazed by my ability to obsess about trivia. It really didn't matter what I wore because I was obliged to swap my own clothes for a distinctly unflattering cape type gown. The embarrassment of meeting the consultant only bruised my dignity, next on the agenda was a mammogram and the bruises from that were much more tangible. I'm sure they could have found an easier way to deal with such things by now. If men had to have their most sensitive parts clamped in a vice like grip between two plates while standing in a contorted position in order to achieve a diagnosis, I think they would soon apply their minds to a better way of doing things. I wonder why we just put up with the pain, maybe for the same reason that we meekly queue up to use public toilets - we just get used to it.

When they had exhausted all possibilities in terms of indignity I was sent off to wait in the waiting room while the consultant reviewed the images. I read the ancient copy of Woman's Own from beginning to end and I was just about to embark on a detailed examination of the notice board when I was called back into the consulting room. I didn't like the sound of this and for a fleeting moment I considered making a run for it. The consultant wasn't happy with the pictures and had asked for them to be done again - such joy! They had come up with some variations on the original torture treatment, this time I had to stand on one leg with one breast cramped so tightly that it made my eyes water while the other breast was flung over my shoulder - well, it felt like that anyway! Back in the waiting room I aged visibly as waited for the consultant to review the new pictures, it really was starting to bother me. Eventually I was informed that they were happy and there was nothing to worry about and with a grateful sigh I headed home.

Staying Upright 06.11.07

Robbie went for his hospital appointment yesterday, to find out why he keeps falling over. The consultant wanted to do an MRI scan to find out what was going on, but Robbie suddenly announced that he suffers from claustrophobia and could not possibly cope with an MRI scan. Instead he has to have a CT scan and some other tests.

I was surprised to hear of his claustrophobia, he has never mentioned it since we have been together and I felt that if he had coped without it for this long, he should be able to cope for a little longer in order to have an MRI scan. He has showed no sign of claustrophobia when travelling on the sleeper train, in fact he is very keen to repeat the experience! When I challenged him about his new found phobia he was insistent that it had bothered him in the past. He claimed that once years ago when he shared a tent with the Wild Woman from Walsall he felt claustrophobic. Silly man, that is not a phobia, it is a perfectly natural reaction, I feel claustrophobic if she is in the same county!!