(Or a somewhat early one, depending how you look at it)

Lamb and mint burger, chips, veg with minted butter

Trigger warning: hospitals and toilet stuff.

Apologies for the lack of post yesterday: as those who follow me on Facebook know, mum woke me early in the morning as she wasn’t feeling well, and the lack of sleep coupled with three days of activity left me stumbling around like a sleep-deprived zombie. (Do zombies need sleep? Nvm, you know what I mean!)

Mum has been taking cocodamol for the pain in her back, but it has resulted in certain gastrointestinal symptoms (whisper it, because mum is of the generation that is reluctant to even say the word, but it’s constipation) that left her feeling so miserable that I phoned NHS 111 for advice. The very nice practitioner assured me I was doing all the right things – providing a dose of the hospital-issued laxative, giving paracetamol and reassurance, encouraging mum to drink lots of liquid – and after a while things sorted themselves out. Until things went too far in the other direction with, shall we say, explosive results.

I tell you all this not for the sake of toilet humour – I’ve never found loos to be particularly amusing, personally: their jokes are a flush in the pan – but as background when I say that the whole situation gave me some unpleasant flashbacks to some of my darkest days in hospital. At one point I had similar unable-to-go problems, but much, much worse, to the point they were considering surgery: when things finally resolved with a massive dose of laxatives it left me in serious pain, bleeding and wondering if I would ever again be able to control my bowels.

After three days of agony and misery, I was begging for medical intervention but my pleas went unanswered, and I cried myself to sleep, ignored by the duty nurse. It was a very dark time which I try not to think about, and trying to handle all the triggered thoughts while reassuring mum that all would be fine was even more exhausting than the early start.

This morning she didn’t feel well enough to go to church (unsurprisingly), and her mood was so low – “I can’t see any point in getting up, can’t I just stay in bed?” – that I was really quite concerned about her. [As I’m writing this, a knock on the door heralded the arrival of some of mum’s church friends, which I hope will cheer her up.]

Dinner was again a freezer to oven to plate exercise, with just a bit of minted butter (a spoonful of mint sauce and a knob of butter) to jazz up the veg. It was followed by carrot cake and the last of the vanilla ice cream, which had an odd texture as mum put it away in the fridge one night and I then re-froze it: it reminded me of Mini Milk ice lollies, which I used to love, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.

So that was yesterday, and I’ll be back later with today’s post. Probably. Maybe?