Chicken burger / cheat’s ratatouille with garlic bread; tiramisu

Apologies for the lack of post yesterday: the reason will become apparent!

Yesterday we were due to have a visit from a nurse, to give mum a check over and confirm that the meds for her stomach pains were working and appropriate. It seemed to be good timing, too, as mum felt “just… horrible”, and refused to get out of bed.

Just as I was about to phone the GP practice to ask what time they would be here, my phone rang. I answered to find a very confused mental nurse who had received a request for a home visit: confused both because she doesn’t do home visits, and because we had an appointment booked with her today.

It turned out that someone had inadvertently sent the request for a visit to the wrong person. The right person was by then already out on her rounds, and there was no guarantee that she would see the message adding another call to her list until she finished.

With the prospect of no immediate medical assistance, mum’s pain increased until she was doubled over, crying “it hurts”, begging me to do something.

I called 111 (the UK non-emergency medical advice line), and they advised that mum should go to the emergency department within the hour.

So I summoned a taxi – the driver of which was the son of the owner of the construction company that built our house back in the late 70s, in a neat coincidence – and headed off to A&E. Again.¹

By the time we got to the hospital, mum’s pain was gone, as was any memory of it, and she was mystified as to why we were there.

After a relatively short wait (at least I thought it was short. Mum was bored within a few minutes and took to asking when we could go home what felt like every 30 seconds), we were seen by a kindly doctor with an accent out of Death in Paradise (I seriously could have listened to him talk all day), who suggested a couple of changes to mum’s needs but thought it was mostly anxiety causing the problems. Quelle surprise.

We got another taxi home², I cooked a couple of giant chicken burgers I had intended for something more exciting but which just went with salad (between two bits of foccacia in my case), we watched some tv so forgettable I now have no memory of it, and went to bed.

Today mum had a very down day of the sort she hasn’t had for a while, and spent most of the day in bed. When the mental health nurse called, mum joined me for a while, very reluctantly, and went back to bed while the nurse and I were still talking.

The outcome of that discussion was that the dosage of mum’s mental health meds has been increased. I really hope it helps with mum’s anxiety, as today we had a major, catastrophic development: our internet connection has become very slow. (Slow enough that, when I told the customer service person at the internet provider the speed we’re getting, he just said “wow. That is slow.)

Mum burst into my room, near tears, clutching her phone and demanding to know what I had done to it (she apologised afterwards for the assumption that it was my fault). Eventually it came back enough that mum could see her ‘pictures’ (Facebook), and an engineer is coming out next week to try to make it go fast enough to do anything else.

(I had intended to write this post on my fancy new laptop, and take the opportunity to set up and launch the new, improved Pineapple Sponge, but I don’t have enough internet speed to do it so I’m still on my phone for now.)

Dinner was cheat’s ratatouille (roasted Mediterranean veg mixed with a quick herby tomato sauce), which I enjoyed but mum didn’t, having suddenly decided she doesn’t like tomatoes. The range of non ice cream food that mum will eat grows smaller by the week.

She did like the Tesco tiramisu I included in our last grocery order. I liked it too, but it has enough booze in it that my lingering headache is now lingering slightly more forcefully than before.

Now mum and I are sitting on our respective beds: I don’t know what mum’s doing, but she’s quiet. I’m writing this while watching the storm clouds gathering outside and keenly hoping that we might get some thunder and lightning this time.

I will leave you with a photo of some plants in mum’s garden. To anyone else, it’s just a striking combination of colours. To me, it’s a memorial: the fuchsia was planted by my dad, who loved and collected them, and the black calla was a gift from my BIL – on his first date with my sister, knowing her goth-y tastes, he gave her a small bouquet of them, and they’re still “Jen’s flowers”.

And now I’ve made myself cry, so I’ll stop there and see y’all tomorrow, hopefully after some good thunderstorm action.

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1. Until last year I had never been to a hospital emergency department. Now it’s almost my second home. ↩︎
2. Important note to self: when they ask if you can get in any car, the answer is “as long as it’s not a people carrier” (an SUV in US parlance, I believe): it’s a long way up there when you use crutches! ↩︎