Breaded prawns, mini hash browns, sweetcorn

Today has, unsurprisingly, been a stressful day.

Mum spent most of the day, from dark o’clock, worrying about her hospital appointment. The headaches that have been plaguing her for the past couple of weeks were made worse by her panic, which made her panic mord, and so around in a horrible vicious circle.

I confess I spent most of the day hiding inside a book, being jolted from the adventure every few minutes by mum’s latest request for reassurance. I was really quite relieved when the car turned up to take us to the hospital.

[Quick diversion: today’s driver was the same one who took me to hospital on Monday. On that journey, he mentioned that he and few colleagues were considering starting their own public service organisation. (I’m being deliberately vague here as the conversation touched on some commercially sensitive information that I’m pretty sure isn’t supposed to be disclosed to a wider audience. I hope you understand.)

I expressed interest in contributing my 20+ years of admin experience if the plan went further, thinking it would likely be several months, at least, before that happened. Then today the driver mentioned that one of his colleagues had been trying to get hold of me to discuss things further. Err… 😬]

Anyway, back to the hospital visit. We arrived, checked in, and were told we were at the wrong entrance and needed to be at the other side of the hospital. With no porters or volunteer scooter drivers available, I had to walk the whole way. By the time we got there I was shaking and near tears of pain and exhaustion, and I was less than impressed to discover that I had misremembered the instructions in the letter and there was no-one to blame but myself for the fiasco.

After all that, mum lasted less than 10 minutes in the MRI machine: it was too noisy for her aching head to cope with, and when she started crying the technicians brought the scan to an early end. I don’t know if they got the information they needed or not, and I didn’t have the energy to ask.

Those 10 minutes of just sitting, with no responsibility for mum’s wellbeing, were a rare pleasure, strongly encouraged by one of the hospital staff who had cared for her own mother and remembered how it felt.

On the way back, we stopped at a cashpoint so I could get some money to pay the driver. One of the many soggy fallen leaves gifted by Storm Amy sneakily positioned itself under one of my crutches, resulting in a skid and an inelegant wobble before I recovered my balance. I’m glad I did as having to be rescued from a fall caused by a single damp leaf would have been incredibly embarrassing. Possibly painful, too, but mostly embarrassing.

Dinner was a classic orange-stuff-from-the-freezer deal: breaded king prawn selection, from Tesco’s C-word¹ range, mini hash browns, and sweetcorn with a bit of Aromat seasoning. The prawns were just OK, a bit small for king prawns and, in the case of the spicy bbq ones, hot enough for even me to notice the kick.

So that’s today’s story. I will doubtless re-read it tomorrow and wince at all the typos and grammatical errors, but right now I’m too tired and in too much pain to go back through it.

Mum’s headache has all but disappeared.

---

1. The 🎄🎅🎁 one. It’s way to early to talk about it. ↩︎