Homemade pizza with salad

Early this morning – earlier than I would have liked, anyway – mum woke me up to let me know that she was going to put the bin out. I decided to stay awake until she came back inside, and was glad I did as she came back in a panic because she couldn’t find the food waste bin.

My inclination was to say “sod it, it can wait until next week”, but I have long since learned that, when mum’s in a panic looking for something, no variant on “it can wait” is acceptable.

So I got up, put in my contact lenses (eventually, as the left one was being an awkward so-and-so), got my crutches, and went out to the garage to find the food waste bin exactly where it always is. Of course.

Then mum and I both went back to bed, and I slept until I was woken by my phone, at a time closer to lunchtime than breakfast. (😳) I missed the call, which was from the GP surgery, which I had been told not to expect until later in the week.

At this point I will jump out of chronological order, to the call-back from the GP surgery which I have just had. The person who called isn’t a GP, but has the overwhelming advantage (in my opinion) that he actually listens. So, rather than telling me that mum is getting tension headaches and leaving it there, he listened when I said that I know they’re tension headaches but I need something that will ease the pain.

He told me that cocodamol can help as long as I’m careful not to let mum take them too often, and that the dosage of the meds mum takes to control her epilepsy (so successfully that she hasn’t had a fit since I was a baby), which has been changed several times in the past year, might be a factor. He’s going to arrange for a district nurse to come round and take some blood for testing. I have previously been told that that wasn’t possible and we would have to struggle down to the surgery for blood tests, so I’m mildly annoyed to find that it is possible, but mostly just relieved that someone is finally listening to what I’m saying.

---

Earlier in the afternoon, our cleaner ‘Lil’¹ came round and, after doing the usual cleaning and hoovering, helped me clean out our main food cupboard. From this little exercise I learned:

• Mum had six (six!) half-empty jars of dried garlic, the oldest having a BBE of January 2015. They all went in the bin.
• Hiding at the back of the cupboard was a sweet little glass jar, with a label saying ‘pudding rice’ that was produced on a label maker ‘borrowed’ from dad’s lab when the jar was new, sometime in the late 1970s. I had an instant flashback to dad making rice pudding in the tiny kitchen in my childhood home, and mentally added pudding rice to next week’s shopping list.
• Mum’s kitchen is now mine, at least in so far as the food cupboard contains three types of flour, three types of pasta, and two types of noodles. And no dried garlic, as I prefer the stuff that comes in jars.

Dinner was homemade pizza: ready-made dough from The Northern Dough Co (highly recommended, btw), topped with passata from a jar, grated mozzarella and cheddar from a bag, and some cracked black pepper. Done and in the oven in five minutes, and cooked in about ten. Mum doesn’t usually care much for pizza, but this one got the coveted ‘yum’.

Tomorrow I have to try and rearrange mum’s scheduled hospital appointment on Wednesday, as she’s not going to want to go (or is going to want to go even less than she already did) if she once again has the sort of headache that has her crying with pain. Trying to explain that to mum left her more confused and me getting frustrated, so please wish me luck with explaining whatever the outcome is tomorrow.

---

1. Not her real name. ↩︎