Quesadillas and salad

Today was, finally, cystoscopy (bladder endoscopy) day for mum. Mum very kindly didn’t wake me before my alarm, but once I was awake, it was full-on panic stations. It didn’t help that the weather was (and remains, tbh) utterly foul, with torrential rain and gale-force winds blowing it around. I really miss driving, but I was glad that I didn’t have to drive today.

We had quite a long wait for the procedure as, due to a combination of staff illness and strike action, the 15 person endoscopy team was down to just six. Mum’s procedure was done by the department consultant, who didn’t seem best pleased to be doing so.

After days of panic, the procedure itself took barely long enough for me to post a photo on Facebook, and then mum was back with me and worrying that the pain from the procedure would stop her going to church on Sunday. My response “why would it if it only hurts when you pee?” was apparently not the correct one.

Then, after a brief pause to buy a novelty biscuit off the snack trolley – to make up for all the days I was in hospital and had to watch the trolley go past as I didn’t have any money to buy anything – and a side trip to the coffee shop to buy a gingerbread latte (something that you cannot get for love nor money in rural West Wight), it was back out into the rain-soaked world.

There are two main roads you can take from the hospital to the west of the Island and, thanks to the weather, one was closed due to a landslip and the other was a foot or more deep in water in places. We got through, thanks to some careful manoeuvring from our driver, but a boat would perhaps have been a better transport option.

This afternoon I spent some time trying to convince my bank that my card won’t make contactless payments: “I can’t see that transaction” said the customer services person, which… well, no, because it didn’t work. 🤷 The rest of the time I spent making vague reassuring noises every time mum worried that the pain would stop her doing anything ever again (a slight exaggeration, but only slight), knowing that after a few hours it would stop hurting, which has indeed happened.

I also did some laundry and hung the washed sheets on the heated dryer for mum to take off and rehang because she didn’t like the way I’d done it. Mum brought in a parcel and did her usual complaining about “where am I supposed to put all this stuff?”, the ‘stuff’ being the new face cloths she had asked me to buy.

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Sorry for all the complaining: it’s been a long day.

For dinner I made quesadillas: cheese and vegetable for mum, cheese and bean for me. (One wholemeal tortilla each, one topped with roasted Mediterranean veg and a handful of grated cheese, the other with a couple of generous spoonfuls of refried beans from a tin, grated cheese, and a sprinkling of Cajun spice mix; both folded in half and fried in a pan with a splash of oil until crispy on the outside and melty in the middle.)

Mum ate barely half of hers, which is probably my fault for giving her cake mid-afternoon: in my defence, the only thing she had eaten all day was a pot of yoghurt, so I figured getting any kind of nutrition into her was more important than the fact that nutrition was chocolate cake.

Now, with the wind still howling but the rain having, for a short while, taken a break, it’s an evening of mum complaining how ridiculous it is that there’s nothing on television she wants to watch (she seems to genuinely struggle with the idea that the television listings aren’t done solely for her benefit) until we both head off for an early night. And a late Christmas pudding cookie, in my case. 🍪