Prawn and Mediterranean veg couscous with garlic toast

Today was heading towards being the best day for some time.

I had to wake up early to get on the waiting list for a GP call (our practice’s process is that you call to get a place on the day’s call-back list, and whoever you speak to decides if they can do a diagnosis / prescription / whatever from the phone call or if they need to book you in for an appointment to see you in person), and as soon as I was on the phone mum appeared to tell me she felt better.

I got us on the call-back list anyway, which turned out to be a good move as mum quickly realised she didn’t feel as better as she had thought and did need to speak with a doctor after all.

For most of the rest of the morning I laid on my bed and played games on my phone, while mum watched television in the other room and only very occasionally wandered in to see what I was doing. Eventually the GP called back and decided mum needs to be seen in person, and booked her in for an appointment on Friday afternoon.

It was around this point that I realised that I had forgotten to add milk to our grocery order, so mum and I popped around to our next door neighbours (well, hobbled slowly and painfully around, in my case) who very kindly agreed to get us some on their way home from an appointment later in the day.

Then our groceries were delivered, with a number of substitutions including the replacement of four 250ml bottles of Coke with eight 330ml cans. A great value substitution, and cans are less breakable than glass bottles and so better for my fumbling fingers. (Foreshadowing alert!)

Then mum and I sat on my bed and watched the Christmas edition of The Masked Singer on my laptop¹, the new speakers raising the possible volume sufficiently that mum isn’t struggling to hear what’s going on. For the 90 minutes or so that the programme ran, mum was sufficiently engrossed to only once mention her health problems.

Then I made dinner² and, before we ate, I decided to put the box of cans of Coke out in the conservatory so they were out of the way. My fingers fumbled, the box split, and a can hit the tiled floor. It split, spraying Coke over me, over mum (including in her eyes), and all over the kitchen floor, cupboards, and appliances.

Mum rushed off to flush the stickiness out of her eyes, and came back to find me trying to mop up the spilt drink with a bit of kitchen roll, using my feet as bending / kneeling down means a high likelihood of getting stuck down there. Instead mum cleared up while I sat on my perching stool trying to keep my feet out of the way, wiping down all the cupboards I could reach and musing on how much I f*cking hate being disabled.

Then I noticed that our boiler is dripping water again, and the day officially went from good to very bad.

So tomorrow I will have to call the heating company and (if they’re open on New Year’s Eve) arrange for them to come out and fix the boiler again, then work out how mum and I are going to work together to clean the kitchen floor (lemon juice will help clear the stickiness, according to my good friend Gemini the AI).

Sometimes I wonder why I feel so tired all the time. This 👆 is why.

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1. Well, 90% watch it, with the other 10% on the birds and the fantastic sunset outside the window. ↩︎
2. Recipe: take one bag of frozen couscous and vegetables, and one bag of frozen prawns, dump the contents of both in a pan and heat through until the sauce is bubbling and the prawns are cooked. ↩︎