Haddock kyiv, chips, salad

No post yesterday as I didn’t sleep well (too much coffee too late in the day 😬) and my patience evaporated some time around 10 minutes after I got up. Mum has (or had, one having now happened) a couple of medical appointments she has been panicking over (“no I’m not”): the only reason I still have my sanity is that BBC iPlayer has previous episodes of The Weakest Link and my laptop now has speakers so I put that on and enjoyed the resulting peace.

During the second episode it started to get dark, and we both noticed little blue lights flashing in one of our trees (we have somehow squeezed two large trees into our small garden) where no lights should be. With the aid of the zoom function on my phone camera we identified a small toy plane that had somehow ended up stuck in the top of a tree.

I joined a local lost and found group on Facebook to try and find its owner, but so far no-one has come forward. The plane will just have to stay in its new arboreal home, as there’s obviously no way I’m climbing up a ladder to get it down. Not that we have a ladder even if I did want to.

This morning mum called me twice to check if I was awake, and – naughty me – I pretended I wasn’t and went back to sleep. The rest of the day was spent repeatedly reminding mum why we were going, why we were going, and that we’d be home in time for dinner.

I love mum, as you well know, but I am so very tired of dealing with mum’s anxiety. I keep telling myself that we just have to get past X event – this GP appointment, that church service – and mum will stop worrying and feel better about things, but of course she just finds something new to worry about so it never stops. I try my best to be sympathetic, as it’s not exactly fun for her either, but her need for endless reassurance is by far the most frustrating and exhausting part of caring.

(There are, of course, a variety of things that mum could do to manage her anxiety, but she won’t, and why should she when she can require me to do it for her?)

Today’s GP appointment didn’t exactly help matters, as the doctor spotted something that is almost certainly a common condition that can be treated with steroids but just might be an early sign of cancer. She has therefore made an urgent referral for mum to gynaecology, which means another hospital appointment for mum in the near future, which means more anxiety for mum to expect me to manage for her.

I have my own hospital appointment scheduled for a couple of weeks’ time, over on the mainland, but I’m hoping the consultant will agree to my request to do it over the phone rather than in person. It means having mum listening in, as she has no grasp of the concept that I might need any kind of privacy, but I won’t have to sort out and pay for transport to the mainland, or to sort out and pay for a sitting service to stay with mum, or to listen to mum repeatedly and pathetically asking me why I’m abandoning her. She does this every time I even mention doing anything without her, which is precisely as irritating as it sounds.

After our GP visit, dinner had to be of the freezer – oven – plate variety. The haddock kyiv is from the Tesco Finest range and is really very good indeed, although lemony enough to make my throat and mouth burn for a while after eating. (I have a citrus allergy, if you don’t know, although it’s usually not a problem if the citrus has been cooked.) Mum was less keen, but then she doesn’t really like fish, except when she does.

So… yeah, that’s what’s been happening. Positively plane sailing, really. ✈️