Pizza and salad / tomatoes

Today was dentist day, which straightaway ran into a problem as Monday is peak tourist movement day, and therefore the worst day to try and get a taxi. Most companies didn’t even answer the phone. Those that did couldn’t help.

Mum, as always, insisted on listening in to my attempts to find transport, and quickly worked herself up into a panic: “isn’t there anyone else you can ask?”

Eventually, as a last resort, I contacted mum’s friend Charolais, even though I knew she was busy with her grandkids this week. She was, but volunteered her husband to be our driver. Thank you, Mr Charolais!

So we got to the dentist, met up with mum’s friend Walker, and mum went into her appointment while I sat in the waiting room with a word game on my phone and tried to pretend I was anywhere else.

After a few minutes, Walker came back out to ask a question on behalf of the dentist, and ferried my answer back to him. A few minutes after that, the dental nurse came out to ask, in effect, why we were there.

To cut a long and infuriating story short, this dentist couldn’t find any sign of the filling the other dentist reported was needed. What he did think needed doing was a hygienist cleaning of mum’s teeth. She had them done about a month ago, at a cost of over £200.

I was, not to put too fine a point on it, seething. I had forced my neuro-flaring feet into shoes, scared and confused mum, dragged a busy working farmer away from his fields, and for nothing except a not-very-veiled demand for more money.

I left a request for the practice manager to call me back when she returns from her holiday next week, and seethed my way home.

Unsurprisingly, after that I didn’t have much energy or enthusiasm for cooking dinner, so I was grateful for my forethought in buying a pizza. Usually mum doesn’t much like pizza, but she greeted this one – a Tesco Finest margarita – with “ooh, I love these”.

Then we had apple pie, from Tesco’s bakery range. Mum had cream on hers – I remembered to order her some this time – and I had ice cream. Now I have ‘too much food’ exhaustion to accompany the ‘going out while in pain’ and ‘getting angry at incompetence’ exhaustions I already had.

Tomorrow I am meant to have my appointment with the domestic abuse organisation, if I can work out how to get there. I have already been looking at flats and jobs around the Island, in the hope that I will need that information some time soon.

For now, medical stuff takes up nearly all my mental energy, mum nearly my emotional energy, and doing anything – particularly when my neuro pain is flaring, as it has been for the past couple of days (I actually took Oramorph last night, for the first time in over a year, and I may well need to do the same very soon) – all my physical energy. At least it’s hard to seethe effectively when I’m this tired.