19 posts tagged “life”
...The anaesthesia really did a number on me [...] and it took many, many, many nauseated hours before I even started recovering[...]
When the doctor ripped the well-crusted packing out of my nose [...] my gut reaction was to punch him as hard as I possibly could, then run far, far away. Searing, blinding, face-smashing pain...
I, however, was surprised how together I felt when I woke up in the recovery room. My nostrils were packed with mini tampons, but I was chatting happily with the nurses who wheeled me back to the ward. Then I spent a contented hour or so cheerily texting and phoning friends, marvelling at how out of it the other patients were looking.
Then the morphine wore off.
After that it was inexplicable and uncontrollable sobbing, bleeding and vomiting (sometimes all three via the same orifice) all the way. And a sudden flashback to the anteroom where the surgeon told the nurses he was going to "flush her sinuses with a cocaine solution". So basically I was.. what? Having withdrawal?
When the chipper young Irish nurse came to remove my packing the next morning, I was wide awake and counting down the hours till I was discharged. But 8am took forever to come. I now fully appreciate my dog's attitude of "okay, let's go!" when we exit the vet's surgery and she's hanging around while I pay the bill. Every second sentence out of my mouth was "...But I'm still being discharged at 8am, aren't I?"
Having the packing removed was a bit of an ordeal. She squirted saline solution up each nostril and dragged out the tampons while I held a kidney dish under my chin. It's a bit like having a wet weasel pulled from the back of your brain via your nostril. And with each one came blood. A lot of blood. Much of it was going down the back of my throat, too. And it just kept coming until the nurse got very pale and said things like "Oh dear" and "Oh god you're so young" and "I'm not very good with blood, you know".
Then another nurse came and there was a whispered discussion about whether I'd need a blood transfusion and an extra night in hospital. I fully believe that I only stopped bleeding then because I willed it. Then The Boyfriend showed up and I went from 0 to fully packed and dressed in 30 seconds. They strapped a sanitary towel to my face, gave me some painkillers and I zoomed out of the door.
I have never been so thankful to be home in my life. I have spent the last week on the sofa, mostly zonked on painkillers, although this weekend I have done an unwise amount of geeking, which only goes to show me that geeking in this condition is unwise. I get thumping sinus headaches, my nose hurts like a motherfucker but I can breathe through it a little. Thankfully my work sent me an enormous bouquet and a card, and I have 7 more days' leave.
So why aren't I slumped on the sofa watching My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Good question! Bye-bye...!
A gale is blowing through London tonight. Anything not nailed down has fallen over. Someone at The Boyfriend's work was almost decapitated by a roof tile that smashed through a window. The silly wooden pagoda my previous downstairs neighbours erected in the garden looks like an advert for When Ikea Flatpacks Go Bad.
My biggest bugbear is that the wind fucked with my journey home. Tomorrow is Moving Day at work, so this afternoon I packed up all my work crap and brought the rest home. For a low-maintenance, jeans-and-sweater girl I seem to have amassed a whole lotta coats and shoes in my desk drawers. So, lumpen and teetering, my bags and I arrived at my local Tube stop to discover it was shut. So I trudged a mile (never carry a plastic bag when the wind is strong) to King's Cross, only to find all the overland lines were closed. There were police everywhere -- at first I thought there had been another terrorist attempt. But then discovered that the storm had littered trees across the tracks. So the police were there for... colour?
I managed to elbow my way onto a Tube and promptly got pushed over by several men. Then a kind lady gave me her seat. And instead of savouring my coveted seated status, I spent the ride home worrying that I must look elderly. Or pregnant. Or both.
Tomorrow I get to work from home while the Men get on with moving our crap over to the new office. Other people in my team who are meant to be working from home tomorrow have mysteriously developed problems with their internet connections. I suspect they will sit around playing with their Wiis all day.
It was sad packing up the Web Office. On Monday we move into our other, open plan building. But for a year and a bit we had a little slice of geeky private office heaven. So many memories. Making the new temp regale us with Christmas carols in 2005 (he was Jewish, we later discovered). Our nativity scene from last year, which was made of ceramic cows, Moomin figurines and a model donkey from Spain. Racing swivel chairs. Shooting tiny pig figures with a plastic gun. Playing tickle tag.
I feel almost melancholy. And the wind whistling through the gables doesn't help.
I was wondering when the migraine would strike; I have been eating erratically and had a few (very) late nights. This morning the headache and fatigue came knocking. I decided to come home after lunch rather than wait until I was vomiting, then taking a 20 minute Tube ride home. I'm feeling better just being at home rather than at work, and I plan to collapse on the sofa with some tea and TV in a minute.
I just had to record this strange observation first:
On the way home from the Tube station just now I passed a woman coming out of her house. She looked about 35-40, plumpish, and was wearing a fleece. That warm, domestic, mid-afternoon smell of laundry liquid followed her out of her door, and the fleece, her plumpness, the time of day (midweek early afternoon - everyone else at work), the smell of laundry liquid and all its connotations made me retch.
I know I have a migraine and nausea accompanies it, and I'm not judging her in any way, but it was the utter bland, domestic ordinariness of the situation that struck me, and I think the retching was telling me this is not for you. You are not meant to be at home in the middle of the day folding sheets, having coffee mornings, or getting ready to pick the kids up from school. There is nothing wrong with this, people do this every day and manage to be exceptional people, but it is not for you.
Just a few weeks ago I was entertaining the thought of being a mother. I became panicky because I thought my biological clock was ticking. I happily envisioned future mes, mothering, staying home, maybe taking some time off to have a family and do some home studying, being a wife, cooking. But I can't remember the last time I felt a sense of rightness, of being in the right place at the right time, doing the thing that I'm supposed to do.
Except I did feel that this week: on Monday, at band practice.
Again, I'm not judging or belittling people who choose a domestic life -- I have great respect for those who do. And I know there's so much more to that side of life than just the biased things I've listed here. And I may yet choose it one day. It's just interesting, after all these years of not knowing who I am or where I'm supposed to be, to have two such opposing, extreme reactions in the same week.
Or maybe it's the migraine. Who knows?
I went to see The Boyfriend in hospital today.
Upon laying eyes on him I was hit by an unexpected rush of love and protectiveness, and a kind of stupid pride that he was easily the youngest and most attractive man on his ward. I brought him flowers. Then I went to the nurses' station to ask for a vase. Do you have a vase? I asked. A what? Said the nurse. A vase, I repeated. Then this exchange followed:
Nurse: Vase?
Me: Vase.
Nurse: Vase.
Nurse: Vase?
Me: Vase.
Apparently the Nigerian nurse had trouble deciphering my, generic English, accent. Despite our both pronouncing "vase" exactly the same way ("vhaarz").
The Boyfriend is on IV antibiotics and hasn't seen his surgeon yet, so we don't know when he will be discharged. But he's surprisingly chipper: he has no pain in his leg. They zapped the nerves in his leg with an electric shock before operating, to numb it. This will wear off and he will be in considerable pain. But for now he's on a quiet ward with plenty to read, and now, some sunflowers. In a vhaarz.
We spent a pleasant 4 hours together, doing what we normally do on Saturday afternoons -- hanging out, reading the paper, chatting. And then it was time to go. Again, I was hit by a wave of emotion: a sudden, gnawing melancholy. I wanted to scoop him up and take him home right then. But I bit my lip and dabbed the corners of my eyes, and swung my bag on my shoulder with such false bravado that, with force, I whacked his bad leg.
He's starting to get some feeling back now, apparently.
I learned a new word today: glückschmerz - sorrow at someone else's happiness. The opposite of schadenfreude (pleasure from someone else's misfortune).
I'm exhausted. tonight I shall go to bed early with a book. But first I am going to make myself a steaming bowl of pasta and watch X-Factor. I imagine glückschmerz and schadenfreude will both feature.
The Boyfriend has just sent me a text message saying "ow". So I'm going to take a wild guess and say he's out of surgery. To bed, perchance to sleep!
Just got home and called the hospital with the slight handicap of not knowing where the hell The Boyfriend is. But a nice lady who called me "darling" told me that The Boyfriend is "probably" in recovery, so I need to call again in a couple of hours when they will "probably" have moved him onto the ward.
De dum, de dum.
I have plans to eat pizza in my sweats, watch Desperate Housewives and Dogma, and have one of those early nights I keep meaning to give myself. But I am currently entrapped by inertia at my computer. I considered putting some new, uninteresting images on Flickr, but then decided to do some research on my old prep school.
I spent my first few years at Dumbrells School, in a tiny, dingly, witchy, Enid Blytonesque Sussex village called Ditchling. Camilla Parker-Bowles also went to Dumbrells, a million years before me, but that has little bearing on things.
Dumbrells was an ancient school, housed in an ancient, sprawling Tudor house and principled by an ancient, grey-bunned lady called Miss Knowles. It was a weird combination of Victorian manners and a progressive, Montessori-like approach to education. I very much enjoyed my time there, amidst the oak beams and the gnarled branches of ivy creeping down the window. In fact, the Olde Englisheness of it all often confused me, a tiny tot between 3 and 7 years, about which century I lived in. Some years later I read The Children of Green Knowe and was immediately reminded of my time at Dumbrells.
Unfortunately Dumbrells closed in 1983 and the building was knocked down. Some "prestige apartments" are now in its place. And there is NOTHING about it on the internet. So I went to my Friends Reunited page and added some memories about the school. This is what I wrote:
My main memories are:
- Not having a set "breaktime". Miss Knowles would decide if and when it was deserved and would send you out to the forest next door to play, rather than a playground.
- Cook, who was ancient and terrifying (and no longer the cook), and who would hand out mints to favourable pupils
- Having to bow (boys) and curtsey (girls) to Miss Knowles at the beginning of each day
- I got lost in the forest one breaktime and ended up in a paddock with some Shetland ponies! A very bizarre but enjoyable afternoon
- Lunch in the great hall with linen tablecloths and napkins. And no talking: you had to whisper "please pass the salt" to your neighbour, who passed the message along the table
- A miserable and painful morning spent picking gooseberries around the back of the kitchen, knowing full well the disgusting things were going to be your pudding
- A bull got loose from the farm next door once, and all the pupils were locked in the main classroom as it rampaged around the building
- Miss Knowles' Christmas parties for the children - you were let into the great hall to see a towering Christmas tree, and each child had a present at the bottom
I don't think I shall find another magical place like Dumbrells again. It's a sad thing. But I cherish every memory.
Today, in song....
~Bow now now now now~
My cat has cat flu...
~Bow now now now now~
My man is under the knife...
~Bow now now now now~
Feel like this Friday...
~Bow now now now now~
Will last the rest of my life...
I got the Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
Oh dem Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
Gonna last me all day
~Bow now now now now~
I have to examine my cat's poo
~Bow now now now now~
And feed her chicken and rice
~Bow now now now now~
I have to help my man get to the loo
~Bow now now now now~
I'm not even his goddamn wife
I got the Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
Oh dem Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
Gonna last me all day
~Bow now now now now~
Tonight I'll get me some pizza
~Bow now now now now~
And some chateau neuf
~Bow now now now now~
And if anyone wants anything from me
~Bow now now now now~
I'll tell them to fuck oeuf
I got the Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
I'll have dem Friiiiiiidaaaaaaaaayyyyy blues
Till at least Saturday
Tomorrow The Boyfriend goes in for surgery on his ankle which will leave him hobbled and unable to drive for 3 months. Next Friday I am jetting off to Spain. In between, I need to
- Work full-time
- Be on hand to care for The Boyfriend
- Go to the opticians
- Squeeze in a quick visit to my mother to see how she's doing (which may involve an overnight stay)
- Arrange stuff for my mother if she needs it
- Do 2 weeks' grocery shopping
- Edit 100 pages of copy
- Pick up 2 parcels from our ridiculously inaccessible Post Office
- Take the cat to the vet
- Find time to sleep
A time travel device would be really handy right now.
My mother, who lives 70 miles away, was taken seriously ill on Sunday.
I have taken a week off work to go home, and take care of her and her life, which seems to have fallen apart around her. No one was sure what had happened to her and she had received appallingly little care at the hospital, and was discharged without a clinical diagnosis. Her symptoms were very serious and very worrying, and she has understandably been very distraught. I've neither slept nor eaten much this week (although I've made sure my mother has done both), and have had to deal with this alone.
My mother had several tests yesterday, and it now seems that all these symptoms were probably a dangerously severe and rare side effect of one of her medications. She is tired, but improving rapidly and now, at last, friends and other members of the family have rallied round to be with her for the next 2 weeks. So I came home last night.
I've lost 7lbs since Sunday, my vision blurs whenever I walk, I have huge dark circles under my eyes and, regrettably, I cry at the drop of a hat. So I have bought some chocolate, dug out Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, unplugged my phone and stowed all hats out of sight for fear of droppage.
See you on the other side.
Today I
- Stole some tea
- Had marshmallows stuck to my face
- Lost a no-brainer eBay auction for someone who was stuck in a meeting the entire time. The item went for £150 less than his top price...
- Compared myself to a hedgehog during a meeting
- Was delayed on my way home by a "person under a train"
- Discovered my old office is haunted
And now to bed.
