Baby Bathwater

My two children have been insanely poorly this week. High temperatures, breaking 40C, coughing, lethargy, crying, aches and pains and multiple visits to the GP and also A&E. They’re both on antibiotics because their fevers just refused to budge after 5+ days, my daughter fell over and couldn’t stand on her left leg for abut two days…

Then our fridge stopped working.

Our car started making a funny noise and the mechanic said it was the exhaust pipe connector thingy and would cost about £1800 to fix… the car itself is only worth about £1000, if that.

So now we have no car, no fridge, two poorly children with no appetites, and just a general air of ‘What will happen next?!’

There is a saying isn’t there? Something about raining and pouring? It doesn’t rain, it pours?

All the bad things happen at once?

I heard a man say yesterday, ‘throw the baby out with the bath water’ and it shivered me timbers, I tell you. What an awful saying. What, why would you throw the baby out with the bath water?

I have heard this saying multiple times and it’s so horrid, so I did some research and it means something like, don’t discard something valuable with the rubbish.

Just like that man who accidentally threw away his hard drive containing a tonne of bitcoin, estimated to be now worth 150 million pounds, so he has assembled a team of experts to excavate a landfill in order to find it. He certainly did throw the baby out with the bathwater.

But back to that, WHO came up with that saying? Had someone actually done that, so it became a bar by which to judge other similar and not so similar situations? Could we not say something else? Why must it be so horrific and morbid?

Those are my thoughts for today. Unfiltered, unedited, just posting because I need to say something, not that the void needs to hear another yammering voice.

We seem to have become a generation of all talk and no listening.

Fits

Yesterday I rode in an ambulance to the hospital for the first time ever. I felt pretty stupid for doing it because I didn’t think I was near sick enough for that, but the paramedics reckoned I was.

It all started after a bank holiday Monday lie in – during which I enjoyed watching an episode of the US Office. I was just getting up when all of a sudden my right arm and shoulder was shot through with a stab of excruciating pain. I thought I dislocated my arm, and told my husband so. Then I began to feel quite woozy, and a loud ringing began in my ears. I also began to feel rather sick so I told my husband faintly that I was going to get up to go to the bathroom.

He tried to make me sit but I was insistent – when you feel like you want to throw up you do not want to sit on your fresh sheets.

I got up but didn’t make it to the door. The last thing I remember was leaning my head on my husband and mumbling that I didn’t feel well at all. He thought I was joking, because he laughed.

Then I remember waking up from an interesting and vibrant dream, the details of which vanished the minute my brain registered where I was, lying on the floor with my husband’s arm under my head and my mother in law calling the ambulance and telling them of my state.

I also realised with great shame that I seemed to have lost control of my bladder. And this was not the first time this has happened during a fit. I could faintly hear, above the buzzing in my ears, my husband anxiously telling my mother in law that I was fitting and seizing.

So this is the third time I have had a ‘seizure’, so to speak. I don’t remember any of it but the people who were there (nurses, when I was volunteering at the hospital, and my husband) said I was fitting while unconscious.

And the paramedics were concerned because it is an unusual number of seizures within a short time frame. So they wasted no time in taking me to hospital, where after a seven hour wait I was put in a ward with old ladies who were very distressed, crying out at night and requiring bedpans and nurses at all times.

The doctor reckons I do have epilepsy and has now referred me to a neurologist.

Well that was an adventure. It means I can’t drive or go swimming anymore which is sad. And a large part of my brain really thinks that I’m completely fine and I just fainted.

When I told the doctor that she emphasised the incontinence while unconscious and said that was highly indicative of an epileptic fit.

Great, right? Anyway. My lesson from this experience is that I am not exempt from sickness. I also learned that life is unexpected. I also learnt that growing older and being dependant on others for everything, down to toiletting, is a severe test, and I hope to God I never reach that stage. I also learned that when pushed, I can be quite patient. Who knew I had it in me, hey!

Image Credit

Dear Lenora

Help me.

I am terrified. I want this to be over. Why can’t it be over?

If somebody ignores any contact from you, manipulative psychopath, for years and years and years, then why do you persist in trying to get in touch?

LEAVE ME ALONE.

Can’t you hear? Isn’t this deafening silence an answer to you? You thick, selfish, disgusting, revolting, ignorant, arrogant, pretentious psychopath?

LEAVE ME ALONE.

I hate you. I HATE YOU.

I hate you.

I hate you.

I HATE you.

Thick, thick, skull. Loud grating voice. Evil cackle. Abusive, manipulative ways. Terrifying threats. Horrible, evil texts. The words on the screen make my flesh creep and my blood run cold.

Lenora. Help me.

 

Coughing

I am coughing all night folks, and all day too. I cough until tears explode from my eyeballs and my eardrums threaten to shoot out my ear canals. I cough until my lungs are halfway up my air pipe, and all my muscles are a twitching, uncontrollable frenzy.

I also cough through the night until my husband turns over in frustration and piles pillows over his head.

Poor thing, I do feel for him. He needs his precious little sleep before the pre-dawn trek to work in the morning, and being constantly woken up by my resounding hacking is not helping his cause, and after three days of interrupted sleep and long hours at work he has developed a certain redness around his eyes and has lost his appetite.

Do I feel bad? Of course.

Will I go and sleep elsewhere?

No. I am too scared to sleep alone in my mum’s house because it’s dark and the corridors are narrow and the lights upstairs don’t work and it creaks something terrible.

Last night I woke up at 4 am to see him pressed up against the furthest wall, wrapped in a cocoon of blanket with a pillow covering his ears.

I tried my best to be quiet, I really did. I coughed silently and when I couldn’t keep it in any longer I ran outside to cough.

This used to be a yearly thing for me. Every year, when winter waned into spring, there would be a cough for me to suppress in class, a cough for me to turn heads towards me in public, a cough for me to battle for weeks on end with no respite, and by the end of it I am a wilted, bushy haired, shrivelled up sparrow.

When I was at uni back when I was doing Accounting, my Economics lecturer was so concerned about my constant coughing that he left the seminar to get me a packet of Halls. We didn’t know he’d gone for that reason, and when he marched back in and determinedly placed it on my desk, I was mortified amid the rolling laughter of my fellow students.

Nothing stops it, though. Not Halls, not inhalers, not cough medicine, and not even good old lemon and honey. I shall just have to live this one out, as I have done all the other annual hacks of shame,  and make sure I do take PLENTY of lemon and honey, and pray it doesn’t happen in a few minutes when I have to face a classroom full of six year olds and attempt to teach them something worthwhile.

Also hope D doesn’t come down with it because he will still go into work while poorly and it will be horrible.

Aaaah.

That looks delicious.