notes from my sofa

1.  I am still poorly.  The antibiotics did their job to a certain extent but by this past weekend I was still coughing, feverish and now starting to get wheezy so instead of going to work on Monday morning, I had to go back to the GP.  He listened to my chest with growing concern, prescribed a course of steroids and an inhaler, signed me off work for another week and sent me off to the local hospital to have a blood test.

2.  Yesterday, four doses steroids under my belt and I was feeling a whole lot better.  So much so, in fact, that I went out in the afternoon and met a friend* for coffee and I decided to go back to work on Thursday.

3.  Today I am nauseated and completely exhausted.  The mere act of having a shower sent me back to lie on the bed for half an hour to recover.  Worse still, it made me read the patient information sheet inside the box of drugs (something I never do).  Yep - nausea, vomiting and fatigue are among the common recognised side effects of this particular drug.  Maybe I won't be going back to work tomorrow after all...

4.  One of the advantages of being off sick is that you get to watch bad daytime tv.  My tv reception vanished yesterday and has still to return.  Apparently it's something to do with the satellite feed to the whole building and they will mend it when they mend it.  I'm not normally a tv addict but being sick for almost a fortnight means that I have been watching a whole host of cookery and DIY shows and, dammit, I need my fix!

5.  On the other hand - catch-up tv on my laptop is a godsend!

6.  *Ahem. A friend for coffee.  It wasn't a friend, exactly, it was S.  As he works weekends, he doesn't work Mondays and Tuesdays and yesterday he was doing a particular London walk (the weather is amazing, totally un-London-like and actually could be said to be a little too hot) which ends about 10 minutes away from where I live.  As we had been in contact during the past week, he knew I was home and suggested, if I felt up to it, we gave date #2 another try.  I was feeling so much better that I said yes, and I am very glad that I did, even if it did leave me completely shattered by the time I got home.  Gentle reader, S is intelligent, funny, kind and I think he likes me.  I'm not good at reading signs but he said "Illanare, I really like you" so that was my first clue.  Second clue was asking if I would like to see him again, because he really wanted to see me again. So we have agreed on a date next Monday as I am on annual leave next week (and I am now casting my eyes up to the universe and asking the dating gods to pretty please make me recovered fully by Monday).

7.  I appear to be dating again.  It is very, very strange.

8.  I am now going to find another cookery show online and try to stop obsessing about what to wear on Monday...

frowned upon

The dating gods are frowning upon me.  I was meant to have my second date with S on Thursday (drinks then dinner at one of my favourite Greek places in London) but I was Struck Down with what I thought was a heavy cold.  S, who seems so far to be rather a nice man, obligingly agreed to shift our plans to Saturday night (drinks then dinner at one of his favourite French places in London).

However, it soon became clear that a fever of 40 degrees (Celcius, American readers), chest pain, shortness of breath, the inability to swallow more than the teeniest sips of warm tea, tremendous ear-ache and the inability to breath unless sitting bolt upright indicated something more than a cold.  On Friday night I sent a text to apologise profusely and then sank back exhausted on my bank of 7 pillows, thinking I would probably never hear from him again.  At this point you are probably wondering why I didn't go and see my GP.  Well, I had a very good reason - I had completely, but completely, lost my voice and couldn't phone to make an appointment.

By Sunday I had regained enough of a croak to call the emergency doctor who, after a couple of questions, suggested somewhat forcefully that I pack myself into a cab and present myself at the emergency clinic immediately.  I did so, he diagnosed a good going chest infection, loaded me up with antibiotics and sent me home.  I called my mummy, she came over with chicken soup and a light in her eye as she saw this as a chance to clean out my kitchen cupboards and arrange them as she thinks best and I was too weak to protest. (I looked at them this morning in awe, they sparkle and I think are organised alphabetically.  I'll protest later as a matter of form, of course, but they really do sparkle).

Yesterday I had to go to my usual GP for a certificate for work.  It is a long, uphill climb and by the time I got there all I wanted to do was lie down in the car park and quietly expire.  My GP, on hearing that I couldn't hear on my right side, peered into ears.  "That's quite the infection you have there" she said, moving tactfully to my left.  "Good job you're already on amoxycillin.  Go home and stay there until Friday when I want to see you again to decide whether you can go back to work on Monday."  I croaked my thanks and crawled back down the hill and into my bed.  And here I stay, coughing up bits of lung and feeling very meh.  Even my darling little cat has had enough of me and has abandoned me, prefering to gibber at birds from the safety of the sun-warmed balcony.

As for S, he says we can re-arrange when I am better but I think I detect a certain cooling of enthusiasm on his part.  We shall see...

dipping a toe

It all started about a month ago, with an awful day at work.  I came home, kicked off my shoes, fed my darling little cat and poured myself a shot of vodka all in one smooth movement.  The plan was to hunch morosely on the sofa and watch bad tv, but then the phone rang and life changed direction slightly.

It was my cousin; I think I have mentioned her before in passing.  She broke up with her boyfriend a month or so before A and I parted, and she has not done very well since.  For a while she really worried us and an attempted overdose put us all on a "suicide watch" rota.  I have always been close to my cousin and she finds me easy to talk to, increasingly so as the months go past since her break-up and she is still more often than not mired in grief.  She tells me that I am the only person who is not telling her that she should "just get over it" or that it's "time you moved on".  I guess that's another side effect of infertility and babyloss - I know about unacknowledged grief.

Anyway, I digress.  My cousin rang, and she was a little drunk and a lot punchy.  She'd decided that she was going to marshall her inner vamp and start online dating. I applauded her decision.  She was going to start right now, this minute.  I suggested caution, reminding her that she'd had a bit to drink and maybe wasn't going to be able to do herself justice on her profile.  She suddenly sunk to the depths of despair, saying that she was being stupid, what did she have to offer anyway and even if the sky fell in and someone contacted her, she'd never have the nerve to do anything about it.  I tried encouragment, regretting my earlier caution.  This went on for a while, during which time I partook of another vodka shot (I should point out here that I had yet to eat anything at all that day).

Finally, cousin decided that she'd had enough of moping and she was going to really do something about it but I had to hold her hand and do it too.  I thought not, cousin pleaded, I sank another vodka shot and thought "oh what the fcuk" and booted up my laptop.  Half an hour later, cousin was gracing the pages of one website and I had signed up to a different one (my cousin and I look alike, are the same age, and have similar interests - using the same site could have opened up a whole new world of problems).

I honestly thought nothing more of it.  I signed up for the minimum length of time (30 days) and set a reminder in my phone to cancel my membership on day 29 and went to bed and forgot about it for two days.  It was my cousin emailing me about one of her matches which prompted me to log back on and I found a host of "matches" (I used inverted commas there because I don't think that, while I am sure he is charming, a 65-year-old man living in Arizona is an ideal potential match for me, especially as we both ticked the "not willing to move countries" box).

Sorry, I'm digressing again.  One of the other matches had sent me a message and his profile made me smile so I sent him a message back. This went on for a couple of days and then we moved to real-world email, and after a couple of weeks we met for lunch. This was my first first date since 2006 and it is no exaggeration to say that I was a wreck beforehand.  For the whole morning my throat was so dry I could barely swallow, my stomach was cramping and, as I walked from my office to where we were meeting, my legs were shaking so badly the 5-minute walk took 10 minutes.  I was embarrassed to shake his hand when he arrived because mine was trembling so much.  We had a very nice hour though, and guess what?  Turned out that he was nervous as well because he thought that my emails were funny and fascinating and he was worried that he wouldn't make a good enough impression.  You have no idea how strange it was to hear that.

Since then we've exchanged daily emails but haven't met again yet as I was busy and then he went on holiday.  We have our second date (an evening one this time) this week and I am really looking forward to it.  He (let's call him S) is funny and kind and intelligent, he says nice things in his emails and seems to like me, even the bits of crazy I've let slip.

I'm keeping it quiet IRL (sorry Rach and BFG - you both seem always to be the unwitting recipients of secrets!), until I know what, if anything, will come of it, but I've dipped a toe in the dating waters and, so far, I sort of like it.

deep breaths

"Here," said Dr Smug, putting a jar of home-made jam on my desk.  "You can have this."

"You brought me jam?"

"Not exactly, a patient gave it to me this morning but I can't take it home because of my son."

I picked up the jar, which had a pretty, handwritten label on it saying "strawberry and blueberry, 2013".

"Your son is 18 months old, he's not going to be able to reach the cupboard or fridge, take the jam home!" I tried to hand it back to Dr Smug (reluctantly because it looked really nice and I do like jam).  Dr Smug backed away a little bit.

"No, I mean I can't risk getting sick or something.  I have a wife and child."

I stared at him in disbelief, and took a couple of deep breaths.

"So, as I understand it, you are giving me this jar of jam because I don't have children and so it doesn't matter if I get sick 'or something'?  Well, perhaps you should give this instead to the Professor [his boss]?  After all, she doesn't have children either."

Dr Smug started to bluster something but I was in full flow.

"Or perhaps the Professor's health and well-being does matter to you because she is a doctor, even though she's not a parent?  But I can take home and eat a jar of jam because it wouldn't matter if anything happened to me, childless non-doctor that I am?  Well, if I were you I wouldn't be so complacent - you can't be as good a doctor as you think you are, if you think that your patient has given you something with the potential to harm you."

Dr Smug was, by this time, bright red and starting to perspire.

"Illanare, I'm sorry, I..."

"Yes, you should be sorry.  Now please go away and don't talk to me again for at least a week."

I am still taking deep breaths!

about my cat

My darling little cat has been pretty sick recently.  I mentioned in a previous post that she had been diagnosed with hyperthyroidism last month and was put on tablets twice a day.  Well, just over a week into that regimen, she started to have fits.  Mild fits (apparently) but they freaked me the hell out anyway.  A blood test showed that her thyroid meds had worked rather too well and she now had hypothyroidism (the lower limit of a normal thyroid level is 19, hers was 11).

So, thyroid meds were stopped and instead I had to watch her pretty much 24 hours a day for about a week, giving her diazapam (rectally, lovely) every time she had a fit and also twice daily doses of phenobarbital.  The pheno stopped the fits after 5 traumatic days and now she is almost back to normal.  The vet and I still have to discuss how (if at all) to manage her thyroid condition but that is something to be dealt with at the end of this week.

My poor darling little cat!

memory lapse

I stay away from social media on Mother's Day for reasons of self preservation. We all know that it is coming, thanks to commercial tv and advertising in shops, so it's pretty easy to remain unplugged on the fourth Sunday in Lent.
This year, however, I forgot that this Sunday was mother's day in the USA (and New Zealand, sorry ex-MIL) and blithely logged in to In Yer Face Book. I learnt a lot, largely that I will never know real love and that whatever I may do in life is irrelevant. Oh, and also that I buy a new pair of designer heels every month and go to the hairdresser every week. Basically, if I aggregated every post and meme, the result would be that I am a selfish, loveless (but well-shod) woman.
Lesson learned: remember to leave the interwebs alone for two days a year.

April

April 17th: two-year anniversary of A and me splitting up
April 23rd: my darling little cat got sick
April 24th: after expensive tests, my darling little cat was diagnosed with hyperthyroid.  It could have been a lot worse, but she now has to have 2 tablets a day for the rest of her life.  There are other, more invasive, treatment options but she's going to be 19 (!) in June and I don't want to put her through anything like that
April 25th: my mother is told that she needs to have an operation on her foot which will mean 6 weeks without being able to walk and a further five months of physio before she recovers mobility.
April 28th: five-year anniversary of losing Starchild.  I don't know if A remembered, he didn't remember when we were together so I can't imagine he remembers now.  But his mother did and she sent me a lovely text message.
April 30th: vet calls to tell me that my darling little cat also has a urinary tract infection which will need 4 weeks of antibiotics

Gentle reader, April has sucked arse.