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.

sometimes...

...I wish I had my cat's life:

readers

As Google Reader is soon to be defunct I have set up a Bloglovin account instead.  If you like, you can follow me on it:

Follow my blog with Bloglovin