Every Day Something Awful.
Many thanks to friends and readers who have written with good wishes. I do not wish to go down in history as a winger, the purpose of these diaries being to help people, not to have a good whine, though to be fair if the last three years were a vintage it was a very good whine indeed. And it got worse this week.
Fighting the rearguard action against the nurse who wishes to get a drug prescribed which is generally for Alzheimer’s which is not what my mother has, continues. I have just been emailing various interested parties because I do not think that spending what could be her last months either doped up or chucking herself round a padded cell is what my mother needs at all. There are some conditions in life that do not lend themselves to forced solutions, you get a better result with patience and living day to day. I think dementia is such a condition. I do not think it is helpful to dope a patient up because they were aggressive yesterday, especially if they have no memory of it and aren’t aggressive today. Besides which my mother always was a bully, just giving her medication now won’t change her personality. The crucial thing about keeping her in her own home is that there she is still herself. Might not be a very nice self, she is a devout coward, a swaggering bully, a fervent controller and so lazy it will kill her but that is her. She is also generous, funny and lives to be a motormouth. Although she talks nonstop so we only know she’s gone to sleep if the noise stops, she doesn’t have much to say so she says it with great import and very slowly; if she could rise horizontally to about waist height and spin rapidly when people stop looking at her, she would. She knows a lot about property, antiques and even more about cooking. If she were younger she could star in her own cookery programme easily, would look fabulous, make outrageous declarations at the drop of a hat and no doubt be trending on everything and a gay icon in no time flat. She could make Fanny Craddock look very uninteresting.
If you cannot be yourself who are you going to be? I’ll fight for her right to be her because I believe we should all be the one and only unrepeatable precious us. I’m a connoisseur of rarity; the one and only you on the planet is of obvious value.
So the bill for the care arrived, unlike the funds. Three separate half hours on the phone, the first to find out that the person who dealt with the request for the funds two weeks ago was ‘in a meeting’ and would ring back. The second half hour to explain to someone else all about it with a similar conclusion. The third effort produced the information that all the payments were delayed because of an internal audit, if the money is not there, which it has not been on each of three occasions when I have rung the bank, on Monday, I am informed I’m to ring them urgently. What? For a change?
Then on Tuesday I got attacked verbally in a car park. I had gone to get some of my mother’s groceries. I parked, went to get the ticket, got my bag out of the car and nearly fainted with shock when the window of the car next to me was wound down and a big florid man started shouting at me. There was a great deal of swearing, he got out of his car and, towering over me, shouting, was at least six foot and several inches tall and big with it. There was a lot of shouting about ‘I am sick of this’ and ‘you people’. He examined his car door, which I had not touched with any part of me, or my car, minutely. I said quietly that I hadn’t done anything to his car, why was he shouting? Whereupon he yelled: Don’t you talk pacify to me! If you’ve damaged it you will pay by God! And there was a great deal more of the same.
It was a full-on verbal attack, though he did bunch his fist up and I thought at at one point he was going to hit me. I walked off and got into the chemist’s shop and felt as if I was going to have a heart attack. I fetched my husband’s prescription. The girl only gave me one small box and insisted that was all, so I accepted the script and the small box, though I knew it was wrong. On the way out a man stopped me to ask if I was alright, he said he’d been going to ‘have ago at the man’ if he’d gone on any longer. I did my mother’s grocery shopping, all wrong, neglected to get anything for my own tea and ended up with old soft crackers.
I got home and told my husband. Of course the prescription was wrong and my fault. He argued with the chemist on the phone and they found the second bag that they told me didn’t exist on the other shelf.
So the next day we went to my mother’s which was a laugh a minute as always.
Then I had another joy-filled day ringing the mortgage lender and the bank.
But I went to life drawing which was a wordless oasis of calm. Hurrah for art.
And then the S&H accepted one of the two jobs he has been offered. It’s a commute but seems reliable and something you could feed a family with, a do a mortgage for a house and all that. When he’s been in the job for a couple of years I might breathe out.
And then today we got a letter in the post promising a future partial water rates rebate because of the three visits by the sewer men to the three ankle deep floods of my front garden in everybody else’s shit.
Which pretty much summed up the week.
Oh I do hope the tide has turned, I so do.
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feeling very effluent.com