I wish I was. Oh I do.
For the last three days I have had a rash all over. Goodness knows what it is. It started off in a band round my middle, right round the spare tyre. Like tiny tyre tracks. Treads. And I have been off my grub. Though to be fair I haven’t really fancied anything since I was in hospital. Knowing scar tissue had twizzled up your intestines does tend to put you off your food.
It started on Friday morning, a week after I had been admitted to hospital. That sounds like a perfect incubation period to me. The OH, who worked in hospitals for many years, has always said they are places full of infection and to be avoided if possible. He took a photo yesterday, when the rash had joined up and spread up and down.
Closest thing to it as a picture on Tinternet is a drug allergy, which qualifies as a medical emergency but I have frequent flyer miles in A&E and simply couldn’t face another four hours on the metal chairs. Anyway, drugs, what drugs? I don’t think the supermarket vitamin pills that I bought because they were reduced in price, count at all and anything else, serrapeptase, peppermint capsules and glucosamine, which is all the anything else there is, is all stuff I have taken for years.
So I shall be off to the doctor tomorrow, providing I am spared overnight and can get an appointment, so I’ve washed my hair and put the curlers in because I always like to go to the doctor looking my best, you know, healthy, full make up, smartly dressed. I am, as I have already told you, in common with everyone I know, my own worst enemy.
I need to get well. Well, I do. Not least because the builders have said they will at last start in three weeks building the extension over the flat roofed garage so that I will have enough bedrooms for my grandchildren to come and stay.
As a child I frequently stayed with my grandmother on Saturday night and went to church with her on Sunday morning. With hindsight this might have been as much for my parents as me. My father was a member of Round Table, which organisation often had dinner dances on a Saturday night. I recall my mother heading off for one of these in a red velvet dress with a sculpted bodice and a spectacular skirt supported by masses of petticoats. 1950s glamour was really something that I don’t believe we recovered subsequently. Hollywood red carpet costumes have been more about the freak show than a celebration of true glamour, of late and nobody dresses for dances anymore. There are no dances anymore. Just night clubs with people moving strangely to garage music, apparently and no doubt pantry music, shed music and garden pond music. (If any of those manufactured items are a real thing that’s entirely coincidental.)
Saturday nights for me I believed were entirely for me. As my grandmother had ten grandchildren I sometimes had to share her with another grandchild but, as a mother of five, she was well practiced in making sure no one felt left out.
We were allowed to watch television dressed in our pyjamas whilst enjoying Evans nicer lemonade in a green glass with a metal cup holder handle. In this would be a scoop of Minchellas ice cream. I remember the taste of it. The ice cream was freshly made locally, the lemonade had big bubbles but was not very sweet. It seemed to last a long time.
On Sunday morning you were given a bath, with a scoop of Daz clothes washing powder in the water to make the water very slightly foamy and a bit gritty on the bottom of the bath. Then you were sent back to bed for half an hour to warm up because washing all over weakens people, obviously. Then you got up, got dressed in your best and went to church, a village away, sang a lot of hymns and were entertained silently by your grandmother if the sermon was lengthy. This she did with hand games. The favourite was to spread her fingers out and up to create spare skin on the back of her hand that you could build walls with, which she could make disappear by making a fist. On the way home we would play a walking game, where you would both walk in step and suddenly she could wrong foot you so you were walking out of step and had to skip to keep up.
The joy of these great wonders of entertainment I naturally wish to share with my grandchildren when they get a little older, therefore, as they have moved and now live some distance away, bedrooms are required.
I have had a consultation with the builder. It will be necessary to take the lid off four rooms and leave us open to the elephants. All of which interesting horrors you can look forward to in future posts.
Meanwhile, if I am still rashy in the morning I will take my spare tyre, and the rest of me, to the docs.
It is my sincere wish to be done with the medical profession. Really. I bear them no ill will but I tire of their company. In the AM I will see if my unattired tyre tires of their company, and then, providing my demise is not imminent, I have to clear the garage. (Not the music, the actual garage.)
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