Me! I’ve got something, possibly a kidney infection. I started being ill last weekend when I thought I had a touch of cystitis and took over-the-counter potassium citrate drinks and thought I was cured. I should have realised I was ill but ignoring it on Tuesday when I had a spate of breaking things. I broke the trim off the bottom of the kitchen cabinets, two or three other things I can’t remember now and finished off by knocking the vinegar bottle off the shelf on to the lid of the teapot, which smashed to smithereens that went everywhere.
I was focussed on the impending remortgage-the-house meeting. Saying you will sell your inheritance for a mess of pottage is one thing, actually doing it is another. I had painkillers before the meeting. At my mother’s I had a big slice of Christmas cake, full of flour (I have celiac disease) to encourage her to eat. Often she won’t eat, a few months ago she lost 2 stone in three weeks but if I take a cake when I go she will eat it with me. You would think she would eat with the carers, sometimes she will, sometimes she won’t.
In the car on the way home I fell asleep and got thoroughly cold. By Friday morning I was very ill and started having rigors. I couldn’t stop moving. I writhed and shook all over the bed. I couldn’t keep still. At this point my other half, keen to get off to golf, thought I should speak to National Health direct and supplied his mobile phone and then stood and fretted and looked at his watch at the end of the bed while the idiot on the phone put me through the twenty questions. After half an hour I had to abandon the phone to crawl along the landing to the toilet and when I came back the NHS direct bloke was still there, unfortunately. After another ten minutes I told him to stop because I was too ill to talk. At this point, though I couldn’t stop writhing and shivering, you could have fried an egg on my middle. I struggled downstairs for Ibuprofen and then the doctor rang me. Could I go to the surgery? Would my husband take me? NO chance, he’s in the hall loading his golf clubs. He helpfully suggested I take a taxi. The doctor said if I got worse to ring back, I crawled back upstairs but the Ibuprofen began to work, I was still shivering but not squirming.
Later in the morning my son, God bless him, walked round to the surgery with a urine sample, which produced the doctor on the phone in half an hour issuing antibiotics, which my husband collected at the end of golf. Now, on Sunday afternoon I have finally emerged from the bedroom and got showered and dressed.
Thank goodness for antibiotics, where would we be without them? (Dead.)
A continuing feature of my mother’s illness has been my regular accidents and illness. My son remarked that she was just grinding me down. It’s true, she is. I am so glad that I engaged the live-in carers when I did. If I’d been trying to do this all alone it would have finished me off by now. I do understand why people put demented relatives into homes, even horrible ones. The illness has devastating side effects on the entire family, In my case the awful things I’ve had to do and my mother’s unfettered abuse and having to supress my natural reaction to it has weakened my immune system.
I’ve had some things in the last eighteen months but rigors is a new low. I looked it up, it’s a sign of overwhelming bacterial infection apparently.
Rigors, broken limbs, signs of cancer, thoughts of suicide………what next?
Will my mother manage to kill me off, which she’s been trying to do all her life?
Stay tuned, it’s thrilling isn’t it? Yes it is, in a really tiring, exhausting, draining sort of way.
Only three months to Miniatura, if she dies just at or before the show I shall never speak to her again.
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JaneLaverick.com – writing about writhing.