A Dog Ate My Face

It has been quite the week. My oldest child came back from Finland, where she is studying art. My youngest child somehow miraculously became seventeen, and my middle child and her girlfriend came to visit for a few days. While all this was going on, I packed in a trip to my friend and hairdresser, an overnight stay with my parents, several visits with old friends, waving my daughter off on her return to Finland and an overnighter to Wales to visit Jason’s sister. I have also been having more interesting health issues, which is where we will start.

I had to give up using my oestrogen cream. I was becoming so useless I wasn’t even fit to sit on a boat and become a professional invalid. I stopped using it about five days before my smear test was due and hoped that the residual benefits would be enough to get me through. I began to feel better almost immediately and after two days I could eat real food again. Best of all I stopped fainting like the weedy heroine of a Victorian novel. I can’t say that I bounced to my appointment on Monday morning, because who Tiggers their way to a smear test? I was definitely operating with a sense of brisk purpose though.

Sadly, the lacklustre attempts of a nurse who arrived twenty minutes late for the appointment and had the bedside manner of a flatpack chest of drawers didn’t help things get off to a smooth start. She was utterly disinterested in the entire process. She communicated in vague but expansive gestures which meant she largely avoided looking at me, or calling me by my name. Unfortunately the oestrogen cream had done virtually nothing to change matters and after two, failed attempts I refused to try again. She handed me some wipes and was already on the phone to someone who was quite clearly not a work colleague before I’d even got my pants on. She used one of her expansive gestures to point at the door as I left.

I know I should probably make a complaint about what happened, but that will have to wait. I have dealt with as many gynae related issues as I am capable of at the moment.

I was hoping that Monday was the end any medical chit chat, but it was not to be. As the week progressed I had begun to feel more and more unwell. By Thursday I felt like I was coming down with flu (again). A myriad of irksome symptoms left me feeling low grade ill and thick headed, which I ignored as best I could. Yesterday afternoon, having had a wonderful pub lunch with my sister and brother in law, we headed back from Wales. As the journey progressed I felt worse and worse. Events culminated with me throwing up for a few hours in quite spectacular manner. The only remotely positive thing I had to cling to was the fact that the boat’s plumbing coped remarkably well, all things considering.

When the onslaught was over, I thought about all my symptoms and had a small revelation. At the same time I was prescribed the oestrogen cream, I was also given one other new medication and a significant tweak to my anti-depressant. I was led to wonder if not all my side effects were oestrogen related and lo, after reading the packaging for my other meds it appeared I was probably not tolerating the doubling of my anti-depressants as well as I thought.

I finally fell asleep in the early hours of this morning and proceeded to have some very vivid and horrible dreams. In one I was walking through someone’s garden when a giant, German shepherd reared up out of nowhere and started to rip my face off. This dream was so vivid, I woke myself and Jason up screaming. When he asked me what had happened, I said in a very small voice; ‘a dog ate my face.’ He giggled quite a lot at this and said: ‘Don’t do that,’ to which I agreed I wouldn’t. He was so amused by it, it calmed me down enormously and I was able to get back to sleep.

Tomorrow then, sees me setting out on another exciting week at the coalface of medical discovery. I am so weary of having to talk to doctors, but I cannot go around spontaneously vomiting and dreaming about dogs eating my face, so I must.