A Sea Change

Time when you are ill moves at a slow ooze. When I get sick I always think: ‘Well at least I can catch up with my reading/watching/sewing.’ Invariably I never do because my eyeballs feel like they’ve been marinading in gravel for a fortnight or my brain turns to porridge, or I can’t stop crying. Or all of the above. Mostly I just wallow in a stew of self indulgent tragedy and wait for all this to pass. I am not patience on a monument. I am whinger on a sofa. Towards the end of whatever it is that has me in its grip, I start thinking about all the things I will do when I am better. Then, when I am better, other things get in the way and so it goes round and round until my head falls off and rolls under the sofa. I’m at the head falling off stage of things at the moment.

I have spent most of this week at my parent’s house, doing all the things I was going to do with them before I got Covid. I also caught up with my friend, Matt, for one of our yearly picnics in a downpour. It’s become a bit of a tradition and no matter how much we attempt to outmanoeuvre the rain, it always beats us in the end. This was not the wettest picnic we have ever been on. That honour is reserved for the year we went to The Yorkshire Sculpture Park. All the roads had turned into rivers and I wished I had sacked off my car for a canoe. This time, eating a multiplicity of delicious cheeses atop The Rollright Stones while great banks of rainclouds emptied themselves over our heads came a close second. It will be no surprise to me if piles are in my near future. Then I won’t even be able to sit on the sofa, whining. I’ll have to crouch grimly instead.

I came back to the boat yesterday in order to take Oscar and his girlfriend to see Cabaret, which was amazing and to take the cat to the vet, which will be significantly less amazing. The vet is very poor at jazz hands and Derek doesn’t care for show tunes.

In the early hours of yesterday morning when I got up for an emergency wee, the whole house was awake and alert because my dad’s knee had slightly exploded and my mum was building a field hospital round him until such time as things could be resolved more professionally. This is the third time in recent weeks this has happened and the only good thing to be said for it is that at least this time, we know the drill. Thankfully for my theatre/vet plans, Tilly and my brother were on hand to help out while I fled the scene, taking my guilty conscience with me.

My dad is something of a medical marvel (I was going to write ‘freak’, but the man’s in hospital, so I will cut him some slack). Over the years he has had an array of interesting illnesses, accidents and badly behaved body parts which has led to his hospital files being so thick they have to be wheeled about on a trolley by a burly nurse who has been on a health and safety lifting course.

As a family, we are very good at being ill, but have a terrible track record for caring for the sick and needy, even if we happen to be related to them. In fact, the more closely related to them we are, the worse it gets. My poor dad often bears the brunt of this tough love approach to things and then we all feel terrible when it turns out that he really does have the scrofulous itch, or his head swells up to the size of The Great Pumpkin.

You think I jest, but this has actually happened and we were laughing on the wrong side of our faces when he had to go to the department for tropical diseases to have his head shrunk back to size. The worst thing is, that last sentence, of all the things I have typed, was the lie. We were still laughing, even when he had to go to the department for tropical diseases, because it was and is, a strong, slapstick illness that unfortunately for him, is hard to keep a straight face about. Ditto the time he had a wild allergic reaction to the hypoallergenic sticking plaster they used after his knee surgery, which completely baffled the entire nursing staff. The scars from the plaster were worse than the ones from the actual surgery. He bears them with pride and we try not to snigger too much.

This time it is his blood that is not behaving. He has a condition which means his blood is quite sticky and thick, which is not ideal. Imagine a tailback on the M25 sort of vibe, but in his veins. This, coupled with mild arrhythmia means that he runs the risk of throwing clots, which would not even make me slightly smirk, so he has to take blood thinners. For a while now we have thought that his blood thinners are too fierce. He bruises at the drop of a hat and frequently looks like he’s taken up bare knuckle fighting in his old age. When he twisted his knee a few weeks ago, the usual bruising went haywire and the blood that makes your bruises all those delightful colours just kept seeping into the knee tissue until the pressure and swelling become intolerable. It happened again and then again yesterday.

Every time it has happened we have talked about the possibility of tweaking his medication and every time we have been told that it is impossible. Yesterday, after a five hour wait for an ambulance because nobody could lift him into a car, several hours sat outside the hospital in the parked ambulance because there were no beds and many more hours doped up on morphine, waiting for someone to come and look at him (sadly the morphine was only for him), we were told that they are probably going to tweak his meds. This time I am laughing for all the wrong reasons.

They’re keeping him in for a few days to see if they can do something about the already exploded knee and make a plan for an explosion free future, so I will be heading back to Leicester in a couple of days to practice my parlous nursing skills once again. Mainly I think I shall be making tea and sandwiches for the family on the front line, which is a skill set I possess and which will stop me feeling completely useless.

What has been interesting for me, personally with this round of family drama, is that I have been able to step away from it for a bit. In the last few years, with everything that has gone on, I have been permanently on the front line of every crisis that has happened to everyone I love. I have always stepped up. This seemed like the only thing to do at the time, and of course, if someone you love is suffering, you want to help, but for me I think it went too far. I had some things I absolutely could not abdicate responsibility for and so, when tragedy followed hot on the heels of what I was already dealing with, I just made room to fight on two, or three or four fronts simultaneously. I was good at it, and I was there anyway, so I might as well, was the thinking. Well, I say thinking, I don’t think I was doing a lot of thinking. I was just reacting in the moment and stretching the waves of adrenaline to fit.

This was all good, until it wasn’t and while everyone else got better, I did not. Even with all the therapy I did last year, my fear was that when a call to arms came, I would just automatically step up to the plate, because it’s what I do. It turns out that it’s what I did. Which is a much better place to put that stuff. Behind me.

I’m not talking about walking away from people in distress and leaving them to sink without trace. I’m talking about the fact that I was able to sit with my mum and have a proper discussion about what was happening and make a plan whereby she wasn’t left in the lurch and other, capable, loving people who aren’t me, stepped up for a bit. It’s better for me, and better for everyone. I had cast myself as the only Green Cross Code man available, but that was a lie. And if I stop other people helping out, it keeps them dependent and also resentful, because they are probably just as capable as me, if not, in many cases, more so. So although I set off down the motorway with a twinge of guilt yesterday morning, I didn’t feel the terrible weight of badness crash down on me like it used to. My parents got the help they needed and I got to spend the day with my gorgeous son, who told me that he had had one of the best days of his entire life, and what had started out as a potential disaster, became something much more rich and strange.