It is 1 am in the morning and I am up bargaining with God.

I am not sure that God will treat any of my offered bargains with much sincerity now though - I have offered them before, when the youngest was in various hospitalised states over her first two years, and I'm pretty sure that as she raced towards each full recovery, my side of whichever bargain I might have promised raced to the back of my mind just as quickly. Were I God, I would probably feel somewhat narked by all this too. My track record, in the eyes of Them Up There must be rather flawed.

But tonight. Tonight, it seems R has managed to develop cryptococcal meningitis. He got back from hospital at 6 and was called back in at 7. "Bollocks" he said to the doctor on the phone. "Bugger." came a bit later. And then "Really?". We are still at the "Really?" stage now. It seems that a rash case of viral meningitis was not enough for R, and he has spent the last 4 months of his own recovery sneakily building a secondary fungal infection which could, in essence, do for him. It seems that his consultant will now have to Eat His Hat after all. As for me, I am just stunned. I do not want to put tents up on my own. I have only just found out where the bonnet handle is. I cannot, CANNOT, contemplate any of the horrendous realities which might be in store and why the hell I am up now putting this all onto my blog I Do Not Know. Perhaps to ellicit some kind of comprehension out of my stupidly befuddled mind. And perhaps because this is the first properly honest thing I've ever put here. But probably most of all, is because it's only my friends who read this and it saves me having to explain out loud and risk the Unspeakable Humiliation of Tears in Public.


But where do you start? How helpless do you feel when your life as you know is handed over to a registrar you have only just met? Do they know what they are doing? DO they? Because I remember the medics at Uni and they were a hardcore party lot and I never saw them study much and I lived with five of them (ok, so they were vets but they used the same building). That has never bothered me until now. After all, I have given lectures in my own particular subject for years and there are still academic swathes of which I am still blissfully ignorant. (Oh, if any readers happen to be former students, please disregard this last bit). Do they really know their stuff? And how will I ever be able to check? When I read up on medical science online, my own complete lack of knowledge condemns me to read terminal illness in everything. Jerome K Jerome once said the only thing you can ever be sure of NOT having, once you peruse the medical journals, is Housemaids Knee and 130 years later it's still the same thing.

But I do know the worse thing you can do at one o clock in the morning is to ponder the what ifs. The best thing you can do is go to sleep and prepare yourself for tomorrow. But I am not sensible tonight and I am up pondering the what ifs. And bargaining with God.

How do these offers sound?

If everything can be ok, I will do my best to raise funds for a shelterbox to go t0 those poor, poor people in Indonesia.

If everything can be ok, I will get over my fear of flying and not leave R to sit with the kids while I grip onto someone else's shoulder having first relieved the departure lounge of all its Bloody Mary.

If everything can be ok, I will try really hard to Be Sweet to one particular person who does not at all deserve it.

If everything can be ok, I will organise a group of singers to visit the Old People's Home to sing carols, like I promise to every year and never get round to.

And if everything can be ok, I will never again bemoan the size of our house and garden. I will never shout swear words at the kitchen cupboard (the one which belches all its contents at you as soon as you open it), but I will keep it ordered and lovely. I will keep the dog bathed. I will iron as soon as it is needed and remember to hoover the stairs. I will even think about having decent nails and wearing gardening gloves. I will not roll my eyes at people who make grammar mistakes nor sniff when they spell "definitely" with an "a".

But most of all, I will be far more grateful for the mundanity that I am sometimes so rude about.

I wonder if such a public declaration of all this lends any gravitas to my promises?

PS
I realise much of this is flippant, but I have always found flippancy SUCH a comforting antidote.