Friday 9 October 2009

MEGA MINDY STAAT PARAAT

I like Holland. R is always vexed by how much I like Holland, but I like its towns and its hagelslag and its greater proportion of tall men. And I like Mega Mindy. She is a Dutch Super-Heroine, who goes around in pink catsuits, being all against injustice and wrong-doing, and whacking Naughty People down. And her boss (male) is the Biggest Clot she's Ever Met, something that she sings out with impunity in the main title song. Ok, so she's still as improbably proportioned as any typical cartoon totty; she is also, of course, hopelessly in love with someone who doesn't know it, but even so. She isn't fawning around a absent-but-authoritarian male boss (yeah, Charlie) who is there simply to Put Her Right, and that works for me. A better role model for girls than, shall we say, Barbie? But more from that particular soap box another day...

Anyway, today I had my own Mega Mindy moment in Addlestone. I was pulling away from a friend's house, with the theme song from Mega Mindy playing (we have reached agreement, my 3 year old and I: ONCE a journey, and that is all. Unfortunately, if the journey involves driving five minutes to pop something through a letterbox and then back in the car, this is apparently, in the cause of Mega Mindy music, two journeys. And so on...anyway, it's on rather a lot.) And I was squinting into the sun to see what was coming, while rather joyfully singing along the main chorus with J "IK BEN MEGA MINDY, MEGA MINDY..". Before I realised it, a cross portly man with no hair had got out of his car in front of me in the road and was glaring.


"OI!" he puffed at me, all fat stomach and concerted aggression "Whatcha say to me?"


"When?" I asked, not winding down my window, because these parts of Surrey can be scary, you know. We're like the hood of Weybridge over here...


"Just then! I pulled up to let you out and you mouthed somefink at me, I saw you. Whatcha say?"


Actually, the sun was so bright, I hadn't seen him, so it was jolly good he had pulled up to let me out.


"I said," I mouthed back through the glass "I SAID 'Ik ben Mega Mindy'". Because I had.


And do you know what? He turned round, ran back to his car and drove off. Just like that.


Wow. These Dutch Super-heroines really rock.


I always said Holland was better.


PS I can't talk about cripplecock at the moment, and I don't mean to be unfeeling. I just can't think about it right now. I need five minutes of being silly and pointless.

Wednesday 7 October 2009

Hmmmm...

We are all in uproar, as Mrs Bennett says.

Last night, I'd left R in a hospital bed surrounded by Concerned-Doctor Looks and hushed whispers of cryptococcal (hereafter known as cripplecock) meningitis. But today? Well, another day, another doctor.

R tells me he had not had a good night. And the thought of staying there for another 8-at-least was not particularly warming his cockles. He mentioned this to the consultant and the consultant suggested that perhaps he might like to go home instead.

Really? But what about the 8 days connected to a drip? But what about the cripplecock? "Ah yes, that" came the answer.

"You see, cryptococcal meningitis is very rare, especially in previously healthy cases such as yourself. Now there is certainly some presence, but had it actually taken hold, I think you'd be dead." said the consultant. "And you're not". R says he could only agree - he had already noticed this himself.

So, what about the fact that we'd been told he'd be there for Over A Week At Least? Hmmm, responded the consultant. What about the fact that they'd rushed him back in on a cripplecock likelihood and scared the living daylights out of us? What about the fact that someone didn't read the instructions on the cripplecock antibiotic fluid and unleashed a whole dose of something into his arm, which sent him into a full-body reaction, until he told them to stop? Hmmm, again, said the consultant, before adding as an afterthought that he would Say Something Stern about that last bit. So what is wrong? "I don't know", was the reply "Something is, but I don't know what. We're sending off for more tests and we'll let you know in - er - a couple of weeks?"

Right then.

So, R found himself blinking in the daylight on his surprise way back home for the second time in 24 hours. Still with the cracking headache of , ooh, 6 months now? And whereas yesterday they had discharged him on a Wait-and-See, and then called him back in on pain of death, today they have seemingly discharged him for Being Not Dead.

My friend K, who is of greater wit than I, very swiftly pointed out to R that Being Not Dead is a somewhat medieval diagnosis. But I feel inspired. Last night, I felt helplessly lost - shut out from the medical world by a gaping lack of knowledge and understanding. But today, I feel slightly more hopeful. Even though I haven't touched a science since O level, I too can make a medical diagnosis. And I could even have beaten our consultant to it. If Being Not Dead is all they had really needed to know, I could have told them myself.

Now, I don't mean to dig at our NHS because the staff, for us, have always been wonderful. I'm sure they'd forgive me though for saying the system is occasionally farcical. Two days before my Mum died in hospital, she was left on a wire frame bed with no mattress in a corridor for 7 hours because "there was nowhere else for her to go". And at the beginning of this week, they wouldn't let R leave his bed, which he didn't actually need, because then he'd lose his place in a queue for an MRI, which he didn't actually get.

You could go on for hours on this, but there is little point.

But just one little thing. Our experience most recently has not been very encouraging, it's true. But even LESS encouraging is the huge poster that you pass on the way to the Brain Injury Unit with the words " Putting MAX at the heart of everything we do" emblazoned beneath a picture of a grinningly smug Max Clifford. Horrors. I don't mean to be nasty, as I'm sure he made a big and needed donation to be on such a poster, but I'm not sure I am particularly warmed by the idea of any organisation putting Max Clifford at the heart of what they do. Especially one now entrusted with the well being of my husband and future. It makes me wonder if they might sew mouse ears to his back and then Mr Clifford would pop up on his rounds to persuade him to sell his story. Or something. Maybe it's just me. Anyway, some things within the Health Service you just can't help, but some things you can: and massive great photos of Max Clifford leering at people who are already in a heightened state of nerves, is one of those things.

Anyhow. We are now 4 months down the line from the initial hospitalisation, and whereas this time last night I was sitting contemplating all sorts of doom, tonight we are again contemplating all sorts of Don't Know. I almost feel ...well, cheated. R is a bit cross with me - he thinks this sounds as though I would prefer him to have cripplecock so that my pangs of anxiety throughout last night were more justified. Or because we had so many lovely messages and offers for help from so many friends who'd heard about the cripplecock and our panic, that I almost feel we'd be letting them down IF he hasn't got it after all.

And I made all those rash promises. Which, incidentally, I now need to keep. So not only has the NHS rather messed us around of late, it has now also got me promising to clean out that kitchen belch cupboard and to be more domestically competent, among other things, and that - that - is unforgivable.

Ah well, so ends this particular saga until the test results come through. But as ever, there are always occasions for a chuckle. Firstly, my 3 year old was delighted when she woke up to find a friend had very kindly stayed over last night for company etc.

"When my Daddy goes to hospital all night, B's Daddy comes to sleep here instead", she announced to a neighbour today, thus labelling me Morally Defunct Street Hussy.

And then my Dad. "My black suit," he complained today on the phone "I've got it out of the wardrobe, I've put it back in. Out again, and in again. DO I need to get it cleaned or not?"

Oh, you can't beat it.

PS
On a serious note, however, thank you, thank you everyone for all your support and offers of help. We were utterly moved and it helped a lot.
Just one more thing though - R suggested he might play rugby by next weekend. Please send insults, or punch him.
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.