Start to plan my own funeral. As one does. Phone
Middle Daughter to arrange a lift to hospital and she says how exciting to be done at last
and offers to give me remedies to counteract everything. She’s a homeopath and she
does get results, so optimism goes with the territory.
Funeral plans put on back burner until Younger
Daughter pitches up with Little E (Eva, her baby) ‘I’ll do all your
shopping’, she offers. Then: ‘But
what will happen if you get post-operative infection?’ I tell her I can’t stand
pessimists but to be on the safe side ensure she knows the sort of music I want at my
funeral, Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong.
If you have a chronic health condition, as I have, the greatest problem is the management
of medics. Because my complaint is a little esoteric, some are greatly interested - in the
complaint that is. Not necessarily the patient. Others have varying attitudes, not all of
them helpful, and I`m sometimes called upon to lose my rag.
 I listen to a consultant friend who provides a view from the
other side. ‘It’s a rotten job,’ she says. ‘No time, too many
patients and everyone wants a bit of you.’ She sometimes wonders why she bothers.
Generally speaking this chimes with my experience of medics and I have learnt to be kind
to them. I commiserate endlessly about how awful it must be to work in a collapsing health
service. I smile and say hello to scowling, non-verbal receptionists in outpatients; on
the phone I hang on through a full rendition of Four Seasons and am still polite.
Of course none of this works too well if you’re
feeling unwell, depressed, worried, in pain or about to have an operation. Brave
little woman flies out the window, self-pity comes in the door.
Medics hate self-pity. It’s understandable;
their job is to make people better and self-pity makes them feel like failures. So the game plan is to look vulnerable and be very very
grateful and try not to cry. That too makes life difficult for them. ‘Please
don’t cry,’ they’ll say and point you towards the Prozac. I remind myself,
they are only human and might be having a bad hair day.
I practise putting on mascara with my left hand in
preparing for post-op handicap. Not too successful and rather dangerous, so decide to get
my lashes tinted. Marginally darker now and am persuaded I don’t look like a skinned
rabbit. (I went
to a local beauty person working from home. She
warned that my eyelashes were too short to show up and therefore not to expect miracles.)
Next comes practise with the buttering of toast.
For those who’ve never tried it with one hand - here’s how. Lightly toast the
bread, dig out bits of butter from the dish with a pointed knife, attach them to the
surface of the toast and replace under the grill; perfect hot buttered toast as Delia
would say.
Living
alone in a post-operative condition can, I know
from previous experience, be a little daunting. Especially when you can’t get the lid
off the marmalade to spruce up the buttered toast; when there’s no one around to take
your frustration out on, or to cuddle it away. In
the past, I have just locked the door and indulged in fantasies about other peoples’
grass, which seemed so much greener than mine. But this self-pity business is actually
quite exhausting, so the indulgence never lasts too long. And the flip side of living
alone is that there is no one around to fuss endlessly, to tell me to pull myself together
or nag me about taking special food supplements.
 Still, I’ve learned that too much independence and too much stoicism
get me nowhere. As a result, I have taken up offers from friends and family who have
offered their help and support. They will come in and cook and clean and shop till they
drop. And I’ll indulge their Florence Nightingale fantasies too, and allow them the
pleasant little sick room stuff; the plumping of the pillows, the breakfast in bed, and
the changing of the flower water.
Can’t
wait!
|
