Stroke, no joke

I have been absent from this blog for a few days because something really serious has happened, health-wise. My boyfriend has had a stroke. The story is long and complex and harrowing. It includes Hillingdon Hospital discharging him while he was having mini strokes every 20 or 30 minutes and telling him it was “just a migraine.” Less than 24 hours later, he had a major stroke and is now paralysed down one side. I am considering a legal case.

As to my own health, I didn’t eat or sleep for three days and am now beyond exhaustion, and feeling very lonely and uncomfortable in his house, surrounded by his things and a poor, crying cat who doesn’t understand and keeps sniffing things that smell of him and gazing at me and asking the silent question, “Where is he?”

De-feeted

I realise I haven’t mentioned ailments lately, and they were the main cause of starting this blog. In fact, I’ve had a good run for my money, apart from the insomnia which is still plaguing me. If only I could sell the house and move out of the boyfriend’s and have my own things around me again, I think I’d start to relax.

Today, though, the foot problems kicked off again. (Yes, I know, awful pun.) I am a Piscean. Every star sign has part of the body allotted to it as an area they should take particular care of, and for Pisceans, it is the feet. Apart from getting a stiletto heel through my right one at a school dance (an accident, not a stomp from a jealous girl who saw me dancing with her boyfriend – I was the bespectacled wallflower whom nobody asked to dance!), my feet and I had a trouble-free relationship even in the barefoot Sixties when my soles were so tough that I could walk over gravel without wincing.

In 1993, I was coming out of a changing room in a charity shop when my left foot was almost sliced in twain by the corner of a knife-sharp piece of stair-edging. Gushing blood, I hobbled up the stairs to the till and asked the young, dopy girl assistant for help. She blanched and waved me up the road to the chemists. Leaving bloody, CSI-style behind me all the way, I reached the chemists where Mr Mistry produced a wodge of cotton wool and some sticky tape and told me it needed stitching. ‘Too jagged for stitches,’ said the hospital, after my tetanus jab. They butterfly-clipped it and it gradually healed, but left a weak spot that hurt when I touched it, and a long white scar.

“Give me the address and I’ll sue them for you,” my solicitor said. This was the same lawyer who had won me six grand following my whiplash injury. It was three weeks before I was well enough to walk down to the shop, only to find it had packed up and vanished, probably aware of my impending lawsuit.

Fast forward five years. I’d had a hysterectomy that had left me feeling as if a bayonet was stuck in my stomach. It was three months before I was capable of walking the mile to the doctor’s. I didn’t realise that feet are held together by muscle and tendon and ligament and that these can go slack through lack of use. I set off at my usual stride and wham! A terrible agony shot through my left foot and I couldn’t walk. Somehow, I managed to hobble painfully home. It took half an hour. I transferred most of my weight to my right foot and three weeks later that suffered the same fate. I was now saddled with a condition called metatarsalgia. No more high heels for me. Instead, a lifetime of sensible shoes with squidgy insoles.

Last night, I danced barefoot for an hour and a half to the Who’s Glastonbury concert on TV. Wow, my feet are getting better, I thought happily. I have a party to go to next week and had bought some shoes with small heels, hoping I could wear them. Well, fate had the last laugh (yes, you can hear my old cry of "It’s not fair!”), for this morning I stubbed the middle toe of my left foot so badly on the leg of the bed that a sickening pain shot right through my foot – and now I can hardly walk again. Bye-bye high heels, it will have to be sequinned flip-flops now.

Footnote: I am rubbing arnica gel all over my foot three times a day. Here’s hop(p)ing…

Bent Beak Clinic

Met a friend in Borough Market and bought some very healthy rye bread. However, it proved too much for both my breadknife and my ageing teeth so I flung it out to see what would happen. A slug got there first. Next, a pigeon, followed by a magpie. They appeared to be having a conversation about which beak technique to use and eventually gave up and flew off, having arranged to meet each other at the Bent Beak Clinic for Birds.

As for the photo of Flad… it speaks for itself. Pity he can’t. I call this photo The Artist’s Cat.

Now for the daily moan. I am freelance, which means that for wages, I am dependent on the companies I work for sending me cheques. Promptly would be nice. But right now, I am waiting for payment for invoices going back as far as March. I have nagged, I have written, ‘Payment within 30 days’ at the bottom of the invoices, all to no avail. People who work for a monthly pay cheque have no idea what it’s like to have to wait for their wages to arrive randomly through the post. How is a freelancer expected to pay their mortgages and utility bills? Let alone eat! They should all be forced to live like that for three months and then perhaps they’d see it through my eyes. And now I hear that, to add insult to injury, we’re getting a postal strike!

Sweet Cherry Pie

It’s cherry time and this year my boyfriend has been determined to get the cherries before the blackbirds and pigeons do. To this end, he has decorated the tree with mobiles in the form of old cds, the flashes off which are enough to blind a cherry-spotting starling at 500 feet up. He even cut a scaredy-cat scarecrow out of an old piece of MDF (see photo). This guy should be on TV, I tell you.

Despite all these precautions, the feathered fiends launched a dawn raid today and by the time the first human patrol checked the tree, their greedy beaks had stripped every fruit above cd level. Now we have done our own picking and the result is my boyfriend’s cherry pie with egg custard. An odd-sounding mix, but it works. If I can prise the recipe out of him, I’ll publish it on a future blog piece.

It’s shaping up for a thunderstorm now. We’ll see how many cherries are left after the wind has whipped through them like a smoothie-maker and hailstones have pulverised the pits.

Ant Phobia

I have an ant phobia. No, not an AUNT phobia – I haven’t any of those left. My phobia is about those tiny black things that live in seething nests, and their larger relatives that march in purposeful columns through the woods. And their vicious red cousins that grab your with their miniscule fangs and won’t let go, whilst pumping you full of poison. (The day following my 21^st birthday party, held in a boathouse in Wales, was spent at Bangor hospital where my jeans were cut off my swollen kegs and my veins injected with antihistamine after I had fallen into a drunken stupor on the river bank, with my ankles dangling in a red ants’ nest.)

Last week I bought ant powder and prepared to wipe out some bold bugs that had invaded my house and were gaily trolling past the wooden lintel, carrying eggs and disappeared beneath the skirting board. But this minor skirmish was nothing compared to some of the epic Ant Wars of the past.

The worst encounter occurred in a wood near the village of Graffham on the Sussex Downs. My (now ex) husband and I had gone for a post-lunch walk during a visit to his parents. We were strolling down a woodland path when a young girl on a pony came cantering towards us. I stepped off the path to let them pass, then suddenly, without warning, my husband threw himself across the path of the speeding pony, grabbed me and pulled me to the other side of the path.

“What the hell did you do that for? You could have got us all killed!” I shouted, when the sound of the girl’s swear-words and pounding hooves had faded and I’d stopped shaking.

“Look what you nearly stepped in,” he said, pointing. "You'd have died if you'd trodden in that." I followed his eyes to the other side of the path. It was moving. Everything was moving for yards around. It was one vast nest of large black wood ants. That’s when I realised that the rustlings I had thought were simply leaves fluttering delicately in the breeze had, in fact, been the purposeful movements of this vast ant army.

At once, I went cold and crawly all over. I felt sick. Terror swept over me. I looked down and noticed columns of ants criss-crossing the path and I said something I hadn’t said since I was two years old. “C-c-c-carry me.” The poor sod had to throw me over his shoulder and lug me back to civilisation, and when he needed a rest he had to hang me from a tree branch, from which I dangled from fingers crooked and frozen in a grip of pure panic. I truly think my ex was right and I would have had a heart attack and died if I'd gone off the wrong side of the path. Each nest can hold up to 10,000 ants and this was no mere colony, it was a continent!

On holidays in Scotland as a kid, I would stay snivelling unhappily in the car rather than trek through the forest with the rest of the family, treading between columns of ants. Scottish wood ants seem bigger than any other member of the UK ant family. They can swallow a Highland cow whole. They would certainly have made mincemeat of eight-year-old me. The torments of being locked in the old Ford Anglia on a boiling August day were nothing compared to my mindless terror of The Ant.

Eventually, at the age of 30-something, I had the bright idea of asking my mother if there was any reason why I should be so scared of ants. “Oh yes,” she said brightly. “It probably dates back to our holiday in Weston-Super-Mare when you were a baby. We strapped you in your pram and left you out on the verandah while we had lunch and you screamed the place down. In those days it was the thing to let your baby scream, rather than spoil it by running to it every time it made a sound. But you screamed so loudly for so long that in the end I thought I’d better go and see if anything was wrong, and I found all these ants had got into the pram and were crawling all over you.”

So there I was, strapped in and subjected to one of the worst tortures known to Man, the equivalent of being buried up to the neck in an antheap. No wonder I go to pieces every time I see more than one or two together. No wonder I hate bondage! And to compound it, I can recall being three years old and thinking I was helping Mother by bringing her tea cup and saucer in from the garden. As I toddled in with them, I noticed ants crawling on the saucer. I remember screaming, dropping the lot and getting bawled out for breaking them. So my fear of ants was compounded by being punished for being scared of them. How’s what for therapy in reverse?

A few years ago, I was recovering from a gynae op in Hammersmith Hospital. I opened my locker, got my bag out and found it was full of red ants. Then I noticed some IN MY BED! They had an infestation of pharoah ants in the hospital and the bastards had found the Kit-Kat bar which I had been keeping as a special treat.

I have decided that when I snuff it, I am going to be cremated. Anything, rather than be trapped in my coffin (maybe not even dead, but waking from a coma and finding I’d been buried prematurely) and having the thing fill up with ants. I saw an episode of CSI in which one of the agents was trapped in a box and ants were let in. I left the room and felt sick for the rest of the evening. Whatever you do, never, EVER, buy me a Formicarium. Or bring me back chocolate-covered ants from your holiday in some bug-infested country. A bar of good, plain Lindt will do. Though… typical, it always happens to me… I once bought a choc bar from a shop in Spain, unwrapped it at the airport, bit into it and found that it wasn’t an Aero at all, but the holes had been caused by some nasty grubs that had bored into it and the inside of the bar was full of caterpillar threads.

Excuse me, I’m just going away to be sick. Hey, I’ve realised what a good way this would be for me to lose weight. One look at an ants’ nest and I go right off food. Think I’ve changed my mind about that Formicarium.

For another amusing ant story, read Zoe’s blog on www.myboyfriendisatwat.com Her ants beat her up!

Good news all round!

HEALTH NEWS. Well, I told my cold to bugger off, using my best, stern Barbara Woodhouse dog-training tones. It didn’t like it. Last night, it got its own back by punctuating my sleep with nasty, tickly, chesty coughing fits, but today I am BETTER! I’ve been out for the first time in three days and, apart from a few sinusy sniffs, I feel fine. So it’s 1 – 0 to Mind Over Matter.

FOX NEWS. Every night I have been putting out jam sandwiches laced with the homeopathic treatment that the National Fox Welfare Society sent me for free (natfox@ntlworld.com). I hadn’t seen the little fox for several days and had started to fear the worst, but it trotted past the window this morning and I am thrilled to report that its fur has started growing back. Its body and brush have sprouted half an inch of fine ginger hair like baby fluff. It has only been on the treatment for ten days and NFWS recommend continuing the treatment for three weeks. At this rate of growth, it will look like a Lhasa Apso by then, with fur down to the floor. Perhaps I could enter it for Crufts

Summer colds

Why are they always worse than winter ones? Why do they seem to hang around longer? Or it is that when it’s cold and wintry, you expect to get one, and when it’s warm and sunny you feel aggrieved at this rotten, unfair twist of fate?

When I went down with this two days ago, someone asked, “Why didn’t you use your own tip and tell yourself you hadn’t got a cold?” Answer: because it clobbered me IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT! I awoke in the early hours, streaming and coughing, and felt too tired and miserable to try anything, be it echinacea or mind control.

Yesterday I took a Lysine capsule and 1000mg of Vit C. Today I have had 20 drops of echinacea and told the cold quite firmly that I have had enough of it and it is going. The Boyfriend has taken nothing at all for his. We’ll see who recovers first.