At the doc's

I discussed my symptoms and the doctor (not my usual one but a rather dour 40-ish Asian lady) asked me why I hadn't just taken Immodium. I told her that a) I didn't have real diarrhoea, just nasty, painful, explosive loo sessions, and b) the consequences of Immodium would make my piles worse! She said she quite understood.

She asked if I had been abroad recently and said she would normally only give antibiotics to people who had. I told her I hadn't, but I had been handling bird feeders a lot and though I always wash my hands afterwards, there's a chance of picking up an infection off those. So she wrote me a script for five days' worth of Ciprofloxacin, which I have never had before. The instructions tell you to drink no milk and take no indigestion remedies or products containing zinc for two hours either side of a pill (twice a day). I merrily popped one having just drunk a mug of milky tea! I shall be more careful in future.

The good news is, after just three pills, I am feeling quite a bit better. I was still awake from 3.30 to 5 am with stomach ache but it wasn't so bad and I didn't have to rush to the loo at dawn.

The bad news is, the results of my blood tests were in and showed a slight thyroid dysfunction (not bad enough for them to do anything about, she said, but that might explain my heart palpitations and dry, itchy skin) plus my white blood cell and platelet counts were too low and I have to have another test in two months' time.

Not knowing the significance of the latter two, I rushed to Google. Big mistake. I'm now convinced I have AIDS, Hepatitis C or both together! Fifteen years ago, I was raped while on holiday in Turkey and got a whole raft of STI's as a result. I didn't go to the police because the man was somebody I had had consensual sex with on a previous holiday. The condom had torn and I picked up STI's then and had antibiotics for them.

The rape occurred on another holiday a year later, when I couldn't get back to my hotel because there was a raging storm and trees had come down over the mountain road. He saw me sitting forlornly in a bar at 1.30 am and offered me his spare room, saying he wouldn't lay a finger on me. No sooner was I fast asleep when he came in and jumped on me. I tried to fight him off but he was stronger. I ran out into the raging night - it was probably about 4 am, still a violent gale and pouring rain - carrying my shoes and a plastic bag containing stuff I'd bought the previous day, and a dog attacked me, tearing at my clothes and ripping the bag to shreds. I screamed and a man appeared on a balcony and threw things at the dog, scaring it off. Then I walked the three miles back to town, with a handful of loose belongings as the bag was wrecked, in floods of tears.

Later that day, when they'd cleared the road, I made it back to my hotel. I didn't go to the police because I knew they wouldn't believe me. Once they found out I'd dated him a year previously, they would never believe a rape charge and anyway, I was a fifty-year-old woman, not a young girl.

So I let it go and as soon as I got back, I got my infections treated again and also had an HIV test. But they said it was a bit soon and that I should come back in two months. I never went back. One test had been enough of an ordeal, and as it had been clear, I assumed I was OK.

However, I now know that both HIV and Hep C can lurk in your system for years, the only symptoms being recurrent fungal infections (which I have), an alcohol intolerance (yes) and liver symptoms like a constant pain under the right rib (yes) and unexplained weight loss (yes) and attacks of letheragy (yes).

I feel quite scared. There must be some reason for what the blood test showed and if there was something lurking, that might explain why I've felt so under the weather for so long. I think I had better go and get re-tested.

A wish

I used to ask a lot from life - excitement, gorgeous boyfriends, holidays, a great job - and I got them all. I was so lucky. Now, all I ask is this: a quiet, warm, calm home that's near my friends and is peaceful enough to write in. Then perhaps my stomach problems would settle down once I could think my own thoughts without interruption, and eat my own kind of diet.

Trip cancelled

After yet another night of not enough sleep, plus awful cystitits symptoms (I went to bed with a hot water bottle on my tum), and waking up at quarter to five and having to to go the loo several times, I have cancelled my trip. My bag is all packed, I am in tears, feeling wretched and dreading the mocking words I shall hear from Mr G's lips.

Thanks for all your support. I will make a doctor's appointment (which will be in a week's time as it always is) and will let you know how I get on.

Travel panic

For the last five mornings, no matter what time I've gone to bed, I've woken up between 4.30 and 5 am with the most horrible stomach ache. I've cut out wine, I've eaten lightly, poached egg on toast for dinner, yet still it keeps happening. Waking after five hours' sleep, bad tum, trips to the loo... It's cleared up by lunchtime but I've felt aching and exhausted for the rest of the day. Last night I went to bed at 9.30 pm and took half a sleeping pill - but I still woke before 5 and still had the painful guts.

I have been thinking that perhaps my IBS has returned in a new form. But this morning, after I'd taken a mug of tea back to bed at 5.30, I suddenly started thinking about tomorrow, when I am heading up to the Lake District to see my sister. My neck and shoulders are really stiff and sore at the moment - I keep getting tension headaches - and as I imagined myself dragging my wheely case on and off the tube, up the flight of steps in Euston Square tube station, along the road to Euston Mainline, I could feel myself tensing up even more, and my stomach roiling.

Now I'm thinking perhaps it's not IBS at all, but my travel phobia striking again.

But why? My sister is always off to different parts of the globe. Once, as soon as I got back from a holiday, while still the the airport I was looking at Departure boards and wondering how soon I could be off again. Now, at the thought of booking a holiday, my guts writhe and I feel sick. Why? What has happened to me over the last ten years or so that has made me feel such a panic about going anywhere?

I wonder if it all stems from the bomb attacks on the London tube? I was on one of the tubes two weeks after the main attack, that had one of the bombs on it that didn't go off. I was sitting right opposite the bomber, a young Muslim man with a rucksack. I kept wondering why he had such a strange expression on his face, his eyes rolled up as if he were praying. I got off the station before the bomb was supposed to go off, but the idea I was on that train was utterly terrifying. I was so close... Too close. God, I'm feeling ill again as I write this.

But this only one factor. A couple of months after Mr Grumpy had his brain haemorrhage in 2000, I was booked to go away with a friend to stay with another friend who lived in Turkey. I had also just moved house and was already realising I'd made a big mistake and the house was wrong for me (horrid neighbours, a big dark tree outside where drug-taking youths congregated, a steep hill to climb in order to get to shops and transport). I had a throat infection, I was tired and stressed and told my friend I couldn't go.

I was hardly letting her down. She had somewhere to stay, she had friends out there and yet another friend was going to the same resort three days later. But she turned on me, spat vitriol and refused to refund me for her air fare (£200, if I recall) which I'd put on my card. In fact she said to a mutual acquaintance, "Hydra must be doing really badly if she needs that money." About ten months later, I received a cheque in an envelope with no note, and that was only after friends had put pressure on her to pay up. Needless to say, we are no longer in touch.

Since then, I have only been abroad once, a most unpleasant week spent mainly in the Spanish equivalent of Ikea as the person I went with was just moving into a flat on the Costa Del Sol. The sun was shining, the beach looked lovely, but there was no time to relax.

In the last two or three years, I have missed two trips to see out of town friends, two funerals and a wedding. I made it to two other funerals, of my last remaining aunt and uncle, but only because I had a lift rather than having to go on my own.

Ah, maybe I have hit something now. It's those words, 'on my own'. Perhaps if I had someone to travel with, to jolly me along and soothe my nerves, to drive to the station or airport with so I didn't have to strain my bad back lifting luggage, it would all feel a lot better.

But that doesn't help me tomorrow. I still have to drag my case to Euston and get on a train, no matter how awful I'm feeling. I'm going for a massage this morning, then off to North London and back, two hours each way. And I've still got to pack, as I've put all the wrong things in my case.

It's my biggest fear that I'm getting like my mum, who, the older she got, the less she went out, until she flatly refused to go anywhere unfamiliar, which ruled out holidays, of course. Could I be suffering from a form of genetic agoraphobia? Or is it all just stress? Or a combination? Mr G makes it worse by saying, "There's no chance of you going. You know that. You'll ring your sister in the morning and tell her you're not coming." Which just makes me feel even worse, of course.

Wish I could just stay under the duvet.

Chi Mimi's den

'The lodger' as we now call her, kept trying to sleep in all Flad's favourite places which, being master of the house and ruler of the sofa, he didn't like at all. So Mr Grumpy cut a hole in a cardboard box and shoved a small cat bed in it. She loves it, as you can see.

Wet Washing Day

I've been waiting all week for a dry day, or at least one where it didn't look as if it was about to tipple down. This morning I arose at 7-ish to find Mr G had shoved some of the contents of the overflowing laundy basket into the machine. It's raining. What's the point? I thought of the rarely used tumble dryer in the garage, then remembered it had blown up last year and scorched my god-daughter's knickers!

Suddenly, I could hear my mother's exasperated voice in my mind, fuming, "Another wet washing day!" I had almost forgotten that, back in the 1950s and '60s, washing was only ever done once a week on a Monday. Monday was washing day. Everybody knew that. Whether it was raining or not, that's the day it got done, even if it hung around all week suspended from the kitchen ceiling from one of those Molly Maid drying racks, long johns flapping wetly in everyone's face.

Such was the rigid routine of those days. It was a class thing. Put your washing out on any other day and the neighbours would frown and label you as eccentric, at best: at worst, they would think you appallingly 'Non-U', persona non grata, a peasant, with an out of control, sloppy household at a time when households had to be 'run', as if they were military establishments.

Neither my mother nor her mother before her had such modern aids as tumble dryers. My mother did her washing in an old gas boiler and squashed it through a mangle, rather than having a washing machine with a spin cycle. She would then hang it on the line if it was not actually raining (oh, those frantic dashes home from park or shops at the first sign of a Monday raindrop!) or drape it on the Molly Maid if it was wet. Where we lived in Liverpool, in the North West, it rained a lot.

I can't remember when the rule of the Monday washing day began gradually eroding; it was probably when Women's Lib began in the '60s and women, rather than staying home keeping house and child-rearing, decided they'd rather go out to work instead. Launderettes sprang up. Suddenly, you could do your washing any day, morning or evening. What liberation from the wet washing day that was!

Yet, when I peg out my washing on a Friday or even (gasp, shock, horror!) a Sunday, I can still see a vision of those narrow-eyed neighbours, headscarves tied tightly over their pink hair rollers, shaking their heads and tutting. Bet you anything it will be sunny next Monday!

Waiting for a sign.

My young friend S is, like me, searching for a flat to buy. Like me, she hasn't had much luck. The other day, she was waxing philosophical and said she was sure that when she found a place, she would receive a sign that it was either right or wrong for her.

Well, I think I'm getting signs, too. I had already withdrawn my offer on that bungalow to do up, but was wondering if I should go for it after all in lieu of anything else, when my eye lit upon a letter I had just received and a paragraph leapt out at me. It concerned a man who had bought a bungalow to do up and a year later, was still trying to sell it. That's the sign, I thought, and promptly binned the property details.

Last Saturday, I went to see another bungalow. (Not that I particularly like bungalows - my knees haven't given way yet - but there just seem to be an awful lot of them round here.) It was down a gravel lane, round a corner, and totally tucked away, a real writer's retreat. I felt my heartstrings being tugged... then I felt my ankle itch. I was being attacked by cat fleas! I rang S and told her. "That's the sign you shouldn't buy it," she said, and indeed, when I remembered I couldn't drive and would have to lug my shopping all the way up the lane, as well as stumbling down it in the dark at night, I realised she was right.

In case you're wondering about that nice bungalow that I was going to go for... S is so miserable having to camp out in her dad's living room that I've said she can move in with me till she finds somewhere. And as I need an office to work from, that means I am now looking for a 3-bedroomed place.

Wonder what the next sign will be? A £-shaped cloud telling me I'm about to win the lottery?