Just press the cure button

Hey all,

Been a bit lax of late with things piling up (though his Royal Dogness stopped by to keep my sanity levels up) and the situation with mum is not great.

A bit of background on my mad mother (who I love to bits, as it happens). She’s 68, lives on her own in a bungalow in a small village in Norfolk and is very well-liked by all her neighbours who often come to her to borrow from her extensive collection of tools and DIY items in the garage. She’s become the honorary auntie to a host of small children who know her as “Auntie B” and never seems to have hair the same colour twice (much like North American television, only more stylish).

‘Active’ hardly compasses the way my mum lives her life. She has probably repainted some or all of the bungalow at least twice in the last twelve months, is a dab hand at laying carpet, rewiring and often can be found zooming about in her car, doing the shopping for some of the young mothers in the village.

This is not, fairly obviously, a frail, old woman.

INT. HOSPITAL WARD - EVENING.

Nurses and orderlies shuffle about in the aimless way they don’t on ER. MARK SPENCER and CONCERNED NEIGHBOUR stand by the bed of AUNTIE B. A NURSE is filling in a questionnaire.

NURSE
Does she have home help?

MARK
(Puzzled)
No. Why would she?

NURSE
(ticking a box)
Does she suffer from pressure sores?

MARK
What? She doesn’t stay still long enough to get them.
Can you get them on your feet? From running around?

MARK starts looking over the form that the NURSE is filling in.

NURSE
(to herself)
Bedbound.

MARK
Wait a minute.
(he indicates the unconscious patient in the bed)
See her there?

The NURSE nods.

MARK
Imagine someone the complete opposite of that.
Loud. Rushing about. Fit. Busy.
This is like the antimatter version of my mum here.

The NURSE nods, then returns to the form.

NURSE
Does she have her meals delivered?

MARK screams and punches the NURSE through a wall. He begins to build a gigantic sacrificial tower from forms, clipboards and pieces of passing junior doctor.

Back to reality. It seems that mum has nothing wrong with her back muscles per se. What she does have is a dose of septicemia that the docs can’t seem to find the root cause of. The septicemia is a staphylococcus aureleus (SA) infection, though thankfully not MRSA. It’s a tough gig for me to see her so frail and weak, knowing what she’s usually like. I can only imagine how throughly pissed off she is with not being able to be up and about, fixing a neighbour’s roof or something equally taxing.

It would seem that the initial back pain was from her kidneys giving out due to massive dehydration.

I now have a stinking cold, so can’t go in and see her. Grrrr...

Thanks to all that have stopped by and wished her well.