Ha! Spoke too soon about Mum being better at our house, yesterday! It never does to tempt fate, does it?? I had another lie-in this morning (have concluded that the years of running myself ragged have finally caught up with me!!), so didn’t check on Mum until late. When I did, she was up and dressed, so I thought, “Whoopee-doop! All OK there then.” But no, her eyes were bothering her. She suffers from blepharitis (although it never bothers her normally) and I think she made a mistake this morning. Finding her room a bit warm, she turned the radiator down – only she hadn’t. She’d turned it up. Blimey! It was like a dry sauna in there. So a big fuss about her eyes, pretty much all day (she’s not a great patient!). In the end, I offered a warming eye pack which didn’t go down well, and then a walk round the garden, which, surprisingly, did go down well once we’d wrapped her up like the Queen, complete with headscarf to keep the wind from her head.
Happiness was restored with the cobwebs blown away, a piece of cake with her afternoon cup of tea, and a bit of fun with the dry ice that came in with John’s specialist eye serum. The fun was, of course, putting the ice in a cauldron, face-timing the grandchildren, then filling the cauldron with water to create a fabulous overflow of ‘smoke’ which tumbled over the cauldron’s rim onto the worktop, over its edge and sent whispering to the floor.
As a matter of fact, I was the most excited among those who watched the spectacle. John can regularly play with the ice each time it arrives if he wants and, being a scientist, he knows the properties of the ice inside out; Mum exclaimed and suitably said “Wow” in the right places but wanted get back to watching The Chase; and the kids were even less enthralled. Freddie had seen it once before at our house first-hand, so watched for a bit, then asked Harriet if he could watch a programme on TV. William also had a bit of a look, but shot off pretty quickly to discover something far more interesting in his own home, and all we saw was his retreating bum on the screen. Ah, well, the best laid plans…… I enjoyed it anyway!!
John did more ‘big stuff’ down the bottom of the garden today AND……. wait for it…… had a fiddle with his restoration project in the garage….the car….. He even got the manual out and started looking up the intricacies of how to repair a specific part of it too. Now that’s what I call progress!!
However, on the downside, the ol’ man isn’t feeling all that great. He’s still plodding on, of course, but struggling with his breathing. Having run out of drugs in general and one of his inhalers last Friday, it wasn’t until Monday that the pharmacy delivered. But no inhaler, just an ‘owing’ slip. By Wednesday, things are getting pretty tight, so I phone up the pharmacy to find out what’s happening. Ah…no, sorry, we can’t get that one, none at the warehouse, sorry….. Oh! Blimey!! Phone call to the surgery – what can you offer instead, please? No worries, an alternative prescribed and the script sent to the pharmacy. Thursday: no delivery. Friday: no delivery. Phoned the pharmacy – no reply; phone call to Good Samaritan, Malcolm, to call in to retrieve the drugs, who then duly reports that there’s no script there. Eeeesh….hubby is really struggling now, so another phone call to the surgery, another script promised. Fingers crossed it arrives tomorrow.
But, as John says, it’s not a panic relatively-speaking, against a backdrop of all those with COVID-19 who really are struggling to breath, with last count of 11,658 people infected, including the Prime Minister and some of his Ministers, and 578 people dead. Yep, that’s the British stiff, upper lip for you folks!!! And, onwards……