Today I had just about got myself up and showered when the doorbell rang and it was two friendly carers who had turned up 15 minutes early – not that I minded. My nickname for the male carer is ‘Mr Teazy-Weazy’ after the famous hairdresser of, I think, the early 1960’s. After everything else is done, I am more than happy to let him work his magic on Meg’s hair and I think that we are going to have the same pair tomorrow which is a bonus. After we had breakfasted, we received a phone call from a nurse who was part of the ReAblement team and she was going to call around in about 15 minutes to do the kind of routine monitoring that is part of the hospital routine (blood pressure, oxygen saturation, temperature) and this all turned out to be normal. After the nurse had left, Meg and I knew that we had to get our act together to get our weekly shopping done. We went to our local smaller Aldi at which I usually shop and know where absolutely everything is. This week, having got Meg seated in her wheelchair, I then managed to clip the special trolley that is available for the use of wheelchair users and found out how it clips onto the vertical leg supports and we then started our trip around the supermarket. This all went pretty well except that the trolley for wheelchair users only has half the capacity of a normal shopping trolley and therefore for a weekly shop, it is necessary to pile things high and to take a great deal of care arranging one’s purchases. Both of the local Aldi stores have invested in ‘scan your own’ shopping terminals but these I do not like when I have enough on my plate manipulating wives in wheelchairs, shopping trolleys piled full of shopping and I am desperately trying to get things packed away once scanned. But I must say that things went pretty well and one elderly lady promised to take one of my bags which was piled high and precariously but I managed without her help. Then I popped around to the garage attached to the supermarket where they have newspapers in racks outside and managed to secure one of the last two remaining copies of ‘The Times‘ When we did arrive home, Miggles our adopted cat wanted to make an entrance but was evidently spooked by the wheelchair just inside the front door and was unsure whether to go round it or under it. Eventually, on the second attempt I got the cat into the outer kitchen where he/she knows to sit patiently for me whilst I got Meg into her chair and the shopping inside the house. Like most things these days, everything is logistics or so it seems.
Lunch today was going to be one of those thrown together meals which always turns out to be a little on the large side, But I started off with a couple of onions and two small sweet peppers which were fried together with a couple of tomatoes, some petit pois and a few mushrooms.I added some fragments of beef left over from the weekend and then made the whole into what I have been told is a sort of Arabic curry once I have put in some sultanas, a couple of small diced applies and a dessertspoonful of Demerara sugar. To this I add a small cup full of onion gravy and some brown fruity sauce and let it simmer for a few minutes. Then Meg’s get dished up on sone cauliflower rice substitute whilst I keep my carbohydrate count down with a couple of broken cream crackers. After lunch, I encourage Meg to have a sleep or a deep doze but for one reason or another, I just could not get Meg to settle. She had a rather agitated afternoon until later on I was able to give her some medication. We also started watching ‘La Traviata’ the opera by Verdi which considering the heroine spends much of the opera regretting parts of her past life was perhaps not the most suitable given the events of the afternoon. But there was some glorious singing as well as emotion filled moments which Meg and I really did enjoy. These days we tend to watch an opera over two days rather than in one concentrated session so after the second Act, we paused the transmission and will resume again tomorrow.
Last night, I had sent details of this blog so that Meg’s second cousins (daughters of a cousin?) could catch up on news and I enquired about their mother, Meg’s actual cousin on the maternal side, who I know has been rather poorly. But we received some unpleasant news in the middle of the night because Meg’s cousin is suffering from dementia, a broken pelvis and has to endure two really serious infections. In short, she is only conscious 5% of the time so we are contemplating if and when the families ought to meet for a joint meal. I conveyed the news in its entirety to Meg but I am not sure whether the full import of the news is fully appreciated by Meg. So I am in contact with the two sisters and we are trying to arrange a meal at one or other of their houses next Wednesday unless we get overtaken by events, of course. It is an inevitable consequence of our stage in the life cycle that most of our news about family and friends seems to be about their frailties or worse but we have to be philosophical and make the best of each day as it comes. Although today has not been a particularly good day, I am always conscious pf the fact that ‘tomorrow is another day’