Life and death stuff and the bits in between

You're just going to have to read this how I wrote it. It'd be boring to flatten out this particular rollacoster and re-write it from today.

This is what I wrote last Thursday morning:

I still don't really know what a Blog is. I know what it isn't! It isn't a diary because there are too many gaps. It isn't a journal because you all get to read it. It isn't a snapshot because there's too much processing and reflecting.

How can it possibly be that I haven't yet blogged the fact that Judy, Chris' mum, my mother-in-law died on Monday 3rd in the evening? Her funeral was last Thursday.

How can it be that even grief fights for space to do its stuff on us? How can we make sure that all the very close up things in our lives don't block out the the colossal life and death moments in our lives. The death of the person who brought you into life. The passing of a relationship that underpins all relationships to follow.

Chris is grieving his mum in his way. At the moment a straight forward sense of relief that she doesn't have to suffer any more the endless diabetes-related hardships. He has enormous gratitude for who she was and what she did. It seems to me, looking on, that he knows the gift of letting go. Chris accepts that his mum's love for him got simpler and therefore stronger towards the end. He wrote a beautiful meditation based on the prayer 'God be in my head and in my understanding'. Email us if you'd like to read it.

It's always felt strange to me that this blog is so clearly mine, even though this journey is such a shared one. Even more so now I'm the one telling you about Judy.

Then I wrote this on a scrap of paper the following day:

How strange to start this blog as Ali-the-pretend-poorly and end it as Ali-the-patient-again. You have all been hoping (and probably rightly assuming) that the infuriating silence my end is because I was too busy being well to get round to blogging anything.

Well to be honest, you were right but just before yesterday's entry I went for a blood test. I instigated this because I had my suspicions that I might be a tad poorly. I was feeling a bit flakey but you must remember temperatures in the city have been unusually hot, everyone was feeling a bit flakey!

I've just held it together through Judy's death and funeral; hard news that Amanda's fight with breast cancer is back on; Asha's little brush with A&E Minor Injuries and a fab but extremely full-on church weekend away (which I helped organise). I'll admit it - my legs were aching pretty permanently and my ability to manage and enjoy the kids was (how shall I say?) seriously lacking.

Anyway it takes an awful lot for me to give into physical frailty so I'm quite proud of myself that my blood test yesterday showed a very low red blood cell count (I think 6.9 for those of you who know about these things).

Converstaions between my fab GP and my Consultant got me straight into Hospital for a swift blood transfusion and a look at what's going on.

It's Friday and we were supposed to be enroute to Leeds to see Chris' brother Andy and then on up to Scotland for a brief holiday with Doug and Rachel (with Neil and Lynda) before we're all due back down south for a Brighton wedding.

It's interesting how efficively I have stopped thinking about being 'the patient'. Hence an episode like this catches us completely unprepared. It's so shocking that I keep finding it strangely funny. Having said that, there is something all too familar and rehearsed about this hospital visit. It was almost exactly ten months ago that I had my first ever blood transfusion following the endoscopy (camera down my throat).

I cant help the comparison - Judy's life was so affected by illness that it is sadly really hard for me to imagine how she might have lived, had she been well. Basically illness changes you. My (supposedly life threatening) illness has, in reality, affected me so little this far, that it's still hard to even allow it to interupt our holiday plans! What are the changes? Where are the allowances?

And now - written today, Monday night, after a four day hospital stay:

My holiday plans certainly were interupted as the Medics, in their wisdom, decided to do a chest x-ray, an ECG, an endoscopy and a CT scan for me. They also kept me attached to a drip for three of the four days, giving me potassium and glucose and lots of saline solution no doubt!

Chris and I had possibly our hardest moment since my diagnosis under the vines in the gardens at the hospital. Chris had been holding it together through the previous few weeks in the knowledge that very soon we would all be in beautiful surroundings with important friends and space for our kids to be less demanding. He saw this disappearing as I was being offered NHS hospitality until (at their convenience) a scan on Monday.

I, at the same time and with dawning realisation, saw a bed, a telly, a book and a dozen different nurses looking after me for a few days and it was painfully clear to me that I needed to stay put. We resolved that Chris should take the kids and go up north without me. Obvious perhaps, but very painful for us to admit to each other that we hadn't realised that I was that exhausted and that Chris was that desperate. At that moment we needed completely different things.

Now out, I feel the urge to write not just a blog but a book on my Homerton Hospital experience, but I won't. Or at least, tonight I won't, as tomorrow morning I'm heading north to join the gang and be looked after. ..

I've undoubtedly taken a knock. It's hard for me not to push myself and it's hard for those around me if I lurch from ALL GO to NO GO without much warning.