A Visitor Falls

Ma modelling her splint

Time: A little after 3pm. I am slowly digesting the radiology report following my CT scan which has just been read to me over the phone. Normal. I don’t think a word has ever sounded so good to me. I still have the symptoms, but it isn’t caused by a growth lurking in my sinuses. Huge, tearful relief. 

It’s been a productive week at Hotel H, I’ve been balancing work – so tantalisingly close to the end of Book 3 – with trips out with Ma who’s been staying here. We’ve just been for lunch at a garden centre before I crack on with another 1000 words.

Ma, who’s been pottering in the garden, calls out from the back door.

‘Have you got a plaster?’

‘I’ll get you one,’ I say, getting up.

And at the back door I see what looks like the aftermath of a fight in a black pudding factory. I know a little blood goes a long way, but a lot of blood goes even further. Ma has fallen out of the greenhouse, gashing open a varicose vein on the frame and badly twisting her right thumb as she tries to save herself.

I sit her down, elevate the leg, apply pressure… and then shout for Tom.

The patient, of course, is muttering about making a mess and being a nuisance but is told pretty firmly that she is going to casualty whether she likes it or not.

Twenty-five miles later we sit in our nearest A&E while the Discovery Channel blares out over our heads. We unwittingly sit through a documentary about the road to Berlin, graphically illustrating man’s inhumanity to man, which is then followed by a programme about great train disasters. It’s not exactly cheerful stuff.

Ma is called not a minute too soon as her dressing is now saturated. ‘Nasty things, greenhouses,’ observes the doctor as he closes and dresses the wound before sending Ma for an x ray. Ma, to our great relief has no fractures – just as well as this is her ‘good’ arm since she did a proper job of mangling the other one falling in the snow.

Ma modelling her dressing.

Nevertheless her arthritic bones have not enjoyed their encounter with the ground and the bruising is something to behold.  She is given a splint to encourage everything to settle.

Despite her mauling, Ma’s as chipper as ever.  ‘I didn’t think I’d be falling out a greenhouse today,’ she says happily. Typically, she doesn’t complain once about how much pain she must feeling – she really is remarkably resilient.

Once again, my thanks to the staff at Glangwili hospital for their compassion, kindness and care… I am not, however, ‘missing you already’.

Ma trying to hide behind Tom

PS Tom has asked me to point out that the above picture is not our 'nasty' greenhouse but belongs to the National Botanic Garden of Wales... at least she managed not to fall out of that one.

Guest Blogger: Margaret James

At last some cheerful news! I'm delighted to welcome my fellow Choc Lit author, lovely Margaret James to Home Thoughts Weekly It's publication day for her new novel The Wedding Diary and here she is to tell us about it...

Thank you for inviting me to be your guest today, Chris. It’s great to be here!

I’ve always loved fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel – all those heroines waiting for handsome princes to come along and save them from fates worse than death (or even death itself) fascinated eight-year-old, unreconstructed, pre-The Female Eunuch me.

I’m considerably older and more cynical nowadays, but I still love fairy tales, probably because they have such strong story lines and they’re so life-affirming. You, dear reader, can wish upon a star. You too can have your happy ending.

I wrote my romantic comedy The Wedding Diary at a time when my own life was in meltdown. I was almost too scared to pick up the phone because I knew something else would have gone wrong. I’ve written several historical novels which have casts of thousands and are full of drama, action and – inevitably, since I often set my stories in wartime – death. But in the summer of 2011 I couldn’t face writing about things going wrong for my characters. So I decided to write a rom com instead. 

The Wedding Diary is a present-day reworking of Cinderella in which the heroine starts off in a very bad place – she’s just won a wedding competition but she doesn’t have anyone to marry because her fiancé has vanished off the face of the earth. So what does she need if her story is to have a happy ending? Well, a handsome prince, obviously – and a fairy godmother to make sure this happy ending is delivered. 

My handsome prince is a building projects manager whose own heart needs some urgent repair work, and at first my fairy godmother seems anything but fairy-like. She behaves more like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz than a dear old lady with a talent for bibiddi bobiddi boo. But in fairy-tale-land things aren’t always what they seem, and after some fairly hair-raising frights and setbacks my heroine finds her happy-ever-after with her very own handsome prince. 

Nowadays, I’m in a better place, too!

Thank you so much for being my guest, Margaret - it's been great to have you here.  

Links

Buy The Wedding Diary HERE

Margaret's on Facebook Twitter

And you can find her blog here

On the Mend

‘Don’t pull,’ I tell the nurse who’s about to remove my stitches. 

‘I have to pull, or it’ll fester,’ says the nurse.

‘But, the consultant said – ’

Too late, because the nurse is now brandishing a pin-sized piece of purple, plastic thread and everything else feels, well, fine. It’s a little disconcerting to see the damage, but the wound itself has healed amazingly well in a week, and, as Tom reminds me later, what I’d forgotten was the consultant telling me to allow 8 -10 weeks for everything to settle. So, apart from waiting for the histology results, that should be the end of that little episode.

What I won’t forget though, is how very kind everyone has been. Thank you all so much for thinking of me and for your messages here and elsewhere – it’s meant a lot to me. But most of all, do, please, look after yourselves.

A Bothersome Spot

Having devoted much of my recent worries to my sinuses, I wasn’t in the slightest bit concerned about yesterday’s appointment to see a consultant dermatologist about a tiny patch of red skin that’s been lurking on my upper arm…

When my name is called, I breeze in and am greeted by two smiling faces; a consultant, about my age, and a trainee doctor. I present my arm fully expecting to be told off for wasting valuable NHS time and sent packing with a tube of cream. 

‘Ah,’ says the consultant to his trainee, ‘what do you notice about this lesion?’

Lesion, I think, is not a word I like, but hey-ho, this is doctor-to-doctor talk, so I listen to an explanation of stretching the skin and distinctive pearly edges, still waiting to be sent home in the next breath.

‘So,’ the consultant tells me, ‘what you have is a basal cell carcinoma, and I’d like to do something about it straight away.’

In that split-second a small part of brain screams ‘F*CK!’ and another prompts me to tell the consultant that he’s clearly made a mistake as I’ve already decided it’s eczema.

‘Well,’ says the trainee, as the consultant goes off to make preparations ‘nothing like finding out you’ve got cancer, is there?’

‘No,’ I agree. We smile awkwardly at each other then settle in to a cheery conversation about ‘Junior Doctors’ until the consultant returns and explains - very thoroughly – what the options are for me. When we agree on a surgical procedure, I ask if Tom can be with me. There’s no time to spare, so I rush to get Tom from the waiting room (remember, this was supposed to be a 30 sec job so no need for him to get up from his seat to come in with me!). I don’t even have time to give him a proper explanation so blunder in with, ‘Come quickly, it’s cancer.'  Not exactly the greatest news to give your loved one, especially when he’s well and truly been through the cancer wringer himself.

In a mini-operating theatre, the next twenty-five minutes or so disappear in a blur of lignocaine, cutting and stitching. Everyone in the room treats me with immense kindness and there’s plenty of amusing conversation to distract me, including a brief comical moment when the consultant and I discover that he attended a boys’public school in the same town and at roughly the same time that I went to a girls’ grammar school. We take a quick glimpse at each other before both silently deciding that we haven’t met in a former life!

And then it’s over. I’ve been told that I’ll have a noticeable scar, but it’s still a bit of shock to look down before the dressing is applied to see a hollow in my arm. In the great scheme of things, it’s nothing, but it suddenly brings home to me the seriousness of what’s happened. Back in the car with Tom, I feel slightly freaked out – largely at the speed of events and because I never saw this coming!

I did no research about basal cell carcinomas before the appointment and don’t intend to now, since I’m very happy with the advice and information the consultant gave me, but there are two lessons I’ve learned which others might find useful:

(1) If you’re fair-skinned, take any suspicious patches of skin seriously!

(2) If your GP gives you cream to try and tells you to come back in two weeks if it hasn’t cleared up, don’t leave it another year!

I’d like to say a huge thank you to the consultant and his team at Glangwili General Hospital for their kindness and care and for acting so promptly therefore sparing me weeks of further worry. And, as always, to Tom for being there.

Days Like These

On Friday morning I open the computer to see how Move Over Darling is doing after its stint of being available free for five days. To my surprise, it seems to be doing quite nicely. Goodness knows what hubris prompts me to take a quick look at Amazon Movers and Shakers, but, hey ho, I do … and see Move Over Darling at number one! Number one!! Of course, what goes up must come down, but it’s an amazing start to the day and as fellow author Valerie-Anne Baglietto jokes to me on Twitter, I’ll always have the screenshot.

A little later Ma phones. She’s a passionate and clever gardener, as I’ve mentioned here before, and has finally decided to treat herself to a greenhouse. She’s had few sleepless nights worrying about all the practicalities of getting it fitted, but when the man turns up on Friday morning to lay the concrete base he has the same surname – quite a common name, it has to be said – as someone my dad once worked with and very much liked. ‘Are you related?’ asks Ma. ‘Yes,’ said her man, ‘he’s my dad.’ The only sad note is that Mr Man Senior has recently made a list of old pals he’d like to contact and my dad’s one of them. ‘Well,’ says Ma, with her usual sense of humour, ‘let us know if he has any success getting in touch.’ 

The same morning the postman brings me a date for a CT scan so that someone can get a better idea of what’s going on with my sinuses. A little light Googling has scared the bejeesus out of me, so getting a hospital appointment will hopefully mean information rather than speculation and at least I can stop fretting about it for now.

‘I’ve sent you some photos,’ says Tom, in the middle of all this. ‘You better have a look. I’d forgotten I’d taken them.’ Sighing, because I’m busy, I start downloading and catch my breath. The photos date from a freezing cold February about eighteen months before my dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Knowing that we were planning to move to Wales, we’d booked a cottage with my parents to show them the area and here we are clambering about at Wooltack Point or looking at Jack Sound… scene of a few hair-raising sails. My dad was probably already ill then, but there we are living every moment. It’s strangely reassuring to see his face again on a day of very mixed emotions.

I wrote Move Over Darling during another difficult year when Ma had her dreadful accident and we took on a building project of a house. Second Book Syndrome nearly killed me too, but in the end I was proud of what I’d achieved. I’m nearly at the end of Book Three, Clearing the Decks, which – after a slow start – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed writing. It’s been great fun returning to Little Spitmarsh and working with my new heroine and hero. I’ll miss these characters when I’ve finished, but equally, I’m looking forwards to coming up for air. See you soon!

Free and Freeze

Did you know that by signing up for Choc Lit's free newsletter, Choc Lit Spread (come on, what else could it be called?) you can find out about all the latest Choc Lit news and offers? Well, in case you haven't let me tell you that Doris Day turned 91 this week - 91!! And to celebrate Move Over Darling is FREE on Kindle for five days ending on Wednesday 10 April, so download your copy now to take advantage of this offer.

In other news we've had a busy time with visitors at Hotel H.  Last week we were out about under sunny skies (but in freezing cold temperatures) with Rose and Si...

Walking at St David's

And at the beach, ducking out the wind

And this week we have Stepson One with my step daughter in law and their very bonny and very well-behaved new baby to keep us entertained.

The only bum note in what's been a lovely time is that the wretched sinus lurgy rolls on. Time to take the investigations to the next level. Sigh.

The Tab and a Path

I was delighted this week to give an interview to The Tab, the student paper, for my old university, UEA (there’s a writing competition to go with it, too). One of the questions related to what I studied and how that helped me on ‘my path to success’. Pretty circuitously, was my first thought. 

 Having done some soul-searching at A Level, I’d decided to abandon my first love, English in favour of studying something more career-oriented at university. Or so I thought, thus proving the downside of those head versus heart decisions. The head may give you cool, sensible advice, but without the heart’s commitment and passion some of those decisions can ultimately leave you unfulfilled and wondering about what might have been. All the ‘proper job’ years might have been mentally engaging, but my creative writing ambitions gnawed away at me the whole time.

Coincidentally - and as a ‘brain rinse’ from writing – I read Rachel Hore’s lovely novel, The Dream House this week, which took me to places I know and remember in Norfolk. There’s a reference too, to the mystic, Julian of Norwich, and one of her best known phrases, ‘all shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well’. The path we follow may take us on some interesting diversions, but they make us who we are. And whilst I might not have chosen some of my diversions, hopefully, my own winding path has given me more to write about!

Here’s me then after my Congregation Ceremony with the two people who made it possible, my parents. You wouldn’t know it to look at them, but they’d just had one of the most traumatic years of their life and yet they’re smiling and looking so proud. Mum and Dad went on to triumphantly rebuild their life after a blow which would have flattened most people. And me, I finally followed my heart.