Thoughts from the frontline - 7

Now this is not fair. I've got bladder cancer and I just don't want any other problems. But I'm getting slightly ahead of my self here. After the lovely "post results" weekend, Monday morning arrived and T left for work nice and early so that she could get back late afternoon rather than early evening - it's nice to have some decent time together rather than a rushed meal then realise that it is bedtime already. So what was I going to do on this Monday morning? That's right, set the work computer up that I had rescued from the office about a week ago. We had started to change the spare bedroom around so that I could work from home without too much trouble. Now this Monday morning saw the bedroom/office in a midway stage ie one big pile of mess!! To be fair the room had become a "put it in there, we'll sort it out later" sort of place. We had done a trip to the tip on Sunday to get rid of quite a lot of stuff but the room was still able to hold the contents of a three bedroom house in towering piles on the floor and bed. The clean up had started but still along way to go. But I needed to start doing some work things so I carried the computer up the stairs and set it down on the desk next to our home one. Now both T and I use Apple Mac computers so we now had two iMacs on our desk. PC's with all that horrible windows/microsoft stuff is banned from our house. Macs are nice and sexy and beautiful and just don't break down.... Further adverts for Macs can be found on the Apple website :-) Computer set up and ready to go on work stuff. Well no. Ooops, forgotten to bring home a cable to attached the machine to the tinternet. Bum, that means that I can't log in to my emails etc. Shame, can't really work but feeling a bit guilty so I called co-director in the company and arranged to join him at a meeting on site to go through the drawings of a restaurant we are designing for a new client. And at the same time I can pop into PC World or somewhere and buy that cable i need. Now I had been lucky in that T had done almost all the telling to family and friends about my cancer. My "actually I'm not good at the moment, I've got bladder cancer" conversations had been limited to the times I had answered my mobile phone since coming out of hospital. It is strange saying "not good actually" when people start a conversation with "how are you doing?" but they don't expect any reply other than "alright", you can actually hear their intake of breath and you know that you are going to have to fill that silence. So, I travel into town, buy the cable and arrive on the site at 1 o'clock on the dot. Simon and Tim are there from the office with the client and his wife. Now this client knew that I'd been in hospital but not the details but I was brave and having been asked the question "Hope you're ok after your hospital stay" I explained all with the short 1 minute version rather than the longer 3 minute one. The client was good, no panic faces and we quickly moved onto work stuff and deciding exactly where the new staircase would go, how big the bar was going to be and should be create a new main entrance. A great afternoon of normality. I was human again. I was not my illness. Yippee!!!!! It felt GOOD :-) And I was good in that I came straight home after the meeting and didn't try to go back into the office. Back home by 4 I just plugged in the internet cable and left work behind. An evening of good food and dvd watching was ahead of us. Smiles, I liked this Monday. Then at 9.15 my phone mobile phone rang but I didn't recognise the number so I left it. One minute later T's phone rang - now who can that be, there are sure keen to speak to us? T answered her phone and it was my younger sister so the phone was passed to me. "Bad news I'm afraid, Mums just had a stroke and I'm with her in A&E..." This is not fair. Lightning shouldn't strike twice but we all know that it does. "It looks like it is just a mild one but it has effected her speech but they are going to keep her in to make sure that the can still eat/drink etc. I'll text you later when I have some more news" So we went to bed with worry heads on again. Tuesday had to bring better news. Didn't it? Preview of next blog: Better news and being beaten by OAP's A xx