Diary of a crabby lady

You know, one of the worst experiences of my adult life was feeding my father spoonsful of yoghurt in hospital and watching it dribble out of his mouth again. (He didn't have cancer; he'd had a stroke.) I didn't like him, never did, but it's a fact that he was a highly successful businessman, good at almost everything he did - other than getting on with his family - very much respected by his peers, and even after he…

I've been hearing how NHS cancer patients can't get the opiates they need, which is all very Bad and Wrong indeed. But I have to admit to having apparently won the postcode lottery here; my doctors love giving me drugs. I have Zoomorph, which sounds to me like a collection of animals all changing shape, and then I had something they thought was better than that - only I didn't have it on scrip, and the hospital…

Lord, I thought having a panic attack in a Portakabin was bad enough. Things have been even more exciting since then, with another panic attack taking me to the out-of-hours clinic in Cowley Road; the next day, Bank Holiday Sunday, we went to five chemists and took four hours to get the drugs the doctor there prescribed. Actually, all we could get was a reasonable facsimile thereof, but the pharmacist at Woodstock Road…

I'm sure things aren't meant to be quite this hard. I had to call the out of hours doctor again last night - I was sick and fever-y, and had very bad tummy pains. This time, by way of variety, they sent us along to an out of hours clinic in Oxford, which was, I suppose, preferable to waiting in the house for someone to (possibly) turn up. Preferable for me, anyway; maybe less so for Judy, who doesn't like driving in Oxford…

I really wanted my lunch today. You can't imagine what a relief that was, after several days where the most I could do was choke down a piece of toast. And (whisper it) my innards are behaving a little better, though that's usually subject to change without notice.