Checking in

Hello dear friends and readers! I'm back ... sort of!

First of all, thank you for your lovely and heartfelt comments on my previous post, most of which made me cry - in a good way, I hasten to add - to some degree. I cannot even begin to express what your support has meant to me.

I know I more or less promised to keep reading your blogs and try to comment now and again, but  unfortunately this never happened.

At times, it was as if I was living in a paralell world, where blogland felt like a foreign country, one I used to visit many years ago rather than the couple of weeks of my absence.

After a dismal Spring and a decidedly under par Summer, the weather gods decided to treat us to a spell of Indian Summer, with skies of the deepest blue, glorious sunshine and temperatures which at one point climbed to an unseasonable 21°C.

Deep down, my battered brain must have registered all this as I somehow managed to take a handful of photos with my phone's camera while I was going through the motions. Old habits die hard, I guess, even if everything I did was on autopilot.

You see, in the week after I published my last post, Jos's conditioned got much, much worse, until on the Friday of that particular week he was rushed to A&E. Apparently, the antibiotics he got for his UTI hadn't managed to clear the infection, resulting in complications which ultimately lead to sepsis.

His son stayed with him while he was put on a drip and submitted to test after test until finally at around midnight he was allocated a night room in A&E.

Thankfully, his blood values had improved significantly by Saturday morning, when he messaged me to say he'd had a good night's sleep and had even - wait for it - enjoyed a proper breakfast. 

While I was visiting him that afternoon, he was moved from A&E to a room on the urology department, where he would stay until the end of the week, getting better and stronger every day. They actually wanted to send him home earlier but there was no way he would be able to tackle the dangerously steep staircase up to our first floor bedroom so that we needed to find a way around that first.

My days were a whirlwind of ticking tasks off my to-do list, working half-days at the office, then rushing home for an hour and a half before taking the bus to hospital. And although Jos's condition continued to improve, I kept lying awake with worry half the night.

The hospital, designed in 1975, and ultimately opened in 1979, is a typical 1970s concrete structure, juxtaposed with imaginatively planted green spaces, which I couldn't resist photographing while walking along its endless corridors to Jos's third-floor room.

It was obvious that Bess was confused and missing her Dad. She slept on my bed for most of the night and insisted on napping on my lap as I lay trying to read on the sofa. 

I'd started Slammerkin by Emma Donoghue but it was more than my brain could tackle, so I selected some easy feel-good reading from my pile in the form of a Maeve Binchy novel charity shopped in Shropshire.

After much head scratching, a solution was found for the sleeping problem, so that Jos would be able to come home on Saturday. 

It was decided that a hospital bed would be installed in our dining room. Having a small and full to bursting home, this posed some logistical problems, as it meant we would have to put our dining room table and Lloyd Loom style chairs in storage. Enter our lovely neighbours Wes, Michèle and Karin, who helped me dismantle the tabel and take it, as well as the chairs, to Karin's spacious garden room.

Although initially it looked quite sterile and unappealing, I managed to make things look cozy. So much so that Jos now has to share his bed with Bess! In fact, I think it might be her current favourite spot as she is reclining on the bed as I type!

As I don't drive and the nearest supermarket is just under a kilometer away, I am now the proud owner of an upmarket shopping trolley which, now that Jos is able to drive again, might soon become obsolete. 

I still did the honours last Sunday, which was his first full day back at home. I even made a slight detour to the local park along the way, as obviously I needed to thank the lady in the shrine for her good works!

For the first time in weeks, it actually felt good to be alive again, so that I could finally enjoy the glorious sights and scents of Autumn.

We even went for a short walk up the street that afternoon ...

Fast forward one week, and things are definitely on the up, although there will still be a long way to go.

The main thing is that Jos has got his lust for life back and is eating like The Very Hungry Caterpillar :-) All the rest, I'm sure, will follow, step by step.

If all goes well, I'll be back to blogging regularly, starting where I left off, which are the final two days of our September holiday. I'm sure it will be weird going back in time knowing what I do now...

I'll also try to comment on your posts as soon as. Thank you so much for bearing with me, i's good to be back!