An uncelebratory fourth of July
We were nearly two hours at the hospital earlier this evening and I’m somewhat immeasurably* past shattered.
The doctor thinks Peter may have had a TIA**, which had already occurred to me. Peter is more or less okay now, but it scared the bejeezus out of me, and thinking ‘TIA’ in the middle of one is not comforting. And the cold truth is that he’s never recovered properly from whatever it was that landed him in hospital this spring—they never did decide what it was—and Peter feels that something going wrong dates back to his sinus surgery last autumn.
So the out-of-hours doc*** has put a note on his file saying ‘urgent’ or whatever docs say to each other, and, just in case the medical computer gods are not friendly, Peter is supposed to ring up his clinic tomorrow, because it’s his GP who has to ask for the assortment of tests that a tentative diagnosis of TIA provokes.
Sigh. It had been a rather nice afternoon. . . . †
* * *
* ‘Somewhat immeasurably’ is the sort of phrase you come up with when you are. That much past shattered.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_ischemic_attack
*** And this is another of those the NHS Gets It Right stories. Both of the people I spoke to on the out-of-hours phone line and the doctor we saw at the hospital clinic treated us like intelligent human beings with a problem they were there to help us solve.
† We’d gone to see a garden. This one: http://www.ngs.org.uk/gardens/gardenfinder/garden.aspx?id=12111 And it’s pretty much as fabulous as the doting husband, who says he wrote the description, says it is. I was doubly fascinated because she’s doing the grand, glamorous, has-a-clue-plantswomany and, er, successful version of what I am doing at the cottage, not because I have anything resembling a plan but because I want to wedge as much stuff in as I can. And her garden may be small but it’s still about twice the size of the garden at my cottage. She even has a tiny circle of grass. Fancy. Peter said, I wonder if it’s rare grass? You also enter through the greenhouse cough cough cough cough but in her case you can enter through the greenhouse. By the time we’d gone round the garden twice and I had a list of about a dozen plants to look up for availability by mail order I was trying to decide if I was utterly depressed or going to go home and rip in a new border at Third House. Lawn is only space you haven’t got round to converting to flowerbeds yet.
Her one serious failing is a near dearth of roses.^ Have I mentioned recently that I have about fifty roses . . . at the cottage? I’m only talking about the cottage. My little handkerchief garden. Yup. And despite the presence of thugs like Souvenir and Fantin—and, lately, Ghislaine di Feligonde, who is having her turn right now at taking over the universe. Bless ’em all. In times of stress and worry having your little garden boiling luxuriantly out of control is curiously soothing, like the presence of hellhounds . . . even when you’re just back from two hours at the hospital and they’re looking at you with that hopeful, We’ve been very good, so you are going to take us out now, aren’t you? stare. Yes. I am. I did. And now I am going to bed. Just in case the clinic says ‘Fine. Come in now’ at 8:30 tomorrow morning.
^But plantspersons generally consider roses beneath them.
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