BASKETTCASE

We have both had colds this week so haven't felt much like doing house-clearance.  However, yesterday I spent the afternoon in Joe's old room which we have been using as a store for bed-linen, towels, sewing stuff, suitcases and all my old medical books.  I have finally disposed of my old lecture notes from med school.  I was very impressed by how much I must once have known, but enormously relieved to realise no-one is ever going to expect that of me again.  The text books will have to be subjected to Dave's electric saw and his pot-bellied stove in the workshop.  They are mostly out of date, but not enough to be historical.  It feels like getting rid of the basis of my adult life, but I will be glad when it is done.  I loved my work as a doctor, but I am glad to have been relieved of the future humiliation of knowing I am doing it badly.

Dave is gradually getting to grips with the new shower.  We have ordered the tiles from Topps, and some for the kitchen too.  I would really like to get the kitchen done before the family come because it is the centre of the house and will be difficult to do once we are all living here.  In the shower the floor is now repaired but the wall of the bathroom needs some attention because we decided to remove the bit of wall above the door of the shower.  It would have been an anomaly as the entrance will now be a foot further out into the room.  Needless to say a bit of bathroom wall came away with the unwanted bit, so it now looks like a complete decoration job.

Little Joe is having really bad nights with nightmares and not wanting to sleep.  Dom and Mary-Ann are getting exhausted, and Viv and Roy have had the same problem for the two Saturday nights they have stayed over to babysit.  It is hard to say whether he has picked up on the forthcoming changes, even though he hasn't been told yet, or whether it is something at school unsettling him or even the TV at the after school club.  He started off saying the nightmares were about Baddies, but now says he just doesn't want to go to sleep.

I still haven't got a very clear idea how to make his cabin bunk into a space-ship.  I am hoping once I have the room cleared it will all come to me in a flash.  Is space travel conducive to peaceful nights, I ask myself.

I have an appointment with a surgeon next Monday, rather sooner than I expected.  I assume it is just the routine follow-up.  I hope I might have the opportunity to ask about the expected side-effects and different function following colectomy.  I suppose they have thought I should know all the answers to that, but even if I did it is not the same as living with it.  I suppose I am getting used to it, but having to go after every meal makes you think twice about a day out or even an evening meal.  And I am rarely completely comfortable.