Categories: uncategorized
Date: 23 October 2005 17:43:49
Well, today's been just lovely - just how a family Sunday should be, apart from me and the boys missing church this morning. Dad managed to go, though - much to everyone's surprise. (I missed in order to get him there, and to catch up on some missed sleep from yesterday, though my planned soak in the bath was interrupted by one sister phoning and my breakfast by the other - not begrudged for a minute, but a bit of a spanner in the works for my planned lazy morning!!!)
So what has today contained, apart from cooking meals and loading dishwashers of course. Well, it's contained singing round the piano (great fun) and both boys practising their Christmas carols for the concert at the end of the year. It contained breaking open Tiddles' birthday present which was a game of "Quick Chess", introducing the boys to playing chess by breaking it down into a series of much smaller and quicker games with a limited number of pieces. We mastered Power Pawns and King's Conquest with great fun discussing tactics and laughing at Smudgelet when he totally messed up :D Then this afternoon, Smudgelet feeling quite washed out and needing to go to bed for a couple of hours, Tiddles and Dad and I got the cards out and played rummy and sevens for two hours of unmitigated fun. It was great, and Dad was able to enjoy it as much as the rest of us.. until I beat him, of course :D
Now Tiddles and Dad are having tea together and getting ready for me to run them to church for the evening service while Smudgelet nurses his cough in a nice steamy bath.
A contrast to yesterday's frightener. My brother was over just for four hours, down from Scotland for work reasons, and he offered (OK, so he was volunteered!) to buy us all lunch at the local pub. Should have been a nice afternoon out before running him back to the ferry. But as it was, he stayed all afternoon. The reason? Dad was taken ill in the pub and collapsed, needing an ambulance to rush him into hospital. It was so indescribably scary - I thought we were losing him. One minute he was fine, apart from not really fancying his meal - the next he was taken with a seizure which looked for all the world like a stroke. The kids were screaming and I could do nothing to comfort them because, had I moved away from Dad, he'd have fallen to the floor from his chair (and of course we're having to avoid any risk of him breaking a bone). Thank God my brother was there to phone the ambulance and to see to the boys while I cared for our father and accompanied him in the ambulance to the hospital. I aged in moments - partly through the shock of seeing him in such an incapacitated state and partly through the fact that the paramedic who arrived to administer oxygen and get him ready for the ambulance had been in my class when he was nine!!!
Possibly a mini-stroke, possibly something else (goodness knows what), but at least the oxygen did the trick in bringing him round and within minutes of arriving in hospital he was flirting merrily with the female doctor, informing her that he had a lot of trouble with his heart... because he kept losing it to lovely female medical staff and getting into trouble for it!
Scary now, though, to be on tenterhooks waiting for it to happen again (as well it might) - especially for my poor little ones who couldn't sleep last night for fear that Grandad would be taken ill in the night and unable to call for help.