too many TVs

Some days, everything seems to happen at once. Today we got the house cleaned by three enthusiastic cleaners in time for Christmas (we hadn’t really cleaned for a couple of months, so it was worth getting someone in). The health visitor also turned up and listened sympathetically to our stories of hospital transfers. She took plenty of notes, but I don’t think she’s actually going to do anything. I wonder what her actual brief is – I mean what is she supposed to be doing beyond finding out if Lisa’s depressed – and what would she do if Lisa was depressed?

We also got our old TV taken away by someone who asked what was wrong with it only after he’d thrown it in the crushing machine at the back of the rubbish truck. And we got our new one delivered. More accurately, we got two new ones delivered. Two identical 32 inch widescreen TVs. No idea why they’ve sent us two. We checked the invoice and it was for one. The delivery man said he couldn’t deliver just one because his note had two on it, and the only solution appears to be for us to keep both until the company concerned works out what they’ve done.

I have a feeling that somewhere along the line this is going to turn out to be our fault. Because nobody else is able to take responsibility. Still, the funniest delivery was yet to come.

George's month's supply of milk arrived. 400 bottles of high fat formula milk. along side of which we were given two large brown boxes. When we opened these we discovered we'd been sent not one, not two but seventy two spare feeding tubes - the same kind that has caused us so much grief in the last two weeks and which George ripped out on Saturday.

Each one lasts for 6 weeks!


I had a dream
I had a dream last night that I was going in for heart surgery. There were two surgeons. One was a cheery fellow who made light of the whole thing and didn’t want me to worry about what was a ‘routine’ piece of surgery. The other was dismissive and sarcastic – leaving me with the distinct impression that if I died on the operating table – and I might well do – that it was my own damn fault for having a congenital heart defect.

The cheery surgeon wanted to party through the night the evening before the operation. The other one – who seemed to live one floor above in the same house – insisted that he needed a quiet night’s sleep in order to do his work.

For some reason it was my job to keep both of them happy and stop them from fighting. Nobody seemed concerned as to whether I was up to this job – being on the eve of major emergency surgery and all – and I just had to do my best to keep the music turned down…

Luckily, George woke me up at 3:30am before the surgery (which I was required to watch for some reason) got too far on. I’m quite pleased he did decide he wanted feeding because the operation seemed to me to be a lot more like an autopsy than a treatment…

Strange thing is, I think the two surgeons were both the doctor we met yesterday. Thinking about it, there is a duality about the advice we’re being given – on one hand we’re being reassured that everything’s fine by cheery faced doctors . On the other, terms like “heart failure” and “emergency surgery” are being tossed around and we’re having to snatch at clues to when the operation is to be (and in some cases what the correct treatment is).