It is Monday morning and I am at the end of my tether.
James is on antibiotics for a urine infection, but after five days he is too weak to get out of bed, refusing to eat and sleeping for up to 18 hours a day.
I wake him every couple of hours or so to get some fluid down him, grateful for the random impulse which prompted me to buy some adult sippy cups a few weeks ago thinking they “might come in handy one day...”
Weak as he is – and he now cannot even manage the few steps from bed to the bathroom for a flannel wash – James is still utterly determined to get up, and in the brief interludes that he is awake each day I have to sit with him, knowing that if he succeeds in standing up he will immediately fall over.
But nothing will pacify him.
And if I leave him for a moment – to pee or put a kettle on – he shouts for me constantly.
“Georgina.
“Georgina....!
“GEORGINA I NEED YOU...”
I have come to dread the sound of my own name, and I ache in every arthritic limb from the effort of constantly climbing the stairs, turning James for a daily bed bath and helping him to sit up in bed.
Over the weekend, in desperation, I put a request on the town message board asking if anyone could let me borrow a zimmer frame - adding that I will also need to have it delivered as I am unable to leave home.
And within minutes a kind stranger messages me back.
She doesn’t have a zimmer herself, but she has located one on a freegle site a few miles away and she will pick it up and deliver it within the hour.
This in itself is overwhelming, but when I open the front door I see a small boy bearing a bouquet of peonies and Sweet William standing in front of a smiling young woman with the frame.
So I did what I always do these days whenever anyone is kind to me, and burst into tears...
But by this morning, when it was clear that James was getting no better, I asked the GP for a home visit to assess him.
“I know you,” James told her as she entered the bedroom.
“Have you got our two tickets to Tokyo?”
She has not, but she does authorise a trip to hospital and as an ambulance arrives, yet again, I feel only a sense of numb relief as I watch them drive James away...
* I was so touched by ‘the kindness of strangers’ in the matter of the zimmer frame and flowers, that I mentioned it to friends on facebook, joking that “I am also at home for the reception of seafood, chocolate, dawn-gathered strawberries and gin...”
Two days later a dear friend arrives on the doorstep with a care-package of moules a la crème, picked crab, freesias and strawberries (not dawn-gathered but she had done her best. so I didn’t quibble...)
And two hours after that I receive a parcel from friends in Australia containing grapefruit gin and chocolates – and if there is anything on earth more delicious than grapefruit gin I would very much like to know what it is..
So while the Universe is listening to me for once, I would just like to ask if anyone out there can arrange to have George Clooney scrubbed and sent to my room...
Ys - a little kindness goes a veeeery long way on a bad day...
Breathe and repeat -- sometimes its all you can do
One day you will have the opportunity to make an equally grand gesture; in the mean time allow others to make theirs