2006-10-21
Did I say her life is settling down? What a clot!Wednesday night Jo and Dave woke to the sound of a crash in the house. Dave’s instinct apparently was that it was a burglar - they did have someone break a window by the door once (the Police theory was that whoever it was only wanted to grab any car keys that might be in reach, not come in). Jo, naturally thought it was one of her boys walking in their sleep and falling on the stairs, But it turned out to be Jo’s ‘mother’ collapsed in the bathroom. They couldn’t get her to come round despite Dave slapping her round the face, so the paramedics were called and Jo found herself at 4 a.m. chasing an ambulance through the town, shocked as you would be and fearing that she’d just lost her remaining ‘parent’. And, as she has found before, deep shock seems to bring on a form of narcolepsy and bizarrely she was struggling to keep awake as she drove (Dave stayed home with the kids of course).
It turned out OK-ish. Mother was let out of hospital after only six hours, the diagnosis being unexplained sudden drop in blood pressure. Apparently she’s had these black-outs before in her own home and not thought to do anything about it. Jo phoned to say she wouldn’t be in at work in the morning, until her sister could get there to over-see the patient. In the office, with so many ears, I couldn’t be the me she needed, so I went out onto the street and called her again, walking around. She appreciated that: ‘your voice makes it all feel liveable…just needed something normal to calm me down.’ She came in during the afternoon and when eventually left alone we were able to talk more and eventually risk the reassuring hug and kiss, hopefully out of sight of security cameras. I’m her only friend.
And Friday she went for her first plasma transfusion and it was every bit as bad as she’d feared, plus an aspect she hadn’t considered. She is having these transfusions because she’s not producing sufficient antigens of her own - which means there’s a whole lot of stuff swimming around in her blood stream that hasn’t been attacked for ages, and then suddenly she has the means to fight them off with the result that she had all of the normal symptoms of that process - fever, raging temperature, a drop in blood pressure of her own. The clinic told her the reaction was completely normal - what’s supposed to happen in fact - and each time she goes the reaction will get less. No gain without pain I guess, but completely zonked.
This was another call to me at the office-with-flapping-ears, this time I could get away with sounding sympathetic, and I relayed it all to the others. But she did sound really bad and slipped into the conversation ‘I’ll be alone until about 5, when Dave gets back with the boys’. I left it a little while (phone rang again, people came to talk to me…) and then went out into the street to call her again.
Mobile: no answer, home phone: no answer.
And I’m worrying. She probably just went to sleep. That’s what I should think isn’t it?