After a disappointing first lesson with two fifteen year old shit-stirrers who obviously spent the summer receiving lessons in evilness in the bowels of hell, I walked into the staff kitchen and whined, I really hate my new job! to anyone who would listen. In this instance it was the nice little Iron Lady. Oh KatieF! she smiled.

Then the bus from ChavTown just missed the bus in Quaint Historic Market Town, so I had to travel all the way to maC and get a bus back out to FlatHickTown. Fourteen miles became about forty. But that’s my fault for not being able to drive.

*sigh*

Still, I just caught it today (although in my haste to get off the bus in Quaint Historic Market Town I bumbled into a rack of bus timetables and they all tumbled onto the floor) and the lovely bus driver promised he’d have a word with the other bus drivers, who all work the direct route that I get in the morning and used to get regularly in the evening.

Oh, I’m a teacher now. I feel that I was rather bullied into it (but that’s my fault for not being able to drive) and I feel completely out of my depth because a) it’s been six years since I last officially donned a Teacher’s Hat, and b) it’s not my specialist subject (although I have been ‘teaching’ it for the last six years.)

The one perky advantage I have is that it’s part-time (0.5ft), so I officially only have to be in work for three hours twice a week, three and three quarter hours another day, and one whole day. I still get my middle of the week day off. Huzzah!

Not so Huzzah! about the shite bus service in this area though.

But that’s my fault for not being able to drive. I can’t stress that enough.

*rolls eyes*

The complete lack of movement worries you too.  The noiselessness is okay as you wear earplugs (a habit from a long-ago time when he snored so loudly it was like kipping in an aeroplane engine) so any noise has to be fairly loud to make you notice it.  But he should be twitching or fidgeting, and he isn’t.  This starts to panic you, and the panic causes you to tense up making your head ache painfully.  You can’t physically move as you imagine that the noise that woke you was his dying breath.

Why aren’t you moving?

You know that you can easily prod him, but he’s only sleeping and you don’t want to wake him up just to tell him you thought he was dead.  What happens if you prod him and nothing happens?  Who is the house insured with?

Random thoughts.

You start to write a blog post in your head.  You do this a lot when you’re unable to sleep, and mostly these blog posts never meet the World Wide Web as they become forgotten amongst hazy dreams and the cold light of day.  In your ‘i wanna sleep’ state you ‘write’ sentences such as, you get up and write a semi-naked blog post and, you played with your pussy.

The latter probably lacks something … maturity?

Eventually you can lick your lips and move your legs.  Slightly later you feel a twitch.  A minute or so after that he starts to scratch. 

Phew!

You stop worrying about things like insurance, and instead you make a cup of tea, take a couple of painkillers (free from the NHS, just like the garden shed) and log onto the Internet to write a semi-naked blog post.  Later you will leave your husband at the hospital and have no idea when he’ll be back home.

Sucks to be you, eh?

Dear You,

I wrote the following many (three) years ago. It was inspired by a plethora of split-second memories which when taken individually mean nothing; put them together and add a spattering of Other Things and these split-second memories take on completely unsavoury connotations.

There’s a little girl in my head.

She makes daisy-chains which will eventually wither and die. She runs through hay-fields, screaming with delight, until she’s out of breath and it’s time to go home for tea. She plays board games with her siblings and can only dream of beating them. She likes to don long party dresses and wear her hair fancy.

She’s an extrovert, a chatterbox.

Innocent.

Beautiful.

But she’s confused. Things have happened and they don’t feel right. They feel very wrong. Things that make her have feelings she doesn’t understand, and thoughts that should be far from the mind of an eight year old.

And so the little girl in my head becomes increasingly introverted, shy, and withdrawn. She bottles her emotions and memories up

(“It’s perfectly fine to say how you’re feeling, Katie”)

until they’re so deeply buried inside that they cease to exist. And once they cease to exist she can pretend that they never happened. If they never happened then she never has to tell anybody about them. And everybody in her life can live happily, blissfully ignorant of any wrongdoing. The little girl can live happily.

There’s a little girl in my head.

She’s created a jigsaw puzzle in my mind and, through flashes of long-distant memory, she’s filling in more gaps. As more pieces fit the puzzle so the little girl is edging me nearer to the truth. I want to fight this: I don’t need to know the truth. I want to be blissfully ignorant. I don’t like jigsaw puzzles!

When the puzzle is complete, who will I turn to? Who can you turn to when the only people you trust will be the people whose hearts you break?

Sometimes I wish she’d go away and leave me alone,

the little girl in my head.

I have struggled with that little girl, to the extent that – at times – I have been convinced she was nothing but a figment of my imagination.  I have often assumed that the little girl in my head was not repressed memories, but just something I latch onto occasionally to help me fill a need (although I’m not sure what that need is … maybe an excuse for being me?)

In a moment of drunken-ness (aged 18) I blurted out to a friend that * had done things to me. I only had vague recollections of telling her and the subject was never really raised again. Likewise, during an argument with Mumsy I couldn’t bear it anymore and proclaimed, But you don’t even know what * did to me!

She told me not to be stupid, effectively putting her hands in her ears and tra-la-la-ing.  Only one other person (an ex) is aware.  I don’t talk about it, because what if I am just being stupid?

In reality I only have one recollection of * doing anything to me. But the split-second memories don’t really tie in with this recollection because in the split-second memories I am younger and the split-second memories don’t really involve anyone else; they are feelings, and sights that don’t make sense.

There are no faces and there is no *.

And then I stumbled across Your blog. I say stumbled, but I was being nosey. I didn’t really have any intention of reading it all, but I did. Perhaps Fate made me.

And You said something, ever-so briefly, something that could easily have been passed by. And I cried. And I’m crying now.

Because what if I’ve got it wrong? What if my recollection of * is based on something that * felt compelled to do by someone else? What if it was learned behaviour? What if my Monster wasn’t * but was somebody else, and when my Monster wasn’t around I chose to look for it elsewhere?

What if the * memory was actually my fault?

Sometimes I have attempted to make sense of my split-second memories, and I have wondered who my Monster was. But never … NEVER … did that person cross my mind.

Never.

Ever.

I don’t doubt You at all. But I need to know … I need to know so many things.

But mostly, I need to know if it started with me.

I have come to terms with it. I don’t know what happened, but I know something did. I don’t know how often it happened, but my split-second memories suggest many times.

I don’t know if that person is the cause of all my split-second memories, but reading that one simple sentence that You wrote in February 2009 didn’t surprise, nor shock, me.  This could only be so if I already know think he’s capable of doing something intrinsically wrong.  To recognise that my Monster might be that person would give me some sort of closure; it’s something I can accept and work with. 

I want You to know that I love You lots.

Sometimes I get ever-so slightly irked. 

(… this statement is false; I often get very irked)

In this instance I get ever-so slightly irked by those who spout forth with self-righteous indignation about the selfishness of people who don’t want to donate their organs following their death. 

(… there was thread on ihd.com, but I can’t find it now)

Once upon a time I had a real issue with organ donation.  I was adamant that when I die I didn’t want any of my organs to be used, and I certainly didn’t carry an organ donor card. 

But if you ask me why I felt that way, I can’t give you a reasonable excuse response.  I don’t think I ever had a reason … not a good one anyway, and if I did have a reason I certainly can’t remember it now, or put it into a sentence that doesn’t sound pathetic.  However, I was not selfish - I am completely sure of that. 

Organ donation is an incredibly personal choice.  The one thing we exclsuively own (usually) is our body.  We can choose to treat our body like a temple, or we can choose to neglect/harm it.  It belongs to us, and we have the right to say what happens to all the bits that make us who we are, even (or especially) upon death.  Other people may not like that, or appreciate it, but to be so judegmental and rude (calling someone selfish is rude) doesn’t make them a better person.

So, I do get irked when folk start calling other folk selfish for choosing not to donate. 

How very dare you!

The main argument seems to be well, you can’t take them with you!, which I usually associate as being said with a smug grin. 

I won’t be able to take my money with me either, but it doesn’t mean I can’t choose what happens to it after I die.

*smug grin*

A few months ago I popped online and became a registered organ donor.  I now have a card, which I carry with me in my purse at all times, and the people who need to know, know.  I am content with my decision.  It doesn’t make me selfless.

As an aside, I didn’t tick the ‘eye’ box.  I have a ‘thing’ about eyes and it’s the one part of me that I can’t bear to imagine being used.  Yes, it is partly because I’m squeamish, but I think it runs deeper than that and until I psycho-analyse myself I won’t be able to say how deep or why.  This doesn’t make me selfish.

I have tentatively put the wheels in motion to be a living donor for Blokey.  This isn’t selfless, and it isn’t heroic. 

In fact, I’d probably say the opposite; my reasons for wanting to do it are incredibly selfish. 

In an ideal world we would live in a society where we had to opt-out of organ donation, but we don’t yet live in that society and I refuse to think of someone as selfish for not choosing to pop online and become a registered donor.  I don’t even have the right to question somebody on their reasons for not doing so. 

(I suppose I might try and educate them though …)

And it makes me mad that some pompous people think they do have the right.

Bah!

]]> http://katiefinger.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=225 1 http://katiefinger.com/blog/?p=221 http://katiefinger.com/blog/?p=221#comments Sun, 11 Jul 2010 18:19:07 +0000 Katiefinger http://katiefinger.com/blog/?p=221 Dear Mummy’s Blog,

There is another cat in the house.  I think it’s a boy; it definitely smells like one!  Poo-ey!  Mummy keeps saying silly things in an effort to get me to stop hissing at him.

Isn’t he pretty? and, Don’t you want to be his friend? and, Look at how submissive he’s being …

I don’t care, Mummy’s Blog!  I just want Mummy and Daddy to myself.  I might choose to tolerate him one day, but I’m not promising anything.  He’s very young and very big and very annoying.  I didn’t ask for an annoying teenage brother so why did they bring him home?

*petulant sigh*

Love, Tabatha-Cat x

Dear Person Who Now Feeds Me Blog,

Tabatha hisses at me.  I don’t like it.  Oooh, there’s a ball of tin foil …

Love, Mog x

It’s not your alarm, I sleepily mumbled. 

He continued to try to turn his alarm off by taking the battery cover off in an attempt to remove the batteries.  I sat up.

It’s not your alarm, baby! (a bit louder this time.)

Mysteriously, my alarm chirped in three minutes later.  I thought it was his this time, and he thought it was the machine.  For a smattering of seconds I realised it must be Friday.  Why else would my alarm be going off?  Nope, I definitely watched the Big Brother eviction last night … it must be Saturday.

*sigh of relief*

So at six-thirty this morning I was crawling around in the cupboard under the stairs, with my bum in the air and some very unladylike language finding its way out of my mouth.  Yesterday we’d tidied the cupboard. 

I never need to use the manual bags of extraneal, put them towards the back.

Ha. Ha.

Blokey spent the whole of Thursday at the hospital; another day off work.  Fluid in; drain it off.  Repeat copious amounts of times.  All dandy.  The nurses scratch their heads in puzzlement and send him home with instructions to increase the amount of fluid that the machine puts in each time, from 2.2 litres to 2.5 litres.

Again, Ha. Ha.

Thursday night must have been the worst we’d had since Blokey started peritoneal dialysis.  I’m surprised the machine didn’t choke on its own buzzing.  The first two fills/dwells/drains took twice the time they should have done, which means the last two fills/dwells/drains didn’t really have time to dwell, so he couldn’t have dialysed properly. 

He rang the hospital.  They’ve finally agreed to let him borrow another machine for Monday night.  For months they’ve been saying that he obviously just isn’t cut out for PD and for months I’ve been saying maybe it’s the machine.  Oh no.  The machines are never faulty.

It probably isn’t faulty, but it’s a relief that they’re at least giving him the opportunity to rule it out.  And if it does turn out to be the machine?  Oh, angry post will follow!  If it is him then I think Blokey’ll be back on HD pretty soon. And however much I grumble about the PD I’d much rather he was happy about the way he has to keep himself alive.

Oh, and the good news?  He’s been activated on the transplant list.  Huzzah!

The last two months have been a whirlwind of psychology assignments, veritable queasiness at work (I still have a job for September; it’s not the same job though,) and kidley mayhem.

Peritoneal dialysis failed. Blokey went to hospital and had tubes removed. New tubes were inserted. Blokey went back onto PD two weeks ago. It isn’t working very well … again.

*sigh*

I have been exhausted, to the extent that I actually have to fight my body/brain in order to function normally. This is a culmination of April and lack of sleep through worrisomeness about everything. The exhaustion seems to have subsided this weekend, although I don’t hold out much hope if the PD continues to cause Blokey troubled nights; he grumbles, I wake. Tsk.

Still, I have my Wii. It tells me I lost 5lb in a week. I know this to be a lie (at least, WeightWatchers don’t agree with Wii) but it makes me happy and so Wii can live cosily in the lounge.

Does anybody needs any boxes? I am the Cardboard Queen … (gah! bloody home dialysis!)

I’ve been watching the tellybox a lot recently. Ashes to Ashes is my (nearly) all-time favourite tellybox show and I suspect it’s going to have a far better/poignant/tissue-needing ending than Lost, which is also my (nearly) all-time favourite tellybox show. As for my (absolute) all-time favourite tellybox show, I really really really want to bop Roxy over the head with her bank balance.

We lost three fish from our aquarium. One week they were there, the following week they’d disappeared. Either the enormous Molly ate them, or they were abducted by alien fish. I’m hedging my bets on the latter, simply because it sounds more exciting. We replaced them with six Tetras which sparkle beautifully in the light. I’m just waiting for the enormous Molly to munch on them …

So, here’s to the next two months … *raises glass of cheap French plonk*

Morale?

It was already low, but this just makes it lower.

There may (or may not; we are still in the consultation period and so things might change) have to be redundancies, but I get the impression they’re hoping enough staff leave naturally and the jobs can be shared amongst those who remain. I have to make a decision; do I want to stay if it means more hours at a decreased level (and therefore a decreased wage, although my current wage may be frozen, perhaps)? There us no guarantee I would get the position anyways, although by all reckoning, the competition won’t be too taxing.

Or do I feel that the time is right to move on …

Maybe, if the right position is advertised.

Everybody is huddling in corners, whispering within their little cliques. There will no doubt be battles when the teachers all decide to go for the same position. And the cleaners! Bless them! I love our cleaners to bits. They’re both about one hundred years old (perfect for not quite wanting to clean around the computers in case they break them) with failing eyesight (great for spotting those elusive cobwebs) and minds that are best left in the gutter.

They’re cutting our hours, grumbled Naughty Nan.
We won’t have time to hoover every room, moaned Irish Eyes. And you know what the boss is like, she continued shaking her head in despair.

To top it all off, the kids are (all) on Mephedrone, cOs iTz LeGaL, innit. Idiots.

At night my bedroom makes strange sounds. It whirs and buzzes, gloops and schniffles, and bomps and sloshes. Occasionally it beeps too.

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Poor Tabatha-Cat must be wondering why we prefer having a machine in our room to having her in there. I miss sleeping with her curled around my head, but she’d only clambour over the Peritoneal Dialysis machine, spreading her fur and germs around.

*sad face*

We have no name for the machine. It worked for two nights, then stopped working. Blokey went back on haemodialysis for two sessions. Now he’s back on PD (since Sunday night) and [*fingers crossed*] it appears to be working swimmingly.

*touches wood, quickly*

It might stop working again because his catheter may be in the wrong position.

Still, at least he’s alive. When people ask me how he is I quite often say, ‘Well, he’s still alive!’. It throws them, and I find that amusing. I am a queen b(ee) with an itch. There are so many people who really don’t understand that if he wasn’t having dialysis he would probably have about ten days to live. And that’s a good estimate.

*sigh*

You wouldn’t believe it but I am looking on the bright side. Really. Even though I loathe Monty and all things Python …

I imagine he was therefore quite shocked when I didn’t kick up a fuss at the state the house was in when I arrived home from Prague.

Prague was wonderful. It always is wonderful. This was my sixth trip to the Czech Republic and the first proper holiday I’ve had since our honeymoon. It was snowy and murky, but Mumsy and I walked lots, didn’t argue (I may have snapped at her once), and enjoyed seeing the sights through eyes that have seen the sights so many times already.

I first went to Czechoslovakia (as it was back then) in 1992, and I find it sad that it’s changed so much. There were little old ladies who demanded money in return for two sheets of loo paper and the opportunity of using their exceptionally clean toilets. McDonald’s was just fantasy. Tesco hadn’t yet taken over the world. Prague wasn’t cramped full of little tourist shops selling meaningless gimmicky trinkets. There weren’t copious amounts of non-Czech folk roaming the streets. Women screamed at you in a foreign language if you didn’t stand up for them on the tram (that was fun!).

But the buildings aren’t grey anymore; they’re now beautiful pastel shades. And if you look hard enough you can find hidden cafes and local shops which are real gems. And no matter how many times I go back I can still find something new to see. And I lovelovelove riding the trams/metro.

Plus, I got to meet my three year-old niece, Valerie. She is amazingly delightful and looks very much like her daddy – my brother – albeit with blonde locks and blue eyes. My other niece, Emily, is so grow’d up now! Seven years old and highly intelligent, with super artistic sense. I love them to pieces (even if they find it easy to understand me, but difficult to form English sentences!) …

I didn’t even cry on the plane. Nope, I didn’t. Not even a little bit. I did hold Mumsy’s hand very tightly and refused to stop whispering, We’re not going to fall, we’re not going to fall, we’re not going to fall … until the plane was level in the sky, but I loved being high above the clouds. I find that very magical. If there was some way of getting above the clouds which didn’t have the same sensation as taking-off does then I would probably love flying as much as the person who most loves flying in the whole wide world.

So, I came back home and the house was a tip. But I couldn’t be angry because my husband is ill and the house needs to be a mess in order to accomodate his dialysis supplies, which means he won’t have to be dependant on the nurses at dialysis anymore; instead of being hooked up to a blood-cleansing machine at the hospital for four hours three times a week, he can now be hooked up to a belly-dwelling machine for eight hours every single night in the privacy of our own home. That’s as long as he takes to Peritoneal Dialysis, obviously.

In good news, we now have a shed (thank you NHS) to store everything in. In less good news, I think it might be a tad too small for a whole months supplies.

Tsk.

Dear Bus Company

You’ve changed the bus timetables/routes. This makes me very bluddy angry. Thanks a bunch.

Fooking Idiots.

*screams*

Yours sincerely,