by Marie Browne
“Erm no.”
“Coughing?”
“No.”
“Sneezing?”
“No.” I shrugged. “I just feel really tired, I ache all over, I feel as though I’m looking up at the world through water and I have this sort of fizzing sensation in my chest and neck. I don’t have a temperature. Sam had taken great delight in checking this earlier, he loves gadgets and the ear thermometer definitely classed as a thing to be played with.
Geoff shook his head. “Time to go to the quack’s, maybe?”
“Probably not.” I really hate going to the doctor’s, I always feel such a fraud. Seventy per cent of my ailments all seem to disappear as soon as I walk through the door and it’s almost guaranteed that two or three days after any visit I end up with some sort of cold or sickness bug. “Let me sleep on it and we’ll just see how I am in the morning, a good night’s sleep and it will probably all just go away.”
I slept for twelve hours that night and even Mortimer trampling me in an effort to get into the bed didn’t wake me up. Geoff told me the next day that he’d woken up to find Mort lying on my chest and staring intently into my face. I was actually quite glad I hadn’t woken up and seen that, I’d have probably had a heart attack.
I was a little confused when I woke up the next morning and, thinking over the day before, ran through that sort of body check some people do. Arms and legs all in working order? Check. Headache? No. Ha I was right, I was fine.
I was reminded that I’d avoided food the previous day by a good deep rumble from a rather sad and empty stomach. Feeling the need for tea I jumped out of bed intending to head for the kettle.
As soon as I gained my feet the world tilted sideways. It was an odd sensation, I felt as though someone had made one of my legs shorter than the other and staggering around like a haggis on a flat surface I bounced, first off the bed, then off the wall, I hit my forehead on the wet window and ended up sitting back on the bed. Looking up I could see where my forehead had made a neat oval mark in the condensation.
I ran through my internal checks again. Well this was very odd, there really didn’t seem to be anything wrong at all. Deciding that I must have just tripped I got to my feet again. I actually managed to take two whole steps before the world tilted once more and I found myself face down on the kitchen floor.
The crash woke Geoff and Mortimer. The dog jumped off the bed and stood over me, his ears pricked and making soft growly noises in the back of his throat, for once he didn’t trample me but he did keep poking me as he gently snuffled around my neck. I rolled over on to my back and, grabbing his collar managed to get myself into a sitting position. Sometimes it’s useful to have a dog that has the shape and consistency of a sturdy log.
“Marie?” Geoff hopped over the end of the bed and helped me back to my feet. I managed to stand up and then sagged again. “Whoa!” he said as I slithered down his leg and ended up sitting on the floor again. “What’s the matter?”
I giggled. I really couldn’t help myself. I felt as though I’d had a bottle of vodka for breakfast. “I can’t stand up,” I said.
“Hmm.” Geoff studied me for a moment. “Let’s get you off the floor shall we?”
I nodded happily. I wasn’t really worried by all this but all the tilting and turning was beginning to make me feel a little sick and I had a new headache brewing behind my left eye.
I grabbed the end of the bed and, with Geoff’s help, managed to hoist myself back onto the bed. As soon as I was flat again everything settled down.
“I think I’m going to take the day off today,” Geoff picked up his phone. “We really need to get you to the doctor’s. We’ll drop Sam off at school on the way.”
The car journey wasn’t pleasant and, by the time we arrived at the surgery, all I wanted to do was lie down again. The doctor was a little confused and you know there’s likely to be trouble when they slip out for a moment and come back with someone older and wiser.
They walked me around the office, made me do odd exercises with my fingers, shone lights into my eyes, and made me look in all directions, all the time talking in hushed tones and ticking things off on a sheet. Eventually the older doctor sat down in front of me and gave me a big bright smile.
Uh oh, I thought, doctors rarely smile unless they have bad news. The rule of thumb goes: the bigger the smile the more awful the news.
“Now then, Marie,” he said.
Oh yes. This was definitely not looking good.
“We need to make some telephone calls and we’re going to try to get you up to the hospital for an MRI. Nothing to worry about but we just need to make sure that there’s nothing sinister going on.” He gave me another big smile.
I leant back in the chair. It was a lot easier than trying to hold myself upright. “You think I’ve got a brain tumour, don’t you?” I said. I’d worked at the hospital for long enough that I knew why they were worried.
The smile fell away and he nodded. “It’s a possibility,” he said. “At the very least we need a neurologist to check you over.”
Well, this on top of everything else that was going on was just ducky. “Are you sure it’s not just an inner ear thing or stress? We do have some problems at the moment.”
“Well that’s what we want to find out. What do you do for a job?”
“I’m a Physiotherapy Assistant up at Addenbrookes,” I said.
“Which ward?” He pulled a pad of paper across the desk and began ticking things off .
I went blank, I really couldn’t remember which ward I worked in. “Hip replacements and the elderly that have fallen over.” I sounded like a confused ten year old.
He scribbled a signature on a piece of paper and handed it to me. “Well with you staggering around like that, I think the patients would have to hold you up don’t you think? Anyway, you can’t drive until you’ve been cleared so, whatever the outcome, this will sign you off for at least two weeks.”
Oh, well that was an unexpected bonus. But then the reality crashed down. I couldn’t drive? How on earth was I supposed to get Sam to school? There certainly wasn’t any public transport where we were. I couldn’t do the shopping, I wouldn’t be able to do any washing. I looked at Geoff for support, living where we did this was going to cause some real problems for us.
“Take a seat in the waiting room and we’ll phone the hospital, we’ll pull some strings and see if we can get you seen immediately.” The doctor gave me another encouraging smile and patted me on the knee.
Geoff and a very capable nurse helped me stagger out to where I could sit in comfort. I didn’t feel giggly any more and, sitting out in the waiting room I indulged in a full-on panic attack. Luckily Geoff was there to sort it all out. As I started on my usual long line of ‘what ifs’ he held up a hand and stopped me mid-sentence. “Facts first, decisions and worries afterward,” he said.
I nodded but the ‘what ifs’ hadn’t gone away. I could feel them, lurking, just beyond my thin veneer of calm.
About twenty minutes later the doctor re-appeared. He looked harassed and began apologising from about ten feet away. “I’m so sorry,” he said.
Geoff and I looked up at him. I quashed the very real need to say “What’s up, doc?” I could feel slightly hysterical giggling bubbling just below my throat, I either needed to laugh or scream.
“They are completely booked solid, there’s absolutely no way they can fit you in for an MRI until Friday,” he said.
Actually, that made me feel a lot better; I’m still not sure why.
He handed me a card with a name, a room number, and an appointment time written on it and, after apologising again, scuttled away.
Back at the boat Geoff settled me onto the sofa, he made me a cup of tea and then, making sure I was mostly upright he wandered off to carry on sorting out the electrics. He wanted to stay and keep me company but I was fairly sure I didn’t want any so I gently sent him off to his engine room.
After I’d drunk
my tea, I hauled myself to my feet and made my unsteady way down the boat toward the computer. I kept giggling, my hilarity had very little to do with genuine humour and much more to do with brewing hysteria. The physical feeling was very similar to that time we’d gone to France on the ferry. The sea had been rather dynamic that day and we’d found out, rather explosively that I suffered from sea sickness. Looking out of the window at the flat water in which Minerva quietly wallowed, there wasn’t any way I could fool myself that this was the fault of any outside activity.
Turning on the laptop I proceeded to search out everything I could about my symptoms. The doctors were wrong, I was sure of it. They were just being careful; I didn’t have time to indulge in something so potentially serious as a tumour. Life really couldn’t be that unfair.
Life can be that unfair, but, luckily for all of us, mine wasn’t. Over the next four days the nausea and the weaving subsided and, by the time I was due at the hospital, the symptoms had all but faded away. As usual I was going to have to see a doctor and feel a complete fraud.
The neurologist was stick-thin and severe-looking, quite terrifying. If I hadn’t been so sure I was fine he would have had me quaking in my boots. However, I was so happy that everything was mostly back to normal I would have faced down Giant Haystacks himself. My protestations of severe good health cut no mustard with the dour little man at all. He listened patiently to all I had to say and then waved me into a chair. It took another hour to run through all the tests and, when he had finished, he finally cracked a smile. It was actually more of a twitch than a smile, lasting only a fleeting second before he returned to his obviously normal blank expression.
“You seem fine, a little wobbly but it seemed to have been more of an inner ear problem than anything else,” he said.
“A little wobbly?” I’d thought that the tests would have shown that I was back in perfect health.
He nodded. “There’s that one test with your left hand that obviously gives you trouble.”
I knew the one he was talking about. You hold out your right hand, palm up and flat. You then place the palm of your left hand ninety degrees palm to palm on top of the right. Turning your left hand over, you then place the back of your hand against the palm of your right and then you alternate, getting faster and faster, swapping from back to front. Almost like buttering bread. I can bat my right hand back and forth across my left but I seem to have a lot of trouble doing it the other way around.
He stared at me for a moment. “But it’s not a problem really.” He had a laconic, toneless way of speaking. “A lot of people are less dextrous with one hand.”
I decided to push the issue. “So I don’t have a brain tumour?”
He studied me further, his expression one of extreme sadness. I felt as though I was a pet dog that was going to have to be put down. “Well I would never say that someone definitely didn’t have that sort of an issue,” he said. “But I would say that its more likely than not that you don’t.”
I worked my way through all the double negatives and vagaries in that sentence. “So I might?”
“Every single one of us ‘might’,” he gave a glum shrug as though it was inevitable that every member of the population harboured a lurking, time-delayed parasite deep within our psyche. “But you don’t show any signs of having one, but there might be one, hidden away somewhere.”
Well, that was cheerful. “Do you think I need to go for this MRI scan?”
He looked disconsolately down at his desk and, after a deep sigh, slowly shook his head. “You can if you want to,” he said. “But sometimes it shows things that then need to be investigated that then just turn out to be nothing.”
Good grief, this man answered questions like a politician. “If you were me, would you go for a scan?” This was almost beginning to seem like some sort of game. Get a straight answer … ten points.
The neurologist shook his head slowly and gave a little shrug. He looked completely dejected. “Probably not,” he said.
I subsided. That was obviously the best I was going to get. I thanked him for his time and, after grabbing my coat, stood up. As I headed for the door a thought occurred to me. “So, I can drive now?” I was completely fed up with having no transport, I’d been bouncing off the walls all week.
He nodded. “But it’s better if you don’t.”
I was confused by the difference between his body language and what he’d actually said.
“Why?”
“Cars are dangerous.” He sighed and placing the top back on his pen he placed it slowly and carefully back into the red plastic stationery tidy that sat on his desk. “Those things really will kill you.”
I was very confused. “But legally I’m OK to drive?”
He nodded again. “If you must.”
What? Just … What?
Back at home I finally relaxed and immediately started thinking about our looming move. There’s a difference between being sure in your own mind that there is nothing wrong with you and having a medical professional, however morose, confirm your suspicions. Now that the immediate problem of possible brain surgery was removed I could concentrate on more pressing issues. With a big sigh I called the local school and made arrangements to visit with Sam. I couldn’t ignore the facts any longer; changes were going to have to be made.
When Geoff came home that evening I gave him the good news and after a celebratory packet of biscuits he also turned his mind to our next problem. “So,” he said, “what on earth are we going to do between being chucked out of here and being able to get through Denver and out to our new mooring?”
I had no answers for him. Any visitor mooring that was likely to be able to accommodate us was going to make parking the cars very difficult. There was no way that Geoff could empty his van of all the tools and bits and bobs he carried around. If he left the van parked overnight in some remote spot and left everything in it we could almost guarantee that it would be battered and empty by first light.
November was fast running out and with the weather being so very foul it was looking as though we couldn’t get anywhere even if we wanted to. Floods covered East Anglia and pretty much every other part of England. Those boaters that had managed to find themselves moorings at Huntingdon and beyond found themselves stuck around Earith. Rivers broke their banks and the surrounding fields began to look like huge pools. Roads were closed, diversions were set in place and still the rain fell in an almost continual stream.
Feelings were running very high about the weather. Walking through Ely one afternoon I stood behind an elderly gentleman while waiting to cross the road at a pedestrian crossing. A car, obviously moving a little faster than it should, hit a puddle and covered the gentleman in muddy water. He spluttered in massive indignation and stamped his feet to shake the water from his raincoat. Turning to me his mouth moved but no sound came out, he was obviously beyond angry. Eventually he managed to get himself under control. Pulling himself up to his full height he sniffed once and settled his hat more firmly on his head. He studied me for a moment and then nodded and leant forward to speak.
I held my breath and wondered what on earth he was going to say. I hoped he didn’t think it was my fault he’d been soaked, I took a step back.
He stared at me, eye to eye and then shook his head. “Drought my arse,” he said. He swallowed convulsively for a moment and then nodded as though we were privy to some sort of government conspiracy. He raised his finger and shook it at the sky, when he spoke again his voice rose in a shout. “Drought my sodding ARSE.”
At this point the lights changed and, at the frenzied beeping from the crossing machine, he whirled and stamped away through the puddles. I’d hovered about and let the lights change back to red. I felt that one more soaking might unhinge him completely and I really didn’t want to be behind him when he exploded.
The river running past our boat, wind-whipped into white horses, washed boats, trees, and other flotsam past at a breathless pace. Nobody i
n their right mind wanted to go out in that. Even if you could battle the side winds long enough to get mid-stream, there was no way you had any real chance of getting where you wanted to go. Most people only went out if they were heading in the same direction as the river. I just hoped that they didn’t want to stop or were happy to just run into the bank because trying to pull in gently was just going to be an exercise in futility.
Most of the boaters viewed the conditions with a certain amount of trepidation but we knew that there was to be no stay of execution. Those that had dared to ask had been met with very terse and negative replies. Even Geoff, normally gentle and good humoured, had become quite militant about the whole thing. “I don’t care what she does.” He stared out of the window and waved as another intrepid boater swished past at a rate of knots. “There’s no way we’re taking Minerva out in this, especially if we’re going to have to tow Charlie’s boat. We wouldn’t even make it to the next moorings.”
My heart sank, I’d completely forgotten the other boat. Dragging that was going to put some serious strain on Minerva’s vintage engine.
One morning in late November we finally woke to silence and for a moment couldn’t work out what had happened. Geoff cautiously peered out of the window. Grey, quiet, and dry, the world stared back at him. “It’s actually stopped raining.” He sounded surprised. “I need to make a phone call.”
I nodded, handed him my phone and watched as he wandered off up the bank with it. Eventually the conversation finished and he trudged back down to the boat. He shuddered as the warmth from the fire met him as he came through the door. The wind may have died down and the rain may have stopped but the temperature was dropping rapidly.
“What was all that about?” I asked.
“I think I may have found a temporary solution,” he said. “Grab your coat, we need to go and look at a mooring.”
We finally found the moorings after about half an hour of exploring the country roads beyond Littleport. Pulling into an area that was part car park, part boat park, and what appeared to be a large outdoor workshop we searched for the owner. Eventually a tall, thin man, in a check flannel shirt and black woolly hat appeared from behind what appeared to be an old railway carriage. I shivered on his behalf, he didn’t appear to have nearly enough clothes on for the weather.