Two legs good

Well, the Tiresome Thing has happened.

My sore toe has got an infection in it and I have been obliged to seek medical advice.

Obviously I have already sought medical advice, being Google, about three times a day, and from my sister the doctor, for as long as it took to ruin her lunch break the other day. 

Twice now I have been woken in the night by a dismal throbbing. This was not helped by having accidentally bashed the poor thing against the pedals in the taxi during an emergency stop last night. This happened when some clown pulled out from the parking space next to the laundrette without looking to see if there was a taxi already occupying the piece of road to which they aspired to be admitted.

I did not bear him any malice, and no harm was done, but the experience left me slightly nauseated.

Anyway, it has become a Barbie-pink hue, and is leaking a rather unappetising yellow dribble from all around the nail. This is making an irritatingly sticky patch in my flip-flops, and so this morning I took myself off to visit the doctor.

She did not stick hot needles in it or anything unpleasant, although I did explain to her that this treatment option was not on the table in any case. She merely looked at it and said that we needed to clear it up before it spread up my leg and she was obliged to cut my leg off. I do not think she does that bit herself. I think she telephones another doctor for that part of the procedure.

Anyway we were in agreement that two legs, in this case, are better than one, particularly since shoe manufacturers do not offer any kind of discount so it would not even be a handy economy, and she prescribed me some antibiotics which come in the sort of size tablets that you could imagine being used as suppositories for a horse, and which are truly ghastly.

I do not like antibiotics, they give me the most shocking indigestion, and the last lot, some time ago, would not stay in my stomach for long enough for me to imagine that they had been any help at all, and I had to resign myself to either getting better on my own or dying.

As it happened I got better.

In order to forestall that undoubted nuisance, the doctor explained, I should not eat anything for two hours before, and two hours after, taking the tablets. I have got to take them four times a day, which does not leave very much of a window for chocolate buttons in between drugging myself, and I was so hungry by the time I was allowed to eat my breakfast, being two hours after getting home from the chemist, that I gave myself indigestion anyway.

I have had the most horrible nausea ever since, and am consoling myself with the reflection that I might even have become thinner by the time I have finished the packet. There are dozens of the things, I have got to take them for a whole week.

Still, I am vaguely attracted by the idea of becoming an unexpected size smaller, as well as not having a bright pink throbbing toe, obviously, and so I shall persevere.

In other news, Ritalin Boy has departed, off to visit his Other Grandma and his cousins, she seems to have acquired a collection of them this week. I would like to say that I shall miss him, although in truth I have barely noticed that he is here. He has been entirely occupied playing computer games with Oliver, in between occasional pizzas and hot dogs and ice lollies. I am no longer sure what you are supposed to feed modern children and so have solved the problem by just giving him what he likes, on the principle that zero waste is good for the planet and also for Rosie, who has eaten so many leftovers lately that she is becoming distinctly barrel-shaped.

Tomorrow I will put clean sheets on his bed, because in another few days Lucy will be in it.

It is all happening here.

PS. Still dithering about Cambridge. Mark is urging recklessness.