I am ashamed to tell you that I have not had a very busy day.
It was only lunchtime, and I had hardly done anything much at all, but I was suddenly overwhelmed with sleepiness, and went back to bed.
I did not quite intend for this to happen, but it did, although it might be some mitigation to tell you that I felt lots better afterwards.
I had been to visit the doctor in the morning. This was to discuss the sore shoulder that has been troubling me, and which seemed to have added a blistering headache and unattractively pink, half-closed eye to its problems.
The doctor was sympathetic and took my blood pressure, which she explained was unusually high. Since I usually have low blood pressure, this surprised both of us. She made a savage hole in my arm, which she drained of practically all the blood that had been in it, and told me that the results would come back this afternoon. She explained what she thought the problem might be, and said that the blood tests would tell us.
I can’t remember now much of what she said the problem might be, except that when I looked it up on the mighty Internet later, I was so horrified by the cure that I decided I would prefer to keep the problem, even with the pain. The drug prescribed for this condition, which is some Latin form of arthritis, has side effects of severe depression, although you are supposed to call your doctor if you actually decide to kill yourself, weight gain, indigestion, insomnia and smelly sweating. The NHS website assures you that they can offer you help with the hallucinations, and that the fat round face you might get will probably go away if you take some other medicine to fix it, although the side effects for that might be distressing as well.
There are worse things than a headache, a sore eye and an aching shoulder, which I think are just normal side effects of getting old, and I thought I would stick with the painkillers.
I took my own blood pressure again at home, which was still stupefyingly high, and crawled into bed, where I instantly fell asleep. When I woke up I tried it again, because obviously nothing is as interesting as thinking there might be something peculiar the matter with you, but by now my blood pressure had become so low that I was quite surprised that I could actually stand up and breathe.
I looked this up on the mighty Internet, which told me that fluctuating blood pressure can leave you aching and tired and is a symptom of being stressed.
The doctor did not get round to calling me back with the blood test results, so I self-diagnosed as being far too stressed for my own good, and telephoned Mark to tell him so.
Mark laughed and said that it would be very nice if I stopped getting myself in a tizz about things, but he was not going to hold his breath in anticipation.
He added that I do not have anything really to be worried about, and that really it would be nice if I could just get on with having a tranquil untroubled life.
I took a large handful of painkilling drugs there and then, and we had some cream that the vet had given us for the dog’s sore eye, so I filled my eye up with that. This, I might add, worked brilliantly, and it did not take long before I felt rather considerably better.
I did the shopping and faffed about with laundry and made Mark some dinner, and thought that perhaps he was right.
Hence I have decided that instead of setting off for Scotland in the middle of the night after work on Sunday we are going to forget about work and just leave in the morning when we get up.
We will just amble around in tranquil contentment instead of getting worked up.
Also I bought myself some chocolate buttons. Life is too short to be stressed about the side effect of being fat.
