Previously, on The Spike: I fell over on the ice and bruised my hip/thigh area and my knee.
A few days later I accidentally nutted a wooden beam in my house in Gloucestershire and nearly broke my nose. (Serves me right for having a country house! Yes, okay. I agree.) I felt my teeth rattle in my head as the bone struck the beam. I was mildly concussed for 24 hours. I cried AGAIN. I have got a hell of a smash across the bridge of my nose and a burgeoning black eye. My left eye won’t stop twitching but I don’t know if it is related.
This is all on top of a horrifying event six weeks ago when a large blood clot was discovered in a vein in my sort of left armpit area. I haven’t mentioned it up until now because I didn’t know whether or not it was going to kill me.
But the headline now is: BLOOD CLOT WILL NOT KILL WRITER - as long as I keep taking my blood thinners. There is a 1% chance that the whole clot will suddenly dislodge and cause a pulmonary embolism but the vascular surgeon said, “Don’t think it will. You’re not going to die. At least, not from this - ha ha ha!”
(People say, “How did you know you had the clot?” and I say “Because my left arm swelled up like a balloon. I was like a fiddler crab.” It was very obvious that there was something wrong.)
I’m actually okay with all of this now. I’m not in any pain or discomfort, not scared, got my blood thinners. Not bothered. I think the smash across my nose makes me look tough and you know how important that is to me.
So I’m fine. But I am rather thinking: blood clot, fall, nose-smash what the fuck is coming next? Or is it really true that bad things come in threes?
A separate point: I know I’ve said this before but I am really alarmed about Christmas. I can’t put my finger on what exactly is bothering me but I think it’s possibly all the moving-about that we have to do. Travelling on Christmas Eve. Then on Christmas Day. Then on the 28th and the 30th. More than once there will be an Ocado order arriving at a house while I am in transit. Is there anything more unnerving? And also - and actually this is really what’s freaking me out - I am so stumped when it comes to forward planning meals quite so forwardly.
Everyone in my family is so bloody fussy and requires this and that but not the other. And I know what you are thinking, you are thinking, “Tell them all to go to hell”, because you are on my side. And I appreciate this. But the desire to feed my family, not because I love them, (I do), but in order to get them to shut the fuck up is very strong. I am willing to go significantly out of my way in order to do this. But when I’ve got days and days-worth of meal plans to sort for us while we will be in the middle of nowhere and it’s Christmas and everything is shut, I am just stumped. I keep thinking: “Sausages? Pasta?” It all makes me want my children to grow up and GO AWAY and leave me and my husband to have our niche, interesting dinners on our own. But of course I don’t want that.
A dear friend of mine goes on a rant this time every year about how if this was 1830, middle class women like us would have loads of help and Christmas would simply be fun. I am always tempted to say that back in 1830, my family were all either in domestic service or getting up at 5am to milk cows by hand but I don’t, because that would be self-righteous and silly.
BLEURGH. How about you? How are you coping? I think I am going to take the whole of January off.
O jeeps - stay at (one) home! Cook for no one, don’t say “I’m fine”. Accept help. What a shitty time you’ve been having. Life can come at you hard, give yourself a break.
I have a friend in her early 40s who had an actual double PE over the summer - no warning signs, came out of nowhere - she is thankfully ok now and is also on blood thinners. Thank god yours has been caught in good time.
We are hosting 3 x days over Christmas. I feel flattened by the whole invisible work load of food prep/seating logistics/pulling out camp mattresses/present finding/present wrapping/finding sleeping bags/1billion tonnes of laundry/washing up and cooking for armies. Always feel like a prisoner in my own home too, with certain relatives. Christmas fucking sucks!
*a vote for ham here as well
I have totally over parented my son. I have friends whose children have actual chores in the house e.g. emptying the dishwasher and taking out bins etc in exchange for, I don’t know, £2.50 a week.
My son gives me a sort of Paddington hard stare if I ask him to pass his sodding plate! 
Re the beam. This happened to my husband on holiday in Devon once, and he semi knocked himself out.  I thought he was going to die and started panicking and crying and apologising for all the times I bossed him and nagged him. He was in the bar downstairs half an hour later.