WTF?

WTF?

Or trying to be a single mother whilst dealing with a teen with Covid and major surgery.

You know when you have those moments when you look at your life and you think; ‘it wasn’t meant to be like this? I’m meant to be on a Yacht in the Med with Bradley Cooper not picking up dog poo in my garden between seeing clients whilst a sick child yells out of her bedroom window on the top floor of the house; do you have any Tampons’?... Tampons, really? I am 56 years old, my Ovaries are drier than the Gobi Desert. No, I don’t have any bloody Tampons (bad use of words). I’m post Menopause, oh that’s a blog in itself.. maybe I’ll write that this week, ‘Menopause when you are no longer hot externally but inside you’re as hot as if you were in Dante’s Inferno, 7th Cycle, first and third ring, drowning in rivers of boiling blood and fire or being captive in a desert of burning sand’.

I’m not sure which is worse. Anyway, I digress, so how did I get here?

The 15-year-old divine fruit of my loins has motherf+$@*-g Covid. She went and hung out with some friends on New Year’s Eve and the next day I got a phone call to say they’d all tested positive. It’s January 1st and she’s now isolating on the third floor of the house where thankfully she has not only her bedroom but her own sitting room and she has access to a private bathroom on the second floor. Honestly, I have never been more grateful that I earn enough money to live in a largish house because it allows you to keep separate enough to avoid catching the ‘dreaded lurgy’. Covid really has made the divide between those with more and those with less seem even greater. If you’re in a tiny space you’re probably all going to get it and that’s the end of that. We are lucky, I mean I’ve worked hard for us to be here, but lucky non the less.

This now becomes a challenging situation and adds a new and unwelcome dimension to my already challenging life as a single parent. I am having surgery on the 13th. Cartilage doodah on my knees which will leave me with the legs of a 25-year-old after years of running on concrete. This the surgeon tells me the surgery will make me ‘uncomfortable, experience some discomfort’ for a couple of weeks. On the day I ask him directly and he laughs and says ‘oh, you’ll feel like you’ve been hit by a train Laura’… wanker. Anyway, getting ahead of myself again.

So, T has Covid and is isolating on the top floor of the house. Seems manageable, yes? NO. On the 3rd I return to seeing clients/patients and this is a challenging and busy time of the year. People have struggled over the festive season and need to see their therapist, so I am slammed, really slammed.

We have discussed the importance of me NOT catching Covid, it is twofold. Firstly, there is the work aspect, it’s really not a good time for me to have to cancel and not see clients secondly, I have the aforementioned surgery on the 13th. I have to provide a negative PCR and isolate myself three days before and if I catch Covid I cannot have the surgery for three months. I need (knee’d) this done; did you see what I did there?

Therefore, I cannot, really cannot catch stupid bastard MF’ing Covid. To make sure I stay ‘lurgy’ free we implement a system where we use facetime. Now I’ve got to be honest there are few teenagers on earth who would mind this scenario; ‘right, you have to stay in your room and sitting room (where there is an Xbox, computer and a massive TV and Soundsystem), you can only come out to use the Loo/Bathroom and I am going to bring you all your meals and drinks on a tray’. ‘What a result’ anyone under probably 30 would think, and my kid is no different.

She misses the start of school, her mocks and she gets to lie around and be waited on hand and foot whilst languishing in bed or on her sofa. Granted she feels a bit shite for a few days but for the rest of the time, when she is meant to be revising, which I suspect she didn’t do at all its basically 5* house arrest with lots of sleep and a butler at the end of the phone.

For me however it’s a bloody nightmare. I have to keep her on the top floor because I have clients accessing the ground floor. I cannot have a bath because she is using the only bathroom that has a bath and the rest only have showers, okay, first world problem there but I know I cannot soak in a bath for two weeks after my surgery because of the stitches and gaping wounds on my knees.

The timing is awful.  Right up to the surgery and even when I leave very early morning on the day she has only just come out of isolation and now she doesn’t want to go back to school because she is worried she should stay at home to look after me, though one has to consider this may well be a ruse to get more time off.

She goes back to school and I go into hospital. 

It’s a lovely private hospital and the surgeon is borderline hot, it’s really not so bad apart from him laughing about how I will feel like I’ve been hit by a train and I’m starving and now wearing a blue paper gown with my butt hanging out the back and white tight knee socks to stave off DVT.  

It’s really not so bad until I come round. Years of recreational drug use when younger have meant I am very tolerant to any kind of medication, eventually my screams in recovery coerce the Anaesthetist into giving me Fentanyl. It’s really not so bad again.

I can’t tell you much about that night, I was as high as a kite. I can’t tell you much about the drive home and what I said to my friend Gina who kindly did the driving on the way home. I can’t tell you much about the weekend as I was merrily nibbling on the industrial quantities of Codeine they’d kindly given me. All was fluffy and quite nice really with neighbours dropping off food and the now Covid free Kid being delightful.

Then reality bites. It’s Monday. I have to go back to work in a couple of days. I can’t walk and because of all the Opioids I’ve taken I haven’t had a poo for what seems like forever and something unnatural is growing inside me.  

A word to the wise; don’t take Opioids without also taking Laxatives or a delightfully named ‘Stool Softer’. No trouble understanding what that is for, just trouble not taking it, and when I say trouble I mean Hell. Hell worse than Dante’s Inferno.

Now I have given birth, naturally, well Vaginally, it didn’t feel natural. This was far worse. So bad was the Constipation that it felt like I was trying to birth a torpedo shaped brick the size of a B52. I can honestly say the screams were so loud I am surprised the neighbours didn’t call the Police thinking I was being murdered. 

Post birth I know have a ‘ruined ring’ and have since grown a Pile so large it is no doubt visible from space and should have its own postcode. I hate my life!

It’s two weeks and two days on now. The Pile is slowly receding and whilst it still feels a little like my sphincter has been attacked with a razor blade it’s better than it was and my knees have gone down from being the size of dinner plates to side plates.

The Surgeon when he sees me to remove the stitches says he’s happy. Well he would be I paid him thousands of pounds, but he says he’s happy with the work he did and shows me a picture of myself taken on his phone on the slab post-surgery whilst I’m out cold and I can’t help wondering if he’s on the spectrum. He’s still hot though, I think it’s a ‘surgeon thing’.

I know having this surgery will change my life and things are better now but the first two weeks were really grim and really lonely.  I am lucky my kid was great and so were my neighbours, but I still can’t walk properly, can’t drive and my mood was really low. I haven’t felt that unhappy about being single for a long time.

This is the thing I think that really sets us apart as single parents, it’s that loneliness around not having anyone to share the difficult times with. Yes, I have friends and family I am really lucky in that respect, but this would have been so much easier with a nice man to cuddle, bring in wood and empty the bins, and I hate saying that.

It has also made me really think about my future and how I am not sure I want to get old and then potentially ill, sick as a single person as it’s a lonely path to walk. I suspect though if any potential suitor reads this blog the ‘arsehole anecdote’ might put them off… ‘good news guys, it’s all better now’! (Well, almost).

Being a single person and single parent regularly throws us challenges which we would never have foreseen before we became parents. I wouldn’t change being a parent, but I have felt recently I really would change being single.

So, to all you single parents out there with long term health problems, I bloody salute you I really do, and to anyone considering surgery and taking Codeine might I suggest an advance purchase of a rubber ring? Because being without it is a real bummer!