15 Minute Post

Just enough to drink a lovely cup of coffee and type today's blog!

At 10 am I am taking Mrs Jones shopping. I was passing her house on Wednesday and with a worried face she called me in. Her husband had fallen in the kitchen. 

" I was going to phone you " she said but luckily for him she had rang for an ambulance and it was already on the way, so I tied the dogs to her fence and went in to help. 

FAST is the acronym to use with a suspected stroke (facial drooping, arm weakness, speech difficulties and time) and I suspected a small stroke after her husband stated he had slurred his words a minute or so earlier....luckily the paramedics arrived minutes later and seemed cheerful enough as they negotiated Winnie on the garden path.

She was blowing kisses at both as they squeezed past with their backpacks

Today, I promised to take her shopping as she didn't want to be gone from the village for the length of time the two buses take to go to town and back. 

Having no transport is a shitter when you are old and poorly.

I'll leave you a photograph my twin sister has been banding around on social media......it took me a while to realise that it wasn't her! 

See I havent changed much

I still remain very round and very pink to this day! 

Acts Of Violence

Mary A3:01 am

"I was a third year teacher when one of the student's parent came into the classroom high on drugs. Without saying a thing he shot me once in the chest. I remember ordering the children to run out of the room. Next thing my grandmother and my grandfather who I never got to meet, were telling me that I have to go back. There were things I needed to do. I remember not wanting to go back but I'm glad I did. I married and raised two children."

This comment from yesterday's blog literally took my breath away.
It described an act of violence in such a conversational way that it almost hurt reading it.
It shows a huge capacity in coping.
Thankfully acts of true violence are rare.

Apart from having to deal with paranoid and combative patients on intensive care, I have never really been party to a violent situation. When patient's kick off, my psychiatric training will often kick in, so remembering the mantra " keep close and keep in control" I have often used my fuller figure to my advantage to quash  any violent situations with a hefty fat arse! well until the time the doctor with the sedation can swing in to the rescue.

One study in the US found that up to 22% of nurses showed symptoms of PTSD
I thought this statistic as interesting as it worrying. So I won't apologise for another of Going Gently's straw polls! 
Has anyone out there suffered from PTSD ?
Or did the violence managed to pass you by?

The Point Of Death

Has anyone out there ever had a near death experience ?
I'm interested to know.
This morning I talked to Mrs Trellis about a patient of hers that nearly died giving birth.
After the emergency was all over, the woman recounted that she had seen " a light" during the worst time of her collapse , a light which was surrounded by relatives and friends long dead and gone.
It's a stereotypical account of the near death experience I think.

The Prof nearly died when in his twenties. He was gassed by carbon monoxide. He experienced no weird sensory event or spiritual enlightenment at the time , just a bad headache and a nicely pink face so typical of an over abundance of  the gas.
I nearly drowned when I was 10. It was in a swimming pool in Loret del Mar in 1972. I remember little of the event except being very calm with my arm thrusting out of the water above my head. A passing man pulled me out of the pool and left me sitting by myself on the hot tile surround.
The only emotion I had at the time was of embarrassment.

I have dealt with many seriously ill people who have eventually survived a near death event, but I have have never heard one admit that something spiritual happened to them at that crucial point where life and death mingle.

So has anyone out there know of such experiences?
Please share them with the group
I would be interested to know

Making Money

Half of the Trelawnyd Flower Show Committee

After much, MUCH debate the Flower Show Committee have finally agreed what we're are going spend our monies on this year.

• We will pay for the coach for the village Friendship Group's Christmas outing! 
• We shall cover the cost for new linens for St Michael's Church
• We shall contribute £250.00 to the village conservation group for Summer plants
• We shall buy a new clock for the Memorial Hall and will offer to replace the existing water geyser in the kitchen which is knackered
• We shall also offer to purchase new crockery for the hall

I love our committee, they may have taken bleeding hours to make a decision about spending money but when I told them that Sandra C from the village needed help with her fund raising Christmas Fayre, to a man they volunteered to run the refreshment table. 

Mind The Gap

I have just experienced a rather embarrassing incident in Marks and Spencers

Had just collected some items ( small packet of cocktail sausages, one packet of crab sticks, a reduced calorie pasta bake in tomato sauce  and a small loaf) and was approaching the self service tills when I had to negotiate a man in a wheelchair who was part blocking the entrance.
The man ( who was a bilateral amputee) was arranging some his shopping on his stumps as his wife bagged up the rest, so thinking I was slinkier than I am, I squeezed past to go to the free till beyond.
However ( and there's always a fucking however) the pocket of my trackie bottoms caught on the right handle of his wheelchair and as I swept past I spun him around like baby in one of those walkers on wheels.
Now bilateral amputees by very nature of their surgery remain rather top heavy, so it was only by pure luck that his wife managed to catch him as he almost bounced over the side of the chair, dropping a box of eclairs and various "meal deal for 10  pounds items" onto the floor.
Still attached to the wheelchair, I did that strange half hopping,half falling thing,as rather too much arse buttock was revealed to the good shoppers of Prestatyn before my elasticated waist twanged back into place with a loud " SNAP" and I shouted out a rather strange expletive of " Hell's Teeth"

The apologies were just about as embarrassing as the event

Halloween is over, the animals race to eat the pumpkin's insides

The Walking Dead Episode 2

A new leader who is doing better than our Rick! 

At last The Walking Dead had a balanced and pragmatic leader of souls . Ezekiel (Kahary Payton) is an actor, and a former zoo keeper who parades a tiger like a pet and speaks in Shakespearean tones in way of providing a larger than life persona ........but he really seems in charge of a post apocalyptic community with some sense and balance and insight which bloody well makes a change! . Our heroes Morgan and the ever wonderful Carol have taken refuge in Kingdom, and Ezekiel has the clear measure of both.
I thought I would hate the new community storylines.....but in fact I am loving them .
My favourite episode so far

Fox Chapel District

It's Halloween and so I should dig deep and share a ghost story should I not?
Well I have not ghost story to share but I do have an odd little tale of coincidence
I love a story of coincidence.

Around 26 years ago I found myself on a specialist six month work course at the Spinal Injury Unit in Southport. It was expected that for part of that course, I  was to organise an elective placement somewhere else and after weeks of organising I was lucky enough to wangle work experience in  the US, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to be precise. Much of my experience centred upon the spinal injury rehabilitation hospital in Harmarville.
Like many rehab facilities, Harmarville was located out in the sticks, so to get to and from my lodgings which were back in the City, I was provided with a volunteer driver, who happened to be a very elderly black guy called Norm. Norm insisted that I sit in the back of his large black car, and so I( and many others)  was reminded of the movie Driving Miss Daisy when we turned up at any event. The film had only just opened in cinemas that summer.
Anyhow I digress.

Fast forward a decade or so to rural Lincolnshire, to an antiques emporium at a former RAF station to be precise. In a dusty, junk filled room, I spied an old map with art deco writing in a battered frame and on a whim bought it. It looked American, in period with the look of our former house , and it filled a spot in the hall.

The map travelled with us to Trelawnyd and until recently it has graced the wall on the upstairs landing, more or less unseen by all.

You may recall that recently I painted the living room, hallway and landing, and after this, I rearranged the paintings in the cottage and moved the map to it's present position by the front door.
There , I looked at it again with fresh eyes.

The map, I noticed , had small illustrations on it. A golfer in plus fours, a hunting hound, a whole series of huntsmen and women  in full livery, and written in the right hand margin in faint deco script was the name Harmarville.

I looked closer, and spied a road called Fox Chapel Road and I suddenly recognised where the map was of. Of all of the places in the world that  a 1930s map could have been from, I had bought an old map of the very place I had worked two decades before!
The map was of one very small far suburb of the city of Pittsburgh. A suburb where the Harmarville Rehab unit was to be built some fifty years later.

The Face At The Window

The Prof is asleep under a warm blanket on the couch

I have just hollowed out a pumpkin

Transvestite Vampires

Our vicar covers three parishes. Trelawnyd, the much larger village of Dyserth and the tiny hamlet of Cwm ( Pronounced " Come")
Every year, to raise funds for Cwm's minuscule village hall  a local woman ( who happens to be the daughter in law of Sylvia our previous Flower Judge secretary ) holds a murder mystery supper night. 
The format is sort of full proof. Eight locals ( including the vicar!) play the parts of the cast and read out their lines with varying amounts of skill and acting ability. Clues are given to who is the murderer, as the paying guests ( some fifty of us) make notes, buy raffle tickets drink varying amounts of wine and have supper.
It's old fashioned and hokey but rather good fun, so on Friday we invited my sister and her husband to come with us this year and the evening started as it meant to go on by the appearance of an elderly man who was smothered in lipstick , dressed as a vampire and who was carrying a woman's handbag.
You have to be there to understand the gist of it all.
Anyhow it turned out that a rather dreadful actress who went by the character name of Ellie Gant ( elegant....... geddit?) was the killer and I won a bottle a putrid aftershave in the raffle.

I am going to approach Jason the affable despot , to see if we could hold something similar in our village hall....he likes murders, and serial killing....oh and he's a good little actor!

I'm Carving our Halloween pumpkin today!