I lay in bed for quite a while and got up late. I felt overwhelmed with anger and despair, as I sometimes do in the mornings. I have got a lot of medical stuff to deal with over the next few weeks, I need to make appointments for blood and Covid tests, which I tried to ring up about yesterday (the GP and hospital respectively) but couldn’t get through. And I need to book my car in for its MOT, and started to think: the MOT is due by the 7^th, and I have to go to the hospital on the 17^th, and need a Covid test within 72 hours, so what if I book the test for the 15^th but then find the car fails the MOT, then I would have to take the van, but the drive through testing at the hospital is under cover, so would I be able to take the van? And will the van even start? I need to know this well in advance so I can tell the hospital I’ll need an alternative non-drive through test. All the what-ifs, what-ifs, what-ifs and all the phone calls I need to make to sort it all out hang around me like a lead collar, and this is why I get so angry with myself. I thought I would get better with this stuff as I got older, but I never do.

I know that everyone’s struggling at the moment, but I can’t help feeling as though everyone is now just getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be me.

The palpitations are still happening, probably three or four times a day, for a few minutes each time, but I’ve got used to them. I’ve got a history of suddenly developing weird symptoms which then lead to investigations (sometimes quite nasty, invasive ones, like gastroscopy and colonoscopy) that don’t come up with any answers – except referrals for counselling and once, a prescription for amitriptyline, which made me feel like a zombie and was followed by two months of double vision which meant I could only see by closing one eye (no proof that there was a causal relationship, but it was enough to make me stop taking them after three weeks and swear never to touch them again).

The background to the palpitations is that in late 2019 I had a senior patient health check (or some words to that effect) at my GP surgery, which among other things tested my cholesterol and found it was quite high. So I was prescribed statins and went back after about six weeks – last January – for a check-up. I’d been noticing palpitations after I started the pills, and mentioned it, but all the tests were good, I had an ECG which was normal, and my cholesterol was down. The doctor wasn’t concerned about the palpitations but reduced the dose of the statins just in case and told me to come back for another check-up in three months.

Well, that didn’t happen of course. I kept taking the pills, the palpitations went away, the prescription was renewed every month. I tried to cut down my cholesterol intake (not going out for breakfast two or three times a week probably helped). But I didn’t have any way of checking any of this.

And then the palpitations came back. I couldn’t find any suggestion online that they might relate to Covid, but I’d had a recurring cough for a few weeks after Christmas, so I got a home test kit (which came back negative) and made this doctor’s appointment. I know she probably won’t be able to say much over the phone without repeating the tests I had last year. She’ll probably tell me – as my daughter did – that palpitations are often caused by stress and worry. At least I’ll be waving a flag and saying: ‘I’m still here, don’t forget about me!’

Of the local shops, I’ve already tried the Co-op, the Romanian butcher and Sainsbury’s. I may head for Tesco shortly, but without much hope. On Sunday I saw a boneless turkey crown joint for six people in the Co-op. I didn’t buy it, because it was clearly way too big, but I did have regrets afterwards. I’ve got some pre-made pastry, because I was planning on having salmon en croute for New Year’s Day, but now thinking that I can get a steak and have steak en croute – or just steak. But I can’t find any decent steak either. First world problems. I can always get something out of the freezer, curry or casserole or something. Still got a couple of days to sort it out, but I don’t want to go to any of the big supermarkets and battle with the queues, or to walk twenty minutes through the rain to the butchers.

I may go and ring Virgin now. I got more worthwhile interaction from them in the morning yesterday – in other words, I got to speak to a human being. I didn’t when I tried again in the afternoon – because the guy had said ‘try this and if it doesn’t show any improvement in a couple of hours, call back’. Yeah, right. I tried calling back again around four, and got lost in that awful endless loop of listening to options and pressing buttons, then snagged on the request to enter characters from a password that presumably I was told five and a half years ago but have no recollection of now.

…

I abandoned writing, and went to call again. When it asked for the password, I sat and held the phone until it gave up waiting and transferred me to a young woman whose job presumably was to be shouted and sworn at by angry old women (or was this morning, at any rate). She said she’d send me an email with a link to change my password, and handed me over to a young Scottish man who asked for my password. I told him I was waiting for the password reset email, which he told me could take up to five days. I told him I didn’t have five days because if I wanted to cancel the new contract I’d have to do it this week. Then he asked me some security questions, looked at the new contract, compared it to my current usage, asked if I really wanted the features I’d never used, and managed to reduce it by £20, which made it less than my previous contract. He also said that I can get boosters online, but they are introducing new ones in January.

Yesterday I didn’t write because of a domestic crisis – when I got up, the radiators weren’t on, but I just thought that it wasn’t cold enough to trigger the thermostat – that’s happened a lot this autumn, because it’s been so mild. But then I tried to run some hot water to rinse out Miko’s food bowl, and realised that wasn’t working either. There was an error message on the boiler saying: ‘Low water pressure’, so I Googled that to see if I could find any advice, but nothing was very clear. Disaster – I was going to have to call someone! I scanned my phone contacts to see if I could identify the man who fixed my shower last year, but I could only find ‘Rob Heating’, and I was pretty sure he was the one who wasn’t much help – confirmed by the call record, which showed I’d called him once but there was no reply. After looking through old emails, trying to remember when it was, googling unidentified numbers on my phone to see if any related to a plumbing business, going through my accounts to see if I’d got an invoice from him, looking on ‘Checkatrade’ to see if any name rang a bell and wondering whether I should take a punt on anybody, and if so which one… I had another look on the phone contacts and spotted ‘Jon’, with ‘heating’ in small type underneath. I called him and he was able to put me right with what I needed to do, which was quite straightforward once I’d managed to look underneath the boiler (which was quite tricky, because it’s in a cupboard, and needed a torch, which when I found it needed batteries, so I had to find them as well…etc). But after all that I decided that was a good enough excuse to skip the writing for once, because the morning had already been disrupted enough.

Other excitement yesterday included: walking to the vet’s to pick up Miko’s thyroid medicine; having another go at cutting the hedge (think I’ve done enough on that now, except get rid of the clippings, which I’ve swept to the back of the forecourt between the bay and the wall); cutting back the clematis and passion flower which have been trailing over the lawn all summer, standing up the metal frame and pushing the top half into the ground so they can scramble over that (a temporary measure because I don’t suppose it will escape the winter storms, even though it’s now only half as tall as it was); and cutting with shears the grass that was underneath and around them. Today I might even run the lawnmower over the patch of long grass and miscellaneous weeds that covers the central section of my back garden.

Nothing very deep there. I had plenty of deep thoughts earlier, but decided that wittering on about trivial practicalities was safer today.

I mentioned on Tuesday that I had to get blood tests (which is normal) and a Covid test prior (within 72 hours for the latter) to my 6-monthly infusion on Saturday. I rang up both the relevant hospital departments and got the Covid for 14:05 yesterday and the bloods for 13:45. The lady in haematology told me sternly: ‘don’t come in more than 5 minutes before your appointment!’ Then on Wednesday afternoon I got an automatic text from a 5-digit number asking me to rate my ‘recent experience of our outpatients department’. This threw me. I ignored it, but started to wonder whether it had been triggered by my appointment – maybe they’d made it for Wednesday and not Thursday? It wasn’t worth the trauma of trying to call the hospital back (which is a nightmare for anyone, not just a phone-phobic like me) so I decided to leave it and turn up anyway.

Because my time management is so poor, I have a habit of allowing too much time to get to appointments, and arriving far too early, to make up for all those times when the reverse has happened. Plus I wasn’t at all convinced that 20 minutes between appointments would give me enough time. I knew where I had to go for the blood test, and where it was in relation to the car park, but not for the Covid, except that it was on the same site – I’d just been told: ‘turn left into Nightingale Rd, follow it round and you’ll see it on you left.’ I knew where Nightingale Rd was, but I didn’t know how long I would have to follow it round for.

Too many times I’ve set off with great confidence for somewhere, assuming that I’ve understood the directions, and got horribly lost. As it happened, that wasn’t the way it worked out yesterday – also the blood people were expecting me and saw me when I arrived at 13:40 and all was well. But it so easily could have not been.

This is the ocean in which my thoughts swim – in a constant state of alert. Stress was worrying away at me all Wednesday evening and yesterday morning – the poem I posted was a reaction to trying to deal with it. In situations like that, I try to think of the worst case, and really all it meant was that I’d have to make another appointment for the blood tests, either today or tomorrow.

It worked out – but there’s no guarantee that the next time will.