… not an awful lot happened today.
One of the housemen came round this morning to see me and asked me how I was feeling. I told him about all of my woes.
Even more importantly, I explained that I was disappointed that it seemed that the hospital was missing a golden opportunity in not giving me all kinds of examinations about the breathing issues.
He replied that the hospital was concentrating on the virus before dealing with anything else but I told him that I wished that I could be so confident. I was rather sceptical on this point. I had a feeling that the hospital was going to discharge me once this virus has gone and they would miss a golden opportunity to settle the matter of my breathing once and for all.
One thing that I mentioned was that I wasn’t prepared to support any more of this “going round in circles”. With Waldenstrohm’s Disease there’s a timeline. No-one with this disease has survived more than 11 years and I’ve had it for at least 7 years. I made it perfectly clear that with only 4 years left at the most.
With the hospital having already wasted 18 months of what little time I have left and not resolved this issue I was not in the mood to have any more of my time wasted.
He told me that he’d made a note but I remain unconvinced.
A second incident worth noting was that I had another relapse today. I’ve moved my room around a little and spent most of the day sitting in my chair by the radiator. In the late afternoon I came over all cold and had to wrap up with my fleece jacket and also a blanket across my knees.
The nurse took my temperature but there was no fever. But nevertheless I really was cold and I couldn’t wait to tuck myself up in bed.
But this morning was worth noting too. I was wide-awake at about 05:30 and couldn’t go back to sleep. In fact I was wide awake.
I had some fibreglass repairs to do for something so I was doing it outside this building. People came past to look, to see and to talk. One woman came past and engaged me in conversation. She said “don’t ask me to do this”. I suddenly remembered that she’d worked for the company in Crewe that built fire engines … "Mountain Range" – ed … as a fibreglasser. I said “if I need your help I’ll call for you” to which she made some kind of dismissive gesture. I carried on and sure enough half an hour later I had to make a box out of fibreglass so I used a plastic container as a mould. I couldn’t make this box correctly – there wasn’t enough resin. It was letting in water and wasn’t watertight. It was starting to go darker so I thought that I’d give it up as a bad job and try again tomorrow. There was an old guy, obviously rather feeble in the head, came past and asked me where I’d had the best medical attention and the best driving school. I said “Congleton” as I’d actively been followed by the medical centre in Congleton for something or other. He made some kind of dismissive remark about that. He called over some other people whom we knew who had come to fetch him. He said “did you hear what he said just then about this health centre and driving school?”. They obviously did because they said “if that’s what he thinks, then he’s entitled to think it”. This little old feeble guy continued to make a mockery of whatever it was that I’d said about going to Congleton.
Back at school a girl had been placed in detention. She was about 3 years younger than me. Because I was busy doing an exam they put her in the same room as me. My exam was to write about potatoes. I hadn’t done any revision but I reckoned that I could bluff my way through this exam quite comfortably. I set to work and found that I finished quite easily with plenty of time left. I was very happy with what I’d written. I began to talk to the girl. She’d been placed in detention for something strange and had a lot of work to do as a result, one of which was to write a letter of apology to the headmaster so with nothing better to do I wrote it for her and printed it out. The ink was feeble on our printer. We spent most of our time while she was in detention talking about school, about her classes and people in them. I found to my surprise that not only did I reckon that she an attractive young girl, she had a lot to say for herself that was extremely interesting. I found myself thinking that this is a girl who would be the kind of girl that I would like to have as a companion. We talked endlessly about all kinds of problems and difficulties. She asked me if I would take the note that I had typed out to the headmaster and tell him that she’d print it when she could find a decent printer. Anything to keep her happy, I took it to the headmaster’s room. He was in the middle of a meeting. I recognised all the teachers of course. One of the things that he was saying was that there wasn’t a single pupil in this school now who had anything for which to be reproached. He wasn’t expecting a report from anyone. and there I was, standing at the door with the report from this girl. I was highly tempted at that moment to walk in and hand it to him. But a couple of teachers noticed me hovering around at the door outside and switched the conversation to Welsh. Of course I could speak Welsh so I could hear all of these intimate details going on. It was quite obvious to anyone that I was listening and making notes. I was half-expecting to be called in at any moment to find out what I was doing and why I was there but the conversation carried on and on.
But going back to this girl, she was as I said about 3 years younger than me, long, straight auburn hair and lived in one of the villages around Wrenbury, somewhere like that. She was talking to me about how the school was basically divided into 2, the rich people and the poor people. I asked which one she was and I could see that she immediately went on the defensive so I gathered that she was one of the poor people. That suited me fine because I was from a council estate. I really felt that I had a lot in common with her and how I would really really strike up some kind of rapport with her and maybe develop a relationship with her but I was certainly learning a lot about the lower echelons of the school that I never knew before that was really interesting.
She would have been the kind of girl with whom I would have been more than happy to be associated. It was another one of those dreams that gave me a pleasant, warm feeling just like that WORLESTON DREAM of several years ago and how I wished that it would never end until I’d finally managed to get my hands on this very nice and pleasant young girl.
I can see her now. She had long, straight auburn hair and dressed in a school uniform, white blouse, school tie, navy blue cardigan, blue pleated skirt that was fairly short, white knee-length socks and typical Mary-Jane type shoes, exactly the kind of thing that you’d expect from a girl who was maybe in the Remove or Lower Fifth, which would seem to fit in with my 6th-form exam that I’d just been taking.
This dream was so realistic and so comfortable that I couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards. It was one of those rare dreams that was preying on my mind because it felt so right. It’s really hard to explain anything about this. It reminds me very much of that dream that I had about that girl from Worleston all those years ago, it really was such a nice comfortable, proper, warm kind of dream. It’s a shame that it had to end.
So right now I’m going to go back to sleep and try to have part two of this interesting dream in which I finally manage to get the girl.
But I doubt it very much. If only things work out how we would like them to be but the subconscious isn’t like that, is it?
