Captain Scarlet was, famously, indestructible. I reckon I know his mum.
Freda was in this morning. She is the far side of eighty, has had rheumatoid arthritis for all the time I have known her (and a decade or two before that too). She is also inclined to be a bit chesty—the product of a few too many woodbines, a habit picked up back when Herr Hitler’s boys were trying to do for her. She’s not actually smoked now for donkey’s years, but still lives with that legacy. So much so that in the autumn she went down with an acute pneumonia.
When I visited her and told her she would have to go in to the hospital for a day or two to start the intensive antibiotics she was going to need she looked crestfallen. The thing was, she was due to go to Spain to visit relatives ten days after my visit. I promised her we would try our best to get her fit for travel, and sure enough, ten days later and after just three days on IV antibiotics before converting to bucket loads of amoxicillin and steroids, she boarded her flight and convalesced in fine style.
Today she is back to review her steroid dose. She needs it tickled up a bit she tells me. This is because her arthritis has been a bit naughty since the weather has been getting worse again. And because she is fretting about her baby, now a grown woman of fifty-something, who goes in for a major operation next week. So Freda wants to be fit, so she can go and cook her son-in-law his Christmas dinner!
Knowing the world is peopled with characters like Freda helps me to sleep soundly in my bed at night. After all with such folk to protect us surely we have nothing to fear from the Mysterons!
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5 comments:
Freda is an inspiration. People like her are the backbone of many neighbourhoods and families. They thoroughly deserve to be memorialised in blog posts: it is right and fitting that their stoicism and feistiness is given full weight and measure.
Capt. Scarlet is my husband's favourite childhood character (we'll ignore the relative newness of some of the related paraphenalia that clutters up our home). I'm glad that Freda is on our side against the Mysterons.
Regards - Shinga
(possibly signing in as anon because Blogger is playing up and trying to force me to go over to the dark side of Blogger Beta.)
Shinga - resist the dark force as long as possible. Beta is poo. Dreadful poo.
My Gran is called Freda and she's on the far side of 80 but nothing like your Freda, sadly..as I said before..she's a bit loopy and spends her days tied to her bed in a nursing home...for her own good...she hurts herself if left alone and untied...
Bugger it I want to be old and canny and strong too.
Should you be spending the taxpayers' money on dosing up an octogenarian just so she can go on holiday?
Terry I think doctors need to do whatever they can for the well being of people - and at 80 years old she deserves it.
Its better than spending tax payers money on helping recovering drug addicts and people trying to stop smoking, who chose their own ill health.
shinga-- beta can be a pain signing in, but so far has behaved ok for me... as for Freda, I have heard nothing further since the weekend, which I take to be a good sign.
wendz-- you're two for three already so should be a piece of cake....
terry-- the sanctimonious troll(?). As an erstwhile taxpayer herself, Freda is absolutely as deserving the attentions of the NHS as anyone else. And in any event the aim of the treatment was to cure her pneumonia not merely to allow her to get away shortly thereafter.
Never moderated comments before. Wondering if I might have to. Thanks for your "input". Not.
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