Tuesday 1 January 2013

Tuesday 1 January 2013 Difficult Christmas

One good thing is the extra few minutes of daylight each day. Another is that M&S are keeping
Catherine on for another eight weeks, one of only four of the temporary Christmas staff to be chosen. This news raised her spirits one degree yesterday, for about two hours..
For the rest, she spends her time in a black and cheerless swamp, where it looks like she's wallowing but probably feels like she's silently drowning. This is because of the continuing acid reflux, which she is convinced she brought on herself by drinking vodka once in September. It started then and hasn't got better, so she is sure she has caused herself irreparable damage. I tell her that even if the vodka triggered it, it's her coeliac condition that perpetuates it, and produce the web pages that support this, but she won't accept this possibility and continues to beat herself up over what happened three months ago. I am sure the constant fretting and recrimination is making it feel a lot worse. It also says online that changing to a gluten-free diet will help cure the reflux, but this can take three months from diagnosis. She has only been gluten free for 10 days and probably hoped for instant improvement, so disappointment makes it feel worse again. Each of us thinks the other is in denial, and today she stopped talking to me so I must have been extra annoying.

Although it's been good to have Rik and Nicole here, all that seems to have happened over Christmas is worrying about Catherine. She spent most of her birthday in bed with a temperature, not for the first time. The raging industrial Christmas that beset the Merseyway shops, and the cold wet weather, and the dead time between bank holidays (which, from our point of view, puts beyond reach the doctors who might actually explain things properly to Catherine) make us think that the best thing we could do next year is go away somewhere sunny