Stroke Diary (12): Not There Yet

Monday 23rd. August: This morning I'm back at the G.P after a bad night. Once again, I'd had pains in the back of my head, presumably from the cerebellum, making it hard to get comfortable. Call me old fashioned but I'm used to being able to rest the back of my head on a pillow. 'Try sleeping face down', my husband helpfully suggested. The consultation with the doctor was pre-arranged to decide whether I was ready to go back to work but given the head pains, I was signed off for another two weeks, with a phased return from September 6th. She asks if I'm depressed. I think not, although I'm not exactly cheerful.
Through the week, I have contact with my boss and do some planning, which makes work seem very close but also possible. I'll be going back to the city service on reduced hours and with a limited workload. The focus of my remaining five weeks will be to tie everything up before I leave around mid-October.
There's good news. My project is going ahead, several wonderful colleagues having stepped in to make sure it happens. I am relieved and deeply grateful but immediately want to interfere with how exactly they're going to deliver. I have a half hour conversation with one of these saints, going over the details. I know I'm not 'letting go' at all.
This week would have been our beach week in Sri Lanka, where we would have met up with our youngest son. This realisation brings feelings of regret and loss but his e-mails describe his stay in a forest monastery, which was no doubt a more improving experience than a hedonistic week on the beach with us. One of the monks he stayed with contacted me a while back asking to be my friend on Facebook.
It's autumn already and I'm not sorry. We have heavy rain overnight and through the day and it fits my mood. It seems more comfortable to be relatively inactive at home and to sleep in the afternoon, when it's pouring with rain outside. But I do see friends, driving myself to Queens Road for lunch in the busy new bistro. Another friend takes me to Palmer's Garden Centre for coffee and we enjoy the 'caravan roof experience' as rain beats down on the conservatory. The coffee at Palmer's was unexpectedly good. The very best thing about this sick leave is how much I've seen of family and friends and the contact I've had from old friends, some neglected for years. I don't think it was a lesson I particularly needed to learn; I already knew it was important and that I was remiss but the demands of my work and the novel writing often made regular contact difficult. Perhaps next summer I'll have a 'stay-cation' and do it all again.
I'm reading The Glass Room by Simon Mawer, short-listed for the Man Booker in 2009. It was recommended by my 82 year old mother. I'm surprised, as there's so much sex in it and I know she doesn't usually like this. We go to Darlington for two days to see my parents, so I get the chance to ask her. She says the sex is well written and feels natural and in context and she's right. It's a terrific book; one of those I can't wait to get back to and the characters pre-occupy me even when I'm not reading. I wonder why it didn't win. The actual winner, Wolf Hall, glowers at me from a shelf, heavy and unread and I've yet to meet anyone who got past the first few chapters (apart from my mother).
The plan is to get back to my own novel next week. I imagine my characters trapped mid-sentence, just where I left them before my stroke. I wonder how I'll feel about them when I wake them up. Will they still be the same people or will they have changed?