Three Months In Brief: A Poorly Child and House Problems

The last few months have been hard

I’ve been offline for a while, so I thought I’d do a quick write-up, describing some of the problems I’ve been facing over the last three months.

Image created by the author.

Back in October, I was struggling with decisions about things which now seem relatively unimportant.

A lot has happened since then.

In November, my youngest son was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at the age of 14. It came as a devastating shock.

In the lead up to it, I had heard him getting up in the night to go to the bathroom, which was not normal for him. At first, I thought it was because of a recent cold, which meant he had got into the habit of drinking water at night time.

We saw his doctor, who told us to go straight to the hospital — we were not even allowed to call at home to pick up things like pyjamas!

He spent a couple of nights in hospital, and had to get used to injecting himself with insulin, as well as testing his blood glucose several times per day. The finger pricks took ages for him to get used to.

After avoiding contact with people as much as possible due to COVID-19, we were suddenly going to several appointments every week!

Around the same time, cracks were discovered in the front wall of our house. After a fairly expensive structural survey, it seemed that the cracks were caused by a heavy porch door, rather than (say) foundation problems. But the cure — to stitch the brickwork using helibars — has to wait for warmer weather.

During all this, my road was being resurfaced for about 3–4 weeks, making shopping and hospital visits just that bit harder.

My son had also injured his toe, and they said he would have to have his toenail removed. Luckily, during the delays waiting for blood test results, it seems that it might be starting to heal itself.

In early January, the diabetes doctors told us that my son might have coeliac disease!

Hasn’t he been through enough already? Losing his mum when he was just 7 years old, then the diabetes, and now coeliac!

A few weeks ago, I noticed my roof had been leaking into the loft. It was hard to find anyone available to come out. I ended up with someone who charged a lot to do a very quick bit of patching. It helped, but there were still problems.

To cut a long story short, I’ve since got someone else in, who is going to re-roof the place. As you might expect with me, the decisions surrounding it all were agonisingly difficult, and there was a lot of second-guessing.

(It’s rather frustrating to think of how the roof money could have been used for other things, such as renovating my awful, dilapidated, 1970s kitchen and bathroom, or replacing my old car, which seems to develop faults every 2 months.)

During the last 10 days, I’ve been emptying the loft in preparation for the new roof — it was completely full of 27 years worth of miscellaneous items.

I’ve sold about 10 items on eBay already, including ‘difficult’ things such as a vintage computer that my late wife bought for me.

The remaining items are even more time-consuming and sentimental to deal with. So things have slowed down somewhat.

Today, we were told that my son has been referred to a children’s hospital after a blood test had come back indicating coeliac disease, and may have to have some unpleasant-sounding tests. (I hope my old car gets us there — it’s about 20 miles away.)

I really wish my late wife was still here; it’s starting to feel like a bit too much for one person to cope with.

* * * * *

That’s all I can think of for now. I’m very aware that there are people in the world who are worse off than me, so I feel bad to be moaning about my problems. But my anxiety levels have been very high lately, and I thought it might help to express some of it in writing.

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