Dreadful Nonsense: Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home

My trip to Dublin and back was a joyous success, albeit one that I don’t want to repeat in any kind of a hurry. It was only when I’d left work, picked up my ridiculously small bag, made my way to Heathrow and was sitting in departures that it struck me I was actually getting on a plane, only to get on another plane less than 24 hours later. The whole hurried-round-trip scheme of things wasn’t helped by the fact that, on the flight to Dublin, we had to fly through a thunder storm which resulted in some heavy turbulence and me having the shit freaked out of me. I hate the flying, you people. I hate it.

It was very lovely to be home, though. I was first greeted by Little Sister Edel’s dog Kesh, who tried to throw herself through a closed car window to get at me. That was pretty great. What was also brilliant was arriving home and finding lots of people there, all enthusiastic about my presence and ready to chow down on some Chinese food with me. Nothing says “Welcome Home!” more than a baby screaming with fear because a tiny dog with no brain won’t stop barking.

This is Cillian, momentarily forgetting about the pain in his teeth and the tiny barking dog.

The following morning was incredibly confusing, because I woke up at 7.30am to the sound of the shower in the next room. My first thought was that He Who Only… was up before me, which was weird. My second thought, on opening my eyes, was that I was in my bedroom in Dublin, and that I had obviously just been dreaming the last three years. My third thought was what the fuck am I doing in Dublin? My fourth thought was that I should probably just go back to sleep. And so I did this.

Being home is always superb, because of the many things that are different to being away from home, even if away from home is actually really home. For one thing, there’s always a ton of food in my parent’s house, and because they share the same allergies as me, I can usually eat quite a lot of it. There’s also always some kind of vegetarian nonsense in the house, because my Mum buys too much of it every time I come home for a visit, and it freezes very well. The luxury of having dogs around can’t be overstated, and as for the 100+ television channels… it took me most of the morning just to flick through them all a couple of times. I could channel surf all day and only once or twice come across the same episode of Friends. It’s great.

About half way across the Irish sea on Tuesday afternoon, I had begun to question the wisdom of spending all of this time and effort travelling all the way to Dublin just to talk to someone about the state of my crappy back, but that was dispelled the moment I stepped into the hospital, and the safe hands of the consultant that had seen me over three years before. This was further dispelled when in marched the lady I used to refer to as Rose on this blog, the physiotherapist that I went through a very long love-hate relationship with, which has ended happily on very much the love side. The final bit of dispelling came when all of my blood and urine tests were performed then and there, rather than me having to wait or come back the following day. In the hour or so I was at the hospital, I saw four different health professionals and got a serious bout of physiotherapy that left me feeling battered, bruised and incredibly relieved.

I’m incredibly fortunate to be in this position, in a way. The reason I made the panicked phone call to my parents last week was because the pain in my back had come back and wasn’t going away again, in the manner that I had become accustomed. I had tried doing it the UK way, and made appointments with GPs to have further referrals made, but that was going to take anything up to 6 months to even get the ball rolling – within a week of my tearful phone call to my Mum, I was in Dublin and being seen by four different people, all of whom were familiar with my situation, incredibly kind and supportive, and all of whom told me that I was going to be fine. And, dear and gentle readers, I really believe them.

This entry was posted on 22 June 2007 at 3:52 pm. 0 comments

Dreadful Nonsense

Home Sweet Home

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