Making It Up As I Go Along (25 page)

With Caitríona’s wedding and all, there
have been millions of people in the house for what feels like months and months. First the
Praguers arrived, and because we’ve got a Wii yoke they took up permanent residence;
meanwhile, we’d had the lovely, lovely Dylan staying with us, and none of this is to say
that it was unpleasant, because it was delightful, but chaotic, you know. Ema being eight and
Luka being seven and Dylan being three months, it was all go.

The house was permanently filthy and you
couldn’t go two steps without stepping on a baby alarm, or kicking over a glass of milk
abandoned by Luka, or breaking your neck skidding on all my shoes, which Ema had taken out of my
wardrobe and strewn throughout the hall.

Then people started arriving for the wedding
– Anne Marie and Jack (nineteen months) and Caitríona’s friend Denise.

Meanwhile, many other people from New York were
billeted nearby, and our house became Pitta-Bread-and-Hummus Central (it was all I was able to
concentrate on in the supermarket – pitta bread and hummus is always safe. And quiche. And
fecking Ben & Jerry’s, more of which anon).

We had the hen night in the Powerscourt Hotel, a
very glitzy, de luxe joint, and the next day we went to the spa, which I was very interested in
because so many Irish spas are crap. (It’s a feminist issue: because they’re mostly
used by women there’s an attitude of ‘Ah sure, give them any oul’ shite, any
crappy oul’ rub with a bit of
lavender oil and they’ll be
delighted. Call it sixty minutes, but only give them forty-three, fling around the words
“pamper” and “deserve” and make sure you charge them a fortune.’)

But this one (it’s by Espa) is the real
thing. Expensive, yes, undeniably expensive. I feel it’s unseemly, going to a fancy-Dan
spa in these credit-crunchy times. All I’m saying is that although it’s costly, you
get what you pay for.
More
than get.

Then we had a week of rehearsals and hair and
make-up trials and fake tan and pedicures and a rehearsal dinner with forty-five of us, then the
day itself, which was truly miraculous and it didn’t rain and Caitríona looked
STUNNING, like Grace Kelly and Gwyneth Paltrow, only far more beautiful, and it was all really
great.

Then I sort of thought that everything would go
quiet, but it didn’t, because although the wedding was on the Saturday, we were still
overrun with people (I’m not saying it wasn’t lovely, because it was) until the
Wednesday, and I was so knackered from toasting pitta breads and I’d slipped way, way off
the sugar-free horse and was eating rings around myself, shoving ice cream into my clob at all
hours of the day and night – you see, the thing is normally I wouldn’t have ice
cream in the house because it would drive me insane and I’d have to get up in the middle
of the night and eat it simply to stop it badgering me, but because of the visitors the place
was full of all kinds of lovely grub and between the high emotion and the tiredness, I
couldn’t resist. I’m fecking HUGE and struggling to get back on the straight and
narrow, but it’s hard work.

THEN I went to Austria and Germany on a book
tour. And although I was destroyed before I even started, I had a wonderful time. I LOVE
Germans, I find them warm and polite and – yes! – punctual. Nothing wrong with being
punctual, the world would be a far nicer place if people were ON TIME and didn’t make fun
of poor Virgos such as myself for wanting to puke if I’m ten minutes
late for something.

Which brings me neatly to my birthday, which was
on 10 September. I started the day in stunningly beautiful Hamburg, then on to Mannheim, which
not many people have heard of but it was a nice place, and at that night’s reading,
everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, which made me happy.

It was an uplifting and rewarding tour –
there were five of us travelling together – and even though we were working and travelling
a lot from city to city, we had a (well, I did anyway) gorgeous time, and on my birthday, on the
train to Mannheim, a man carrying an icebox full of Magnums arrived in our carriage. Isn’t
that the most amazing thing you ever heard? Like, they weren’t
free
, you had to
pay for them, 2.5 euro a go, but we all had one and afterwards my German companions said that
they’d never before heard of such a phenomenon, a man laden with Magnums on the
Hamburg-to-Mannheim train. Which made me wonder if I’d dreamt it, but if so, we’d
all had the same dream.

On the Friday we went to London, because Himself
was going to Tadhg’s stag do in Brighton and had to drink forty pints and lie on the couch
all the next day, roaring for a bucket, then on the Saturday was Suzanne’s fortieth
birthday, also Seán and Caitríona were back from their honeymoon in Italy, so we all
met up.

THEN, when we got back to Dublin, both myself and
Himself had massive dental work done. THEN my dad took a tumble and cut his face and broke his
glasses and got a terrible fright. THEN myself, Himself, Mam and Dad all had to go to Newbridge
to look for Mam’s mother-of-the-groom rig-out for Tadhg’s wedding (she would go
nowhere else but Newbridge, even though there are hundreds of shops in Dublin, but shur feck it,
what harm is there in indulging her).

Dad was going round with his
cut face and crooked glasses offering his styling services to other customers, and I’m
sure the people in the shop thought I was guilty of elder abuse and that I must have pushed him
and broken his glasses, because I kept shouting at him to sit down and stop helping the other
shoppers.

THEN on the Friday night it was Susan’s hen
night.

THEN on the Sunday it was Dylan’s
christening.

And as I write, it’s going to be
Himself’s birthday on Saturday, also his father’s eightieth, so we’re going to
the UK for that, then back for Tadhg and Susan’s wedding.

Himself is after doing something to his back and
he’s not able to sit in his chair, he has to type his emails while kneeling on the floor,
and last night in bed he couldn’t lie on his right side because his back hurt, then he
couldn’t sleep on his left side because his back hurt, then when he lay on his back, his
back DIDN’T hurt but it triggered his persistent cough, so in the end he had to get up and
go downstairs and sleep sitting up on the couch. For the love of God!

I made him go to the doctor because I’m
sick of it, and I expected much resistance because even if his head has fallen off his shoulders
and is rolling around on the floor, bumping into the legs of chairs, he always says,
‘I’m fine, I’m GRAND, what could a doctor do for me?’

THEN Himself and I had a scrap about the meaning
of ‘persistent’. As in me saying, ‘While you’re at it, talk to the
doctor about your persistent cough.’ And he said, ‘What persistent cough?’ And
I said, ‘That cough of yours that has persisted for the past week,’ and he said,
‘It’s a cough, I grant you, but it’s not persistent,’ and I said,
‘But if it has persisted for a week, which it fecking well has, then it’s
PERSISTENT.’

Of course all of this was just delaying tactics
by him to get out of going to the doctor.

But he WENT to the doctor
and got a prescription for Solpadol. Do you know it? A delightful codeine-based painkiller. I
had it last November for a throat infection and,
mes amies
, I was OUT OF MY HEAD on it.
Extremely pleasant, so it was. Well worth the sore throat!

Luckily Himself is a stoic and fears painkillers,
thinking if he takes more than four Anadins a year he’s in danger of being
‘addicted’. Amateur. Therefore I ferried away his lovely packet of tablets to my
medicine press (as big as other people’s walk-in wardrobes) and I planned to fob him off
with Nurofen, which is grand but nothing like as nice as Solpadol, and he will never know.

Meanwhile, I was wishing for something painful to
befall me so I’d have a legitimate excuse to lie in bed OUT OF MY HEAD, mildly itchy
(that’s the codeine) but otherwise in great form.

But then Himself approached me and ASKED –
yes, ASKED – for some Solpadol. He claimed to be in terrible pain. I turned down his
request. I said that he wasn’t meant to take lovely tablets on an empty stomach, so he did
something unprecedented, he said he would
eat something even though it isn’t a
mealtime
(he is very, very, oh yes, VERY different from me). I will give you his exact
words. He said, ‘I will have a Solpadol sangwidge.’

In the guise of concern, I snapped two caplets
out of their foil and gave them to him with a glass of water, in the hope of obscuring the fact
that I was fobbing him off with Nurofen. He’ll be grand.

Anyway, he’s going to see a specialist
soon. He must have slipped a disc or something, God love him.

mariankeyes.com
,
September 2008.

We’ll kick off with Himself’s ongoing
health debacle. He was sent for an MRI scan, and while we were waiting for the results he was in
absolute agony and my old friend Solpadol wasn’t even touching the sides of the pain, so I
flung myself on the mercy of the neck pain specialist (because it’s always easier to do it
for someone else, no?) and he gave Himself some (to quote the pharmacist) ‘very potent
painkillers’ – MORE potent than Solpadol!

But even they didn’t do the trick. It was
late Friday afternoon and we were in Dundrum with baby Dylan, and Himself was grey and sweaty
and glazed-eyed with the pain, and I thought, ‘Cripes, we can’t go into the weekend
with him in this much agony,’ so I rang the specialist again but couldn’t get him,
so I rang the local GP and they had to see the ‘potent painkiller’ prescription
before they’d do anything and it was all very messy.

But at the eleventh hour, just before the chemist
shut, the scrip was faxed through and the receptionist scored a NEW scrip for (and once again I
quote) ‘opiate analogues’, even stronger than the ones that were stronger than
Solpadol, and if they didn’t work, the next step was to admit Himself into hospital and
put him in traction and on a morphine drip.

God, it was horrific, but I was convinced at this
stage that Himself had slipped a disc and that it would all be fixable, but it turns out that
no! No disc was slipped! The result of the scan shows he has some sort of degenerative condition
where some bone in his
neck is growing against ‘a bundle of
nerves’ and that’s what’s causing all the pain.

We looked it up – it’s called
Cervical Spondy-something or other. I wish I could tell you more, but every time I tried to read
it I thought I was going to faint and had to stop before I toppled over and crashed face-first
into the keyboard.

It’s horrible when someone you love is in
pain. I wish I could take the pain from him and feel it myself. (Of course it’s very easy
for me to say that, as such a transaction is impossible and if it WAS possible, I’d
probably waste no time trying to give the pain back fairly lively – ‘Take it, take
it, for the love of Christ, take it!’)

He had to embark on a variety of anti-arthritis
pills and madzer painkillers and wait for two long, horrible, agony-riddled weeks for a series
of steroid injections. I was convinced that the steroid injections would fix him entirely, but
no, when the day rolled around and he got the injection, the specialist said that physio was the
next step and if there wasn’t an improvement, Himself would have to go under the knife and
have the offending bit of sticky-outy bone removed (i.e. sawed off).

Meanwhile, TONS of stuff was happening. Including
poor Himself’s birthday, which he shares with his dad, and it was his dad John’s
eightieth birthday and we went to Saffron Walden for it, and I suppose between this far more
dramatic celebration and Himself’s agony, Himself’s birthday was somewhat
overshadowed.

THEN no sooner were we back from England than we
repaired to County Clare for Tadhg and Susie’s wedding! In Gregans Hotel in the wilds of
the Burren. It rained so much on the way down that the roads were impassable (honestly).
Father Ted
was filmed in Clare, and you know the episode where a priest gets trapped
in Craggy Island Parochial House because the bad weather meant ‘they’ve taken in the
roads’? Well, it was a bit like that.

Himself, maddened by the
cocktail of drugs he was on, took a notion to go some bizarre back route known only to him and
his fevered imagination, and because I forgot that he was out of his head and stone mad, I let
him, and by the time we’d been driving on a single-track boreen for half an hour, getting
precisely nowhere, it was too late.

Anyway, we eventually got to the hotel, and the
biblical-style rain ceased for the day of the actual wedding and it was blue and blustery and
very beautiful. (I LOVE County Clare.) Susan looked stunning and everyone was very happy and it
was all great fun.

Newly-weds Caitríona and Seán were over
from New York, and Niall, Lilers, Ema and Luka were over from Prague, and apart from the
hand-to-hand combat that ensued as we all tried to get a go of Dylan, we had a great time.
(Dylan is now nearly five months! And the most sweet-natured, smiley, squashy creature you could
hope to meet. And he has gorgeous bright red hair!)

mariankeyes.com
,
October 2008.

Well, the great news is that Himself is much
improved. Things were bad, bad, bad and he continued to be in appalling pain or out of his head
on painkillers or both, and there was no let-up, and I know that it wasn’t my agony so
I’ve no right to whinge, but like I said last month, when someone you love is in pain,
it’s horrible to witness, and suddenly I remembered all those articles I’d read
about people living with chronic pain, people who’ve been in car crashes or are cursed
with bad arthritis, and I realized that for every day of their life they’re in agony and
their main purpose every day is to manage that pain, and suddenly I was wondering what
‘manage’ meant.

It made me realize how very lucky he and
I’d been previous to this. That we’d been going along, not realizing how very
beautiful our lives were, simply because we were living each day without pain.

Mam is forever saying ‘Your health is your
wealth’, which usually generates much mockery from me and the rest of her children, but
the older I get the more I’m inclined to agree.

The funny thing is that every night I try to
write a gratitude list and one of the things that regularly appears is ‘Today no terrible
disasters happened to me or anyone I love’, so in a way I HAD been grateful for the luxury
of ordinariness and I was desperate to return to those halcyon, pain-free, anxiety-free
days.

Then! Unexpectedly a corner was turned! Himself
went back to his physio, who did some fiendish jiggery-pokery on the place
where the nerves and his spine intersected, which released him from much of the pain, and
he came home armed with a set of exercises, which the physio claimed would be a great help.

He’s meant to do them for ten minutes three
times a day, and in solidarity I am his coach and timekeeper and I wear a hoodie and sweats and
carry a stopwatch. First of all he has to nod his head vigorously and while he’s doing
that I shout, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’

Then he has to shake his head vigorously and I
shout, ‘No! No! No!’

Then he has to waggle his head in a strange,
inconclusive way and I shout, ‘I don’t know! I don’t know! I don’t
know!’

Then he has to do rotating movements with his
head, like I used to do in the warm-ups in the aerobic classes I did in the 1980s, and I shout,
‘Round we go! Round we go! Round we go!’

At this point he tries to look at the watch and I
say, ‘It’s only been four and a half minutes, keep going,’ and he objects and
says that it must be at least seven minutes, but I shout, ‘Funky chicken! Funky
chicken!’ and I hide the watch inside my hoodie.

Defeated, he commences doing jutting movements
with his head (like he’s doing the funky chicken), and I sing Earth, Wind and Fire songs
to get him in the funky chicken mood.

Then he has to do some funny business with a ball
and a wall, where he sort of headbutts the ball against the wall using his neck muscles. I am
still looking for the best song to accompany this, but ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for
Fighting’ has been my default thus far.

Meanwhile, Christmas looms. God, what a wretched
business it is, and hard to believe that this time last year we were swanning around, so
bounteously laden with worldly goods that we were altruistically giving each other goats on
behalf of communities in the developing world.

This year, seeing as the
world economy has gone into meltdown, it’s more like, feck the Ethiopian farmers and
where’s me Body Shop gift basket! I am, of course, joking! All I’m saying is that
things are very different this year. Lots of people won’t be buying anything – goats
OR Body Shop gift baskets.

I am getting Himself a yearly subscription to
Sheridans Cheese Club for his Christmas present. It’s what I got him last year and he says
it’s the best present anyone’s ever given him, and what it entails is that on the
second Wednesday of every month a foul-smelling parcel shows up at the front door (usually flung
by the postman, who yells, ‘For the love of God! The stench in the van!’).

When the foul-smelling parcel is unwrapped, it is
found to contain four different cheeses and a long biography on each of them: the farm they grew
up in, their nationality, age, favourite member of Girls Aloud, all that business. I
couldn’t be bothered myself, cheese is cheese, but Himself gets a great kick out of it.

Regarding the worldwide economic meltdown,
Himself says that if there’s any way that people can, we should continue spending. This
causes me to narrow my eyes suspiciously at him and conclude he’s after buying a load more
CDs. ‘It’s basic Keynesian economics,’ he keeps saying, and I keep replying,
‘What the hell would you know?’ And then I remember that actually he has an MA in
Economics and, wrong-footed, I shout, ‘Time for your exercises! Dance! Boogie
Wonderlaaaa-aaand!’

mariankeyes.com
,
November 2008.