snakemeister's Blog - 2old2play

Happy Birthday to me!

I turned 30 last Tuesday! I've made it a custom to take the day of my birthday off, but this year I took the whole week off instead - I ended up sitting around playing Red Alert 3 to the end - fun times

Last Saturday, we had my girlfriend's sister and her boyfriend, and her parents. We ordered in veritable Chinese banquet, and I got ridiculously drunk - fun times again I suffered badly for it on the Sunday of course, so that wasn't quite as much of a fun time.

Despite receiving a card from my parents for my birthday, I've yet to actually hear from them in person - there's been no contact from them in weeks, maybe even months now, and I've resolved to wait and see if they phone, and what they say if and when they do. I say 'they', but i really mean my mother, as my father only phones when there's something he needs.

Still, no great loss, if I'm honest.

One last thing - i thought I'd share pictures of the birthday cake my girlfriend had made for me - enjoy!

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Running on Empty

Well, I guess I needed a bit of a break after that last bit of soul-searching. Well, not exactly soul-searching, but certainly some soul-bearing. My thanks for all the comments I received, they were very much appreciated. I think a couple of people asked what I meant by 'the rest is history' with Morag and I. I should have clarified; we've been together since we started dating, maybe 8 or 9 years now, and have had our own place together for 6 or 7 years. We've had our ups and downs, and had the occasional row, but nothing serious.

Anyway, back to the title. I feel like I'm running on empty just now, scraping the bottom of the barrel, or whatever euphemism you want to choose. I'm struggling to work up any enthusiam for my job at the moment, and every morning when I wake up, I'm finding it harder and harder to get out of bed and trudge my way in. I tend to have emotinal 'peaks and troughs', I guess most people do, so it's not the end of the world.

It may be something to do with the season changing, but our Bankruptcy is weighing on my mind more and more just now, and with Christmas and my Birthday coming up, last year's family drama with my father is coming back to haunt us. Morag and I were actually up late on Friday night talking it over, to little effect. I guess it's just one of those things.

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The lesson I had to learn - 3 of 3

Last, but not least is Lynn.

She actually worked on the same floor of the office I did. I never worked with her directly, but I knew who she was. It was a few months after Jullie had fled the scene, and I honestly wasn’t looking to get hooked up again, but something just seemed to click. She had quite a bit of backstory – she’d been married, her husband had left her for another woman and there were rumours that she herself had been having an affair with a married man on our floor. My friends didn’t really think too highly of her, to be honest, and I think that added a certain ‘frission’ to things when we started flirting via email.

As is the way of these things, I can’t remember when or why we started chatting, but we began exchanging friendly emails that slowly changed to become flirtatious. Our first date was a day out to Loch Lomond, which we kept secret because we didn’t want anyone in the office knowing just yet. This was at her urging, and even though I didn’t quite see the need, I went along with it because I was daft and excited and didn’t see it for the warning sign it was. Had I told any of my friends, I’m pretty sure they would have physically restrained me.

Lynn was a few years older than me, and obviously had more life experience. I guess there was something of the rebound in there, because she was nothing like Jill or Jullie. She didn’t smoke, hardly drank, and bought her clothes almost exclusively at Marks & Spencers. ‘Nice’ is the adjective I think most people would use to describe her.

My mum never took to her, neither did our cat Tigger, both of which were more warning signs I chose to ignore. I suppose it was kind of a whirlwind – we went from almost complete strangers to dating seriously, to me declaring myself to be in love within a couple of months. Definitely something of the rebound in there. In retrospect, I think Jullie hurt me more than I realised at the time, and Lynn was a subconscious reaction to it.

Deep down, I knew things weren’t really right between us. I’m not a particularly conservative kind of guy, and I’ve always been very laid back. Lynn was rather uptight, slightly prudish (outdoors at least), and while she wasn’t high-strung, she wasn’t particularly laid-back. I think I was as much of a rebound thing for her, as she was for me. I was younger, adventurous and probably nothing whatsoever like her husband or any man she’d dated before.

As time went on, I started to see signs of some of the issues she kept hidden. If prompted, she could get pretty badly worked up about her marriage and divorce. Even though I was barely out of my teens and flat broke, she had a problem with me living with my parents, even though she was doing the same. The one time I challenged her about that, she went off on one about how ‘her house’ had been stolen by her ex, etc.
She had a weird thing about me not sleeping over at her parent’s house, even when they were away one weekend. I remember distinctly we had sex one night late on and I fell asleep afterwards (which is actually odd for me – usually I’ve got a weird rush of energy afterwards) and she woke me up about 2 in the morning, and told me I’d have to leave and she’d drive me home.

What’s funny is that her parents were really, really nice people. I think they were two of the nicest people I’ve ever met – Elizabeth (Betty) and Alan. As much as Lynn had a problem with my living arrangements, she didn’t seem to be doing much about moving out of her parent’s house herself.

Eventually things ended. There wasn’t any drama, any cheating or anything like that. She started to grow distant and pull away eventually, but I was too much of a blouse to challenge her about it, and just stuck my head in the sand. She broke things off one day (it seemed to me) out of the blue. I can’t remember what she said, but I was in tears. I’d convinced myself that were going to be together forever, so my world fell apart. I went off the rails a wee bit, started doing the Goth thing, dyed my hair black, painted my fingernails black, bought a leather trenchcoat (which I still have today). My friends ribbed me mercilessly about the whole thing, but I didn’t listen to them, I just shut myself off.

I did all the stupid things you do when you’re heartbroken. I kept a bottle of her perfume so I could smell it when I wanted to torture myself, I sat and cradled pictures of her – the whole nine yards. Soon enough, I got a grip on myself. I woke up one day and decided enough was enough. I cleared my room out completely, binned everything of hers I could find and put the whole thing behind me.

When I look back, I realise I got over Lynn quicker than I thought I could or would. For a while I worried that I hadn’t really, and that I was carrying a torch for her secretly, but now that I’ve had time to think about it I realise that it was mostly a rebound thing, as I’ve said above.

It was maybe 6 or 7 months after that when I met Morag through a mutual friend from the office. It wasn’t love at first sight, but we certainly hit it off when we met on a Wednesday night at my friend’s place. The Saturday following, our friend was going to get a tattoo – Morag was already going to go with him for some mutual support, and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind my tagging along as well so that I could spend some time with Morag. He didn’t, so I did, and the rest is history.

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The lesson I had to learn - 2 of 3

Second was Jullie. That’s the correct spelling – her dad was drunk when he registered her birth. ‘Nuff said. She was a good friend of a girl I worked with at the time, Laura, who was also a very good friend of mine, one of my best friends in fact. She’d had her eye on me for a while apparently, even while she was dating a guy, Paul, who I worked with. Are you seeing a pattern here?

Jullie drank like a fish, smoked like a chimney and got stoned like it was going out of fashion. She was from one of the scummiest parts of Cumbernauld (my home town) and her brother, who was actually a really nice guy, was pretty much a layabout drug-fiend. She was also the first girl I slept with. She had her own flat in Cumbernauld, and I ended up spending a lot of time there, sleeping over for days at a time and only going home to grab new clothes and keep my parents happy by spending time in my own bed. I think we dated for about 6 months or so.

She was nice enough, and while I can’t say I was exactly head over heel for her, I liked her a lot, and she’d even given me keys to her flat. We had plenty of fun, and we spent a lot of time together with mutual friends which was great. I’d also finally managed to kick my depression into touch, and was doing large amounts of Extacy at the time, so my perceptions of how much fun it was may have been skewed somewhat.

I’m not sure if things started to get too serious for Jullie, or if she figured out that I wasn’t as interested in her as she was in me, because things came to a halt when I caught her swapping spit with another guy one night when we were all out clubbing.
It was a Friday night, and myself and ‘the guys’ had been out on our own, while ‘the girls’ had been doing the same. We met up later on in one of the many dingy clubs in Cumbernauld. Immediately I knew something was up, as Jullie was distant, wouldn’t sit near me, hardly said two words when we came in and had a face like thunder (as we say over here). I paid it no mind at first, as I was drunk and a little high, but as time went on it started to work on me, and our friends noticed it too as the atmosphere started to dampen. Eventually she staggered back from the dance floor with a stranger in tow, some guy her and her brother knew from way back and hadn’t seen in years. She paraded him round us for a bit, then dragged him away to dance with. I watched them out of the corner of my eye, getting a little annoyed at how close they were dancing, but tried to put it down to paranoia. I was wrong though, and when I was going to the toilet I saw the two of them against a wall, tongues down each other’s throat. I just walked past them, not really sure what I was going to do. On the way back out of the toilet, they’d gone. When I got back to the table we were all sitting at, Jullie was pulling her coat on, and saying that the guy (I’m not sure if I even knew his name) was leaving and she was going to walk him to the taxi rank, then go home on her own. I didn’t believe her, and felt sure she was taking this guy home with her now. I’d had my doubts about the relationship for a while, and I knew immediately that I didn’t feel like fighting for or about it, so I just nodded and let her go.

As the rest of us were leaving the club later, I took my friend Laura aside and told her what I’d seen. She wasn’t sure whether she sold believe me or not, and kept asking if I was sure about what I’d seen, but I was adamant – I knew what I’d seen. I was drunk and a little high, but not enough of either to be seeing things. Jullie denied the whole thing, but I knew what I’d seen. I suppose it gave me the excuse that I was probably looking for to get out of the relationship, but it still left me feeling pretty down. I refused to return Jullie’s phone calls for a week, and moped around the house. My mum realised something was up, but I didn’t give her any details for a couple of days. The one thing that really pissed me off was that the majority of my friends seemed to think that, even if it was true, and she had slept with the guy, that I should forgive her and move on, because I was just being stupid and should settle for what I had. Given that one of my friends had got his girlfriend pregnant then dumped her in her 8th month, and another was regularly seeing his ex – the mother of his baby girl – behind his girlfriend’s back, I wasn’t too inclined to listen to them. On of them had the nerve to give me shit after I went over to collect my stuff. I’d said to Jullie I’d come over to talk things over, but when I got there I finally realised there was nothing to say, and just handed her the set of keys she’d given me, grabbed the few belongings I had and left.

I was bummed out for a couple of months afterwards, but nothing too serious I don’t think. It hurt for a while, given that I’d lost my virginity to this girl; I caught myself almost crying once or twice, but fought them down – I wasn’t going to waste any tears on someone who treated me that way. Picking through the rubble with Laura later, she mentioned that Jullie had told her she was worried the relationship was getting too serious too fast, and that she was thinking about slowing things down. Well, her methods may have been unconventional, but they were certainly effective

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The lesson I had to learn - 1 of 3

Here's a new one for you, gentle readers - a multi-parter. I'd written the lot up, intending to post it as one chunk, but at 2414 words, it would be a bit much I think, so I'll split it up into three parts, which fits the subject matter perfectly, as you'll see. Don't worry, this first part is only a couple of hundred words.

As I was driving in to the office this morning, Madonna’s ‘Power of Goodbye’ came on the radio. I’m not really a fan of Madonna, but one of the lyrics stuck in my head, “You were the lesson I had to learn.” It got me thinking about my ex-girlfriends, and I thought I would share them with you.

First up we have Jill. I think I was 20 when we hooked up. She was the youngest sister of a woman, Elaine, whom I worked with at the time, and we’d met at Elaine’s birthday party. We chatted for a while, but I didn’t really think we ‘clicked’ or that I’d made an impression. Turns out I was wrong, and on the Monday following, her sister-in-law asked me if I wanted to meet Jill again, I said yes and handed over my mobile phone number.

Jill was a year or two younger than I was, and fancied herself as a bit of a Goth. She was also pretty hot, and I had no idea why she was interested in me. I think the fact that I had my eyebrow pierced at the time made her think I was a bit of a rebel. She wasn’t really that bright, either. She was obsessed with Keanu Reeves, believed she was going to become a witch and start her own Coven and all manner of strange things. I really should have clocked that it wasn’t going to work out, but I was still struggling with the tail-end of the depression I’d been dealing with since my teens, so I wasn’t exactly au-fait with how to handle relationships – Jill was in fact the first ‘girlfriend’ I’d had, I had to pluck up the courage just to try and kiss her.

Things just kind of petered out, I suppose. We actually broke up, then got back together for a few weeks, then broke up ‘properly’. I can’t remember if it was me or her that broke it off, and I suppose it doesn’t matter now.

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What's wrong with me?

That’s kind of a rhetorical question, to be honest – I don’t really think there’s anything ‘wrong’ with me.

Sometimes though, when I peer into the inky black depths of my mind, I wonder if I might be ever so slightly ‘wrong’, because sometimes I get the feeling that I’m hooked on drama. For example; a while back, when my mum was in hospital, there was a very real danger that she wouldn’t survive her surgery. If I’m brutally honest about my thoughts, there was a small part of me that was hoping that she wouldn’t make it.

Deep down, there’s a little nugget of Snakemeister which would revel in the heartbreak, trauma and depression which would result from the loss of my mum. There’s even another part of me which would welcome it, given that the death of my mother would make it easier for me to cut all ties with my father.

And it’s not just that. Say, for example, my girlfriend had been cheating on me. Depite the fact that I’d be utterly heartbroken, and my world would fall apart around me – while I was sitting around lost, wondering what had gone wrong, there’d still be part of me deep down giggling like a schoolgirl, happier than a pig in s**t.

I’d love to know where that comes from. Is it something to do with a desire for sympathy from other people? Is it due to a lack of attention from my parents in my formative teenage years?

It doesn’t surprise me that I’m a little weird this way – I’m emotionally stunted at the best of times. My girlfriend and I used to have arguments about my not being able to open up to her when we first started dating, and the fact that I struggled to convey my feelings, even though I knew how much I love her.

We weren’t big on touchy-feely emotional stuff in my house. I can count on one hand the amount of times I remember my mum hugging me, and my dad has never actually said out loud that he loves me.

I know it’s a bit of a cop-out to blame things on your parents, and I’ve tried hard to work through the issues I’ve got. I’m happy to report that I’ve got no problem holding hands, cuddling, snuggling or being touchy-feely with my girlfriend, and I suppose that’s the important thing really.

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ADD

Can you suddenly ‘develop’ ADD just before you hit 30?

Recently, I feel like my attention span has a length of roughly 10 minutes, sometimes even less than that. I find myself avoiding articles and columns online that I’d normally read through with relish, because I’ve skim-read them and weighed them up to be too long to bother with.

It extends to pretty much everything else – listening to music at home, I’m slicking through playlists constantly. When I’m watching movies, I’m ready to jump out of my seat if they don’t grab me right away.

Even writing this short piece, I’ve clicked out of Word and back to Firefox several times. It’s extremely annoying.

P.S. It turns out the seal around our bath has been leaking for some time now, and the flooring under the bath has been seriously damaged by the water, but I’ll talk about that another time.

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Warts and Verrucas

I've got a cluster of 3 verrucas on the sole of my right foot, most annoying they are. They've been there for a while, but they haven't really bothered me too much. I was at the Wart Clinic at our local GP a month or so ago, and the nurse there whacked some liquid nitrogen on them, but it hasn't done much. I've been using one of those 'home freezing' kits, but it's been equally useless.

It's not the first time I've had a run-in with warts or veruucas. When I was a wee boy, no more than ten, I had warts all over my hands. I literally had at least one on every finger of each hand. It was terrible - I felt dirty and unclean every time my fingers rubbed against one of the warts. I nded up trying to hold my fingers at weird angles so they didn't brush against the warts I knew were there. I had them for about a year or so, I think, during which time my parents tried the usual creams and ointments from the doctor. Eventually the doctor burned them off with liquid nitrogen, although it took at least 2 visits.

Ever since then, I've had a slight case of OCD when it comes to keeping my hands clean. I've got a very particular ritual when it comes to washing and drying them, which I do several times a day. That probably wasn't helped by my mum accusing me of having 'clammy, rapist hands' later on in my life, when I was hitting puberty, which also gave me a bit of a complex about my hands getting sweaty.

Fun times.

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Writing

I like to think of myself as a writer. I may be kidding myself on, given that doing one column a week (usually) on a gaming website - however popular that site is - does not necessarily constitute 'writing'. For almost as long as I can remember, I've enjoyed writing. I've always had a fertile, active imagination and I've always tried to scribble down ideas and thoughts as they come to me.

As I've got older, this process has stalled a little. I've had ideas for a novel or two and more than a handful of short stories floating around my head for years now, but I haven't done any more with them than some half-hearted outlines and maybe the odd scene or two. I'm not sure if it's a lack of motivation, or procrastination or just plain old laziness, but I can hardly seem to get started on most of it, let alone get them finished.

My girlfriend called me earlier to say she'd been talking with one of our neighbours. Her sister disappeared around 10 years ago - her body was never found and no-one was ever charged with her murder. Then, a few months back, a guy called Peter Tobin was charged with the murder of another girl and during the investigations, her sister's remains were discovered buried in the garden of a house Tobin used to live in. Anyway - Morag (my girlfriend) was speaking with our neighbour, who mentioned that she's written a book about the whole thing, which is due to be published in the next couple of months.

I suppose I'm a little envious or jealous. If I want to be a 'writer', then I need to get my finger out and start writing. Part of me doesn’t want to write because I'm rarely happy with what I've written when I'm done. Another part of me slaps myself in the head and points out that 90% of writing is re-writing, and that I should just get stuff down on paper, and take it from there.

I've been playing WoW a little too much lately and I've neglected my painting, so I've stopped playing altogether for a bit until I clear my painting backlog. Maybe I'll focus on writing once I'm finished with painting. Or maybe I'm just procrastinating again.

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My Father

A little vignette I wanted to share with y'all, which may shed some light on my relationship with my father.

My sister and I were quite young when this happened - we were friends with a brother and sister, Kevin and Caroline, who lived in the row of houses below us in our street. By some coincidence, it happened that the brother and I were the same age, as were our sisters. We'd been friends for a few years, and I remember one day my sister and Caroline had been playing, something happened and Kevin ended up knocking Gillian over, or hitting her, I can't be too sure. I wasn't there,being ensconced in my bedroom with my head in a book or camped out on my computer.

Regardless, Gillian came home in tears. My father, doing the only thing any reasonable father would, stormed upstairs to my bedroom, and ordered me to go out and beat Kevin up. Now, it may come as no surprise to you that I was never the kind of child who got in fights. Any arguments I was involved in which turned physical invariably ended up with me losing blood in a variety of painful and embarassing ways.

Perhaps this was my father's idea of 'toughening me up' or 'making me a man'. More likely he was just to much of a blouse or too lazy to go down and speak with Kevin and Caroline's parents. Being young and spineless, I went and did it. I tried to beat up my friend for probably doing less to Gillian than I did on a regular basis. I think it was fairly inconclusive, with the pair of us flailing around on the ground in a ridiculous scrum.

I don't blame my father for many of the mistakes I've made in my life - almost all of the screw-ups I've made have been off my own back, and I'm man enough to admit them

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An Old Book

I remember reading a book when I was much younger. It was a child's book - about a boy, or it may have been a girl, searching for either his/her sister or family, I think. I'm not sure where it was set, geographically, but wherever it was, it was winter. I remember that the snow, ice and cold played as much a part in the novel as anything else did, but for the life of me I can't remember the details of the book.

I remember one scene in particular, where the boy (let's just say it was a boy) comes to a town, or a party, in the middle of the snow. The people there are full of life, laughing and dancing round a large bonfire. Even though he knows something isn't right, the boy can't help but get caught up in the excitement and joins in the dancing. The people are dancing round and round in ever-decreasing circles, dancing closer and closer to the fire, and at the last instant, something happens and the boy realises the entire scene is an illusion. Everything fades from around him, and the bonfire disappears to reveal a massive pit in the ground, into which the boy was about to dance and plummet to his death.

Some of the imagery behind the story has stuck with me all this time, even though I can only remember snatches of it. I also remember something to do with the boy saving his frozen tears, tiny pips of ice, which I think he throws at someone or something in the story.

It's been pointed out to me that I may just be half-remembering The Snow Queen, and filling in the blanks in my memory with my imagination, but I don't think so. I'll need to pick up a copy of the book to check I suppose.

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Still Alive

I know, I know, I fell bad about not updating, so please don't hate me.

There hasn't been much to report, tbh. Mum's surgery went fine, and she got out a day or two after my last update. Unfortunately, the staff on her surgical ward screwed up the laxative medicine they gave her, so she wasn't quite as 'cleared out' as the surgeon was hoping for. That meant that he wasn't able to get a good look at everything he wanted to when he was removing her gall bladder. He booked her in for a scan, so they could try and spot anything sinister. The scan itself went ok, if a bit more severe than my mum had been led to believe, but unfortunately she won't get the results for a week or so yet. So, more chances to 'wait and see'. Someone remind me how lucky we are to have the NHS?

On my side of the tracks, there's even less to report. Work is going to be getting busier as we're losing one of the engineers on our team to another contract. Not the end of the world, but it means I'll probably end up doing some real work instead of skiing most of the time

I've been busy over the last couple of weeks, putting together a big article for Massively, 'A Return to Star Wars Galaxies'. I used to play Galaxies pretty hardcore for a couple of years, but got tired of it and left before they released their 'New Game Enhancements', which quite literally completely changed the game. I haven't played it since then, so I grabbed the 14-day free trial and put together an article, nearly 4000 words long, giving my impressions of the game. I'm rather proud of it, so go check it out.

In unrelated news, my G4 iBook has started acting up, seeing as how I've had it for nearly 5 years now and it's ran without a problem all that time, I'm not too bothered, I just need to figure out how to trouble-shoot OS X!

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Quick Update

I'll need to make this a quick one, as things are about to kick off here in work - bloody Mondays.

My mum's doing ok just now. Her douole-oscopy went okay, although they knocked her out instead of just sedating her slightly, which didn't surprise me at all. The surgical team apparently took a biopsy of something, but seeing as how mum hasn't spoken to the surgeon since she went under, she doesn't know what they did exactly. Still, she seems in good spirits, and look well, although that may be artifical, and due to all the blood they've given her while she's been in. She's having her Gall Bladder taken out on Wednesday - which is keyhole surgery, but still pretty serious. We're going in to see here tonight, and she should have spoken with her surgeon, so we should get more details then.

On the WoW front - Blizzard have managed to recover all of my items, gold and both deleted characters, and it only took them a couple of hours! w00t! I finished reformatting and patching my PC on Saturay afternoon, and raised a ticket with a GM just before I left to see mum in the hospital, and by the time I got back home, everything was back to normal. Score one for the Blizzard GM team. Obviously, they read my column on Massively last week, and were quaking in their boots about me writing something seriously stroppy this week. Yeah, I'm sure that's it.

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Mum Update and B**tard Hackers

So, we went though to see my mum last night, and she's in decent shape for now. Her doctors really don't sound like they're got a bloody clue what's wrong with her. They're sure that her Gall Bladder will need to be removed, but they're also sure that it's not the Gall Bladder which is causing her nausea and vomiting, difficulty swallowing and apparent blood loss. They are also sure that whatever is wrong is quite serious, but they just don't seem to know what it is.

She saw her Surgeon on Wednesday who told that they would definitely be taking her Gall Bladder out today, and they would infuse her with two pints of blood to bring her levels up to a safe point for the operation. However, during the day yesterday, she was told by a member of her surgeon's team that they wouldn't be taking the Gall Bladder out now, and instead are going to perform a Colonoscopy and Endoscopy this morning, basically so that they can have a look and see what's going on inside her.

She was also told that if they do find anything that shouldn't be there - tumours, ulcers, etc., they won't be doing anything about them yet, but will instead take biopsies or samples, get tests done on them, and then let her know in 10 days or so what the results are.

So, to recap - she's getting a double-oscopy this morning, which may or may not find something sinister, at which point they may or may not decide to keep her in or let her go home.

*sigh*

Also, I got home on Wednesday night to find an email from Blizzard informing me that my account had been suspended due to activites which led them to believe that my account had been compromised. I check the Armoury quickly, and only one of my three level 70 characters is on there - that may mean that my other two have been deleted, or that they've been transferred to different servers and had their names changed - and he's naked. I've not logged into WoW yet, as I plan to reformat my PC completely, so I'm backing the data up just now.

My PC is zipped up tight, with all relevant patches, AVG and Zonealarm Pro running contstantly, so I'm stumped as to how I got infected. In the past, I've scorned people who have been hacked, and blamed it on their own stupidity and/or complacency - maybe it's just Karma coming round to bite me on the ass.

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My mum isn't well

So, my mum is pretty sick. For as long as I can remember, she was always really heavy, to the point of being diagnosed morbidly obese. Then, two or three years ago, she had a gastric band fitted.

You might know what that is, but if you don't, essentially it's a band that is surgically fitted around your stomach, which prevents overeating. Despite a few hiccups with my mum's post-op treatment (thanks a lot NHS and your post-treatment infections) things went fine, and she's lost pretty much all of the weight she's wanted to.

Recently though, she's been feeling really sick. Not only has she been feeling nauseus, but she's been struggling to keep any food down at all, and her Gall Bladder has been causing her serious pain. Following some investigations and tests, it turns out that her blood count and haemoglobin levels are dangerously low. This last part is particularly odd given that she's been talking Iron tablets as a matter of course since her band was fitted.

She was having her regular check up a week or two ago, and the surgeon who had fitted her band decided that she needed to get some tests done as soon as possible, so they could figure out what was going on, because it was lookingincreasingly serious. Cut to this morning, and my Dad sends me a text telling me that he was taking my mum into hospital. I called him up, and he pass me over to my mum, who told me that she'd been to her local GP this morning, who has told her she should go straight into hospital this morning, given that she's gotten steadily worse to the point where she can't keep any food down, and is as white as a sheet.

My mum was supposed to have been scheduled in for an Endoscopy the last time she spoke to her surgeon, so they could find out what was going on, but it turns out that it was never booked. According to the doctors, it seems likely that my mum is bleeding internally somewhere, perhaps her stomach, but the cause is unknown at the moment. What is quite worrying is that my mum is really weak just now, not having been able to eat properly recently, and her low blood levels mean that any kind of surgery would be extremely dangerous for her.

Watch this space.

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