It’s bein’ so healthy as keeps me goin’

As you know, I generally enjoy ill health.  I like to moan and whinge and have some low grade malaise hanging around in the background at all times.  This is partly because I am training for my old age when I can really hit my stride in terms of listing my illnesses and showing random strangers on buses my scars, and partly because I am so knackered from the onset of middle age and chivvying three small children about that I catch everything going.

 

You may wonder, given my predilection for coughing up a lung and wailing about it, why I don’t just go to the doctors and shut the fuck up.  Or why I have such a rabid hatred and morbid fear of doctors and hospitals in general.  On this damp Sunday night in February while the children are all hunkered down at their father’s house or in their cot, and husband is grinding away at the coal face of poker in order to win me a luxury Sicilian villa with hot and cold running chandeliers, I shall tell you.

 

Now, I am not known for the darkness of my blogging, but the NHS tends not to be very amusing unless you have private health care or live in Cuba (apparently the best free health system in the world), so If you’re waiting for the jokes, the first two paragraphs were it.

 

Things were mostly fine until I decided that I wanted to have babies.  Not brilliant, but manageable. 

 

I did have an interesting run in with the incompetence of the health service when I was sixteen and succumbed to a nervous breakdown.  When my parents first hoicked me off to the doctors because I couldn’t stop crying, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t read a book and couldn’t be left on my own for more than ten minutes without having a panic attack that made me want to vomit, my doctor’s suggestions for better health were ‘beer’ and ‘rugby’.  I was somewhat dumbfounded.

 

Needless to say, beer and rugby did not help me get better.  Nor did anything else the NHS failed to do for me, like getting me a counsellor.  My letter telling me that a counsellor was available to see me, came three months after I was ‘well’ again and a year after my initial consultation with the GP.  Timing is everything.

 

This is why I tend to try to avoid their tender ministrations when my emotional plumbing occasionally goes a bit hay wire these days.  I am still not convinced that beer and rugby will help. I know people will say I am probably in denial or being resistant, but hey.  Everyone has standards.

 

Nope. It was the pregnancies that really did it for me.

 

I have always been rather loathe to write about my experiences at the coalface of baby making.  I know I am very lucky.  I had some horrible experiences, but I did end up with three very gorgeous and very healthy children, which is the point of the exercise.

 

I am fully aware that there are other people out there who haven’t been as lucky as me.  Other, lovely, totally deserving people like La Belette Rouge and Red Shoes, people who should be having babies and who can’t. 

 

So, to them, and others like them, I apologize sincerely for the content of my next few blogs and will totally understand if you choose to skip them and come back when things are more ‘booish’.  Nevertheless, it is my blog and my pain and I’m going to write about it.  In depth.

 

You have been warned.

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