Getting my ducks in a row

  I’m trying to get ready for our overseas trip as well as expecting Belgian visitors day after tomorrow. As usual I write out a long list of our assets which includes bank account details (pins, passwords, etc.) and I have come to the conclusion that it is just easier NOT to die!

For most of the details I’ve said “look in my Little Red Book” (OAP calls it my Bible!) but then suddenly I realized that I take the Little Red Book with me so if the plane goes down so does the book! Likewise the cell phone which also has all my details of everyone I know and which is a back up for the Little Red Book. And writing out all the pernickety details of how to get into a bank account just goes against the grain! What if Eldest Daughter’s house gets burgled and the baddies get all my details? What do we do about the properties not in South Africa? I think the kids are supposed to go overseas taking with them proof that they are my kids and carrying a copy of our death certificate!

My tendency is to say “Oh bother, it’s too much trouble” and just leave it for another day, but part of me says “Just put it down on paper and let them deal with it when the time comes”.

If we can just hang on for another year we will have consolidated a bit and it will be less awkward, but having said that, OAP has just opened yet another bank account – this time with Capitec (the people’s bank!) because, hmmm, not sure why but it made him happy so what the heck!

So I have decided to stay on for another 20 years until I am an old, miserable git that they can’t wait to get rid of! Maybe they could incarcerate me in the cellar of You Know Where with the Flaming Salamanders and leave me to haunt the house for the next couple of hundred years!

The Leg

I walk again! In my whole life I have never known what it’s like to be unable to walk! Since breaking my fibula at the end of January this has been a total frustration. After 4 weeks in a plaster cast I was sent to an orthopaedic surgeon because the fracture wasn’t knitting, in fact it was further apart and now slightly displaced. He operated and inserted a screw from underneath the “knuckle” bone (I think that’s the malleolus) into the upper part to hold the fracture together and correctly aligned. This was done in the dismal Rustenburg hospital called Ferncrest which could really use a makeover! Us orthopaedic day patients were put in a windowless ward in the maternity section which was so freezing cold that I worried more about catching cold than about the op! Actually I don’t even remember being taken into theatre! Whatever they gave as a pre-op knocked me out and I had to ask OAP a couple of days later what happened!!! I don’t remember coming round or going home and yet I am informed that when he came to fetch me I was sitting up eating supper and quite chatty! Apparently we had to wait hours for the only wheelchair the hospital owns to take me out to the car. It was painful but not in plaster, just bandaged and with a splint to stop it moving and strict instructions NOT to put any weight on it. A week later I went back to the orthopod who removed the splint and dressings and put the leg in a fiberglass cast with by ankle now bent at 90 degrees. All concerned, including me, was amazed at how black and swollen the foot still was so I left with instructions to keep the leg up higher than my heart to get rid of the swelling and to get a “boot” fitted to the cast which would allow me to begin walking. Apparently walking will encourage bone growth – but after every walk I have to lie down and raise the leg for a couple of hours!! Anyway for one reason or another it was another 4 days before we could get to the “boot” place where I was fitted with a neoprene shoe that velcros around my foot. An ingenious device that enables me to walk with ease!!!! I still have to be careful only to put a bit of weight on the ankle but what a relief to have my “other” leg back!! I can stand while unbuttoning and unzipping my shorts to get to the loo, I can stand while I wash up – which is about the only housework I can do with ease, I can even, with some trepidation, get up and downstairs which means I can revert to our upstairs bedroom (when OAP has got rid of his ghastly head cold – poor man!) so that our guests from Belgium will be able to have the guest room! Meanwhile, I, for the first time in my life, have a MAID!!!! I am totally in love with Paulina who arrives on a Saturday morning and whizzes through the housework and leaves a few hours later with R100. I know, minimum wage hasn’t hit here yet and I was told not to rock the boat by everyone else who employs her! OAP still puts the washing in the machines in the laundry and hangs it on the lines he’s strung in there but Paulina, like a good fairy, goes in and takes it down, folds and irons and leaves it for him to collect in the wash basket. I think I shall employ her forever!


The day I had the boot fitted I walked from one end of the shopping mall to the other ( in Woolworths I realized that I couldn’t carry any of the stuff I’d bought so had to put most of it back and fit the rest into a little backpack I was wearing!) and then met OAP for lunch in the food court. I was shattered and sweating like a horse after running the Derby. I know I overdid it that day but it was such a break through that I was elated.

Each day I walk up and down the driveway to get stronger and in a weeks time will be able to put a little more weight on that leg until I can just walk normally on it. Unfortunately (for the leg) we are off to Cape Town with the Belgians on the 2nd March and this cast is supposed to come off on the 11th so I will have to have XRays and find an orthopod in Cape Town who will take it off and fit me with a sports brace which I then have to wear for the next 6 weeks.

So, a very expensive lesson has been learned: Birding is Dangerous!

Hairy legs

Has anyone any idea how long leg hair will grow if left to its own designs?   Mine is about half an inch long on my right leg after 5 weeks in plaster!  I only know because I am in an interim period of crepe bandage before the next plaster is applied tomorrow.  I am able to peep down inside the dressing and can see - a GORILLA'S leg!!!  DIsgusting!!!   I started shaving my legs when I was 15 and have never seen hairs on them since!  Even when I had jaundice I didn't have hair like this!  Maybe it grows better when its under cover?   Tomorrow I have the stitches/staples removed and a plaster cast applied and I hope its more comfortable than this odd half cast I have on which feels as if I have iron manacles (manicles?) around my ankle.  Last night I drifted off to sleep (with the aid of a pill) imaging only too vividly how slaves must have felt.   Doesn't matter how I lie, sit, stand it seems to rub on the ankle bone where I had the screw put in.  OAP pointed out that it's probably the ends of each broken bone rubbing together where they are screwed together but this is such an awful thought that I prefer the manacle/manicle one!

But if you want an even worse picture imagine this:  night before last we had a centipede in the bed!  Twice I felt it crawl on me and you wouldn't believe how quick I can get out of bed when I need to!  The first time I thought it was maybe a moth or a Christmas beetle but the second time (about 5am) I saw it - about 4 inches long, flat and red/brown with zillions of legs!  It whipped off into the folds of the bedclothes and OAP had no choice but to get up, shake out each bit of bedclothes and then spray.   He then admitted that it had crawled on him in the night but he couldn't be bothered to do anything about it!  Those things STING!!!!   When the grandchildren were little they always wanted to make their beds in the dormer window areas upstairs - but luckily when it came to bedtime (and dark) they wanted to get into OUR bed.  Problem with the dormer windows was I occasionally found a centipede in there under the mat or whatever had been left in there.  I think that's because there is so much wildlife inside the skin of the dormer - there's a family of squirrels and a flock of bats just for starters and their droppings are a smorgasbord for centipedes who hunt there looking for breakfast, lunch and dinner!  So every now and then one comes inside the house - i'm sure by accident but nevertheless it's IN.   Now the one in the bed has still not been found and the spray never got it unless it dragged all 100 legs off somewhere to die 'cause I got on the floor yesterday with the flashlight and looked under the bed and didn't see it lying, one hundred legs in the air, dead!  That means it's still here somewhere and hopefully NOT inside my leg thingie which, to a centipede, would make a wonderful dark and hairy nesting place!!!  Shudder!!!!