The Unbearable Writeness of Being

Some writing days are easy. Today is not one of those. Since it isn’t, I thought I’d tell you lot about it. Feel free to skip past to another breezy post where things are chipper.

It’s difficult to tell how other writers handle their down days. Here on the Writewipe blog, I feel like my own tale is all I can tell. The writing part of my life is so important in keeping me sane and meaning that my existence has more meanings than just that of a carer. Not that being a carer doesn’t have its own meaning, but in current times other than being clapped at, it doesn’t really feel like a place in society that’s valued, so I need to find that somewhere else.

What I should be doing today is battering on and getting to the end of my short Dark Sci-Fi story. I know where it’s going and I’m on the last bit. It’s usually the easiest bit for me. I can do a denouement. “Get on with it then!” I can hear the cries from the cheap seats. Well yeah, but my brain feels like its trapped under a heavy object. The weight of ‘carer shit’ over the past few weeks has been tough. We’re slogging through getting our youngest vaccinated, she meets all of the UK criteria: Clinically Extremely Vunderable, (CEV to its mates) over 12, susceptible to chest infections, neuromuscular condition*. But actually getting anyone locally to do it, is a fight. In the meantime, we’re trying to decide whether to put her through another elective surgery to straighten her feet. It would give her small payoffs currently. Mostly being able to do ‘standing transfers’ where someone helps her to her feet, but she can then support her own weight while we move her somewhere. But the future payoffs in terms of staving off various future forms of wonkiness are massive. So this week we had a three-hour appointment, with a lot of super clever people from two departments of two hospitals to collect information about the pros and cons of it. The NHS is truly freaking awesome. The organisation alone of getting all of those people into one place was nuts. But it was knackering. The actual processing and imparting of that much dense information and then parallel processing the implications of it. The fact that any operation with the youngest is a big deal. She’s at higher risk than ‘normal’ kids of complications from anesthetics. Even getting a needle into her at all is a trauma for all concerned. (Her veins are tiny and the ones that are any good are largely messed up from the number of ops she’s had so far.) So the long story short version is, do an op now, while she’s well, with all the inherent risks involved there, with no guarantees it’ll fix what’s up, versus wait it out, and try and manage as best we can as she navigates the growth spurt that’s coming in the next eighteen months. But see above, about thanking our lucky stars for the NHS. God knows what you, dear non-UK readers would also have to go through in the same position. The consultancy fees alone for Monday would have been breathtaking.

Anyhow, the carefully crafted, bizarrely situated, thrilling Sci-Fi I should be writing is postponed for today, while I get my head around real life, by writing it down and telling it to you lot. Is that okay?

* Neuromuscular conditions are a massive grouping of hugely varied diseases, youngest has a genetic error which gives rise to a very rare one of these. THIS is a great article by Great Ormond Street Hospital, London, that explains it better than I can!