Tonsil Trouble: Part Four

Something that struck me, as I lay awake at 5am this morning having woken up for the third time in one night, is how dependant I am on a variety of external things to see me through difficult times. My three biggest vices – smoking, eating and booze – have always played a large part in my life’s celebrations or commiserations. Good news? Crack open the wine. Bad news? A cigarette and big piece of cake will help. This was by no means a revelation for me. I’ve known for years that I’ve got a fairly addictive personality. But now, as day 11 post-op rolls around and I’m still unable to talk properly, let alone eat or drink without screaming the house down, I’m more aware of it than ever. In all honesty, I’m quite miserable and my usual go-to remedies are definite no-nos.

However, I’m able to get out of bed now, and cutting back on the pain meds a bit means I can at least go up and down the stairs without a chaperone waiting to catch me (codeine turns me into a bit of a space cadet). So, I’m getting there. Slowly, slowly, catchy monkey and all that. A couple of things I wish I’d known before/have learnt since, though:

* Ice packs are a brilliant help. I’ve only been using them for the last two nights but wish I’d had them at the beginning.

* Despite the myths, ice cream is arguably the most painful thing I’ve eaten so far. It burns. But that didn’t stop me chaving my housemate’s Cornetto last night. I suspect that harks back to the food = happiness thing, though.

* People telling you ‘It’ll get better soon’ is both reassuring and infuriating. So if you can afford to, hire a nurse to look after you for the first week or so, because you will get grumpy, and your loved ones won’t have the foggiest idea of how to deal with you. Everyone ends up frustrated. Trust me.

* Tell the hospital, upon your departure, that there’s no point calling you to find out how you’re doing, because you can’t talk. You’d hope that they might look at their notes, see that you’ve had throat surgery and realise that telecommunications are a bit beyond your current remit, but they won’t. So you’ll end up answering the call thinking it might be important, and end up grunting at a non-English speaking person who makes no sense and keeps asking you to repeat everything, and you’ll get so frustrated that all you want to do is throw a bottle of wine down your neck and chain smoke between eating huge mouthfuls of gooey cake, just to cope with the idiocy. But you won’t be able to. All you’ll be able to do is drool into a tissue, look angrily at your nicotine patch and punch the next person that cheerfully points out that ‘It’ll get better soon’, as they tuck into their dinner with a beer in hand.

Evil Drives a Peugeot 206

I am not having a good week.

Having been plagued by recurring tonsillitis for the last five years, my long overdue tonsillectomy has been pushed back (thanks, NHS), and it has emerged that work will not be extending my contract past June. This means I’ll have a two week window in which to find a new job, as it is my understanding that potential employers are not keen on interviewing candidates that are unable to speak and bleeding from the corners of their mouths. And in a wonderful twist of irony, I’m currently wandering around in a cloud of WTF because I’m on antibiotics again. For tonsillitis. Hurrah.

However, the icing atop my cake of grief presented itself on Friday evening, when a mouth-breathing moron too involved in her own little world of delicious ignorance to pay any attention to the terrible trials of reality, swerved mindlessly across a lane of traffic, ploughed into my car and wrote it off.

“Don’t shout at me,” she bleated, as I stood there in the middle of Sainsbury’s car park, shouting at her. “I’m having a bad day.” And I saw red. Had housemate N not been there, the thoughts I were entertaining about slamming her stupid head in her undamaged car door may very well have become a reality. Her car was relatively unscathed. Mine was trashed. But apparently that’s fine, “because [her] insurance will pay for it all.”

But what her insurance didn’t pay for was the subsequent hours I spent standing in the rain trying not to kick the supermarket down while I waited for the AA. Or the time spent on the phone to her insurance company – a premium rate number – repeating the same details over and over in a dead, robotic voice. Kudos to Lisa and Hannah at Admiral Insurance for dealing with it all in such a friendly manner, but unless they tell me that they’re going to send a battalion of Storm Troopers to this idiot’s address, I’m just not satisfied. And here’s why.

To say I have little luck with cars is something of an understatement. The coolant tank of my first car exploded in my boyfriend’s face, and then the gear box fell out, and my second car, bought from a ‘sound guy’, was so riddled with mechanical cock ups that the garage very nearly didn’t give it back to me. I bought it for £2,000. I sold it at a car auction for £425. Then I got the Rover.

Yes, mock if you will. A Rover. It had faux walnut veneered panelling, and the seat covers were made out of what could only be redundant old people’s home curtain fabric. And the sunroof leaked. It leaked so much that before trips to the supermarket in my uni days, my housemates and I would have to gather whatever receptacles we could find to scoop the lakes of water from the foot wells.

The speakers were bust. The back wiper didn’t work. For a long time the driver’s side window wouldn’t open, meaning car parks offering a ticket payment service required meticulous positioning equations. In the four years I’ve owned it, I’ve been stranded on the sides of country roads, main roads, dual carriageways and even my own drive. I’ve met at least half a dozen not always helpful or indeed coherent AA repair men. I’ve replaced the tyres, the brake discs, the brake pads, the coil, the exhaust, the catalytic converter, the battery, the coolant tank and, most recently, the bloody head gasket. And the only reason I went to the almighty expense of replacing the head gasket is because I knew that everything else in the damn thing was new, and that it’d prove to be a more economically sound investment than buying a new car. Unless, of course, an unbelievably stupid oxygen thief smashes into the side of it, undoing all the work and money bestowed unto it with bittersweet emotion, because she’s had a bad day.

But this is fine. As I have now had several bad days, this logic leads me to believe that I am well within my right to drive into whomever I choose, and maybe throw some bricks through windows to boot. But don’t shout at me, I’m having a bad day.