the case. You want to be careful, Bert, you never know what the dog’s like. She could have all sorts of vices. I knew someone in Granthorpe who rescued a little white dog, looked like butter wouldn’t melt. I never saw such a sweet little dog. She’d only had it three days and it bit her hand. She ended up with four stitches and it went septic.
Marge is something else. If she can find a problem with something, she will.
I’ll be fine, Marge, thank you for your concern. I grit my teeth as I write back. Cavaliers have very sweet natures. More likely to lick you to death than anything else.
Well don’t say I didn’t warn you. I can imagine her sanctimonious expression as she types this.
I put Marge to one side and go back to the matter at hand. Okay, Bertie, I’ll organise a time with Jan to meet Tilly, although I’ll meet her first, just to make sure she’s friendly (to stop Marge from worrying) and then I’ll sort out a meeting for you – outside of course – and we’ll go from there. As long as you’re sure.
Sure? I think it’s meant to be. This little dog needs a home and a warm lap and I need some company. It’s a match made in heaven.
I make the arrangements through Erica and tell Jack the happy news, well, as long as it all works out anyway. My phone bings and announces I’m due on the video call with the hospital at 3 p.m. I sit myself in front of the screen having checked the view behind me is not offensive. I mean you don’t want left-over washing up, or anything embarrassing like Fifty Shades of Grey on your shelf when talking to the doctor. Mind you, they’ve probably seen it all. Whilst I’m checking the image, I accidentally press a button and for some reason my forehead becomes enormous and my cheeks puff out like a hamster. I look hilarious.
Erica wanders past casually and glances at the screen. ‘What are you doing? You look like a chipmunk.’
She peers at the screen and immediately her face changes too and we both roar with laughter. ‘Try this image,’ she snorts and our eyes swell up like comedy googly eyeballs and our teeth chatter like frenzied rabbits. We are in the middle of making stupid faces and laughing uncontrollably when my epilepsy specialist hoves into view.
Erica, still doubled up with laughter, rushes off into the kitchen and I am sobered up immediately by the sight of my doctor’s earnest and concerned face in front of me.
‘Just a second.’ I fiddle with the screen and after a couple of false starts, during which my face stretches as wide as the screen and my eyes become just two straight stretchy lines, the image goes back to normal. ‘Sorry about that,’ I say breezily as though I had just had some interference on the line or something.
‘No problem at all, computers can be tricky things.’ He twinkles at me and I relax. This is nice actually, sitting at home with a coffee instead of having to drive all the way to the hospital, struggle with parking, park three streets away, run all the way into the hospital, realise you need the toilet because you really shouldn’t have had that last coffee. Then rush to your appointment, worried you’re going to be late, panic at the length of the queue at the desk because you know you’re really late, then be shown into the waiting room to discover you’ve got a fifty-minute wait and you could have taken things a bit more steady on the way and not got half so stressed after all. But you never know; that’s the problem.
‘This is very civilised,’ I say to Mr Zivan, ‘and the clinic is on time.’
‘I know,’ he says cheerfully. ‘I haven’t had to step out of my home and I’ve managed to complete half my afternoon patients without overrunning.’
After our discussion I wander across to the balcony, stunned. ‘After more than two years seizure-free, if you are unhappy with the side effects of your medicine, you can always try coming off them,’ Dr Zivan had told me.
I had assumed I would have to stay on them for life. Of course, as the specialist has pointed out, if the seizures return as I reduce the meds, I will have to stay on them permanently, or I might even have an increase in seizures, which are harder