IBS

AKA irritable bowel syndrome...

I've been thinking a lot about IBS recently and researching it again. It's not because I'm hitting an age when I'm supposed to start talking incessantly about my bowels, but more because I never really do, talk about my bowels that is... Talking about your bowels doesn't tend to increase your friend numbers! The research is more to do with self-preservation.

No one who reads this blog is likely to have an inkling, given my reticence on the subject, that IBS plays a huge role in my life. I had my first run-in with it when I was still at uni in the 80s. All would be fine, then suddenly about once a month, I'd wake up bloated, in pain and unable to go to the loo. It would take a good two or three days of being extra careful before things would generally right themselves and I'd breathe a huge sigh of relief, well until the next time. And so that was the pattern I lived with through my twenties and thirties, some years worse than others, but on the whole bearable. Whenever things would get really bad, I'd be sent off for the usual, coelic and Crohn's testing, barium meal, endoscopy, colonoscopy, CAT scan or MRI and then I'd be told - 'Don't worry, it's just irritable bowel syndrome.'

Then it all changed. I contracted the worst bout of the winter vomiting virus in my life in the winter of 2012. I actually felt like my insides snapped. Sometimes I think they did. I woke up the next morning with my IBS playing up and assumed it'd all be back to normal in two or three days, it wasn't, and I'm still waiting... Every single day since winter 2012 has been marked by galloping indigestion, bloating (usually about 2 sizes over the course of a day), a feeling as if someone is sticking a red-hot poker right through the upper half of my stomach, lower back pain, muscle spasms in my intestine, an inability to go to the loo, exhaustion, need I go on? Interestingly, I recently discovered most sufferers can trace the beginning back to a viral/food poisoning episode.

The funny thing is - when you have these symptoms once a year, you take a sick day and lie in bed trying to get over them, but you can't do that when every day is a sick day, so I fully suspect those who suffer from IBS are probably amongst the workers who take the fewest sick days.

Anyway, I'm not looking for any miracle cures (unless anyone happens to have one) or sympathy. What I'm actually on to suggest is a change of name... You see irritable is just wrong - it's kind of like 'my baby's a little irritable today...' And that makes people think it is a minor inconvenience. If I had a pound for every doctor who has told me 'Don't worry, it's only IBS'... What sufferers actually need is a GP who happens to suffer from it! Irritable trivialises something that is actually quite difficult to live with. For starters, you can't wear clothes! That's a bit of a problem in a climate like Scotland. Anyone who thinks I tend to spend 85% of time in leggings because I think I have the figure for them, think again! Even the elastic in tights irritates my insides, so it's leggings all winter, dresses in the summer and pain whenever I have to dress formally for a business meeting. Then there's food - most self help books tell you to follow a low-FODMAP diet - ie eliminate these (see the lists with the reddish background) from your diet, ie eat as if you are a lactose intolerant coeliac sufferer who doesn't like spice, coffee or anything fried - that doesn't leave you with much scope! You also have to try to keep your stress levels low - it's not like my life has been in anyway stressful for the last decade, is it? (Did someone say Brexit?) It is physically and emotionally draining.


So without further ado, here's my list of suggestions:
Agonising bowel syndrome
Excruciating bowel syndrome
Red-hot poker bowel syndrome
Somebody's-tied-a-knot-in-your bowel syndrome
I'm-so-physically-exhausted-by-this bowel syndrome
Who-needs-to-poo-anyway bowel syndrome
You-can't-eat-what!? bowel syndrome
Can't-remember-what-normal-feels-like bowel syndrome
Will-this-ever-end bowel syndrome

Or in fact, maybe we could drop the word 'bowel' from it too, then sufferers might set up self-help groups instead of assuming the subject should be taboo!

I've never actually used this emoji before, but it seems kind of appropriate!

💩

Chuggy's back

Restored to his former glory - phew.

Poor Chuggy

So there I was (last week, before the snow!) minding my own business in the shopping centre car park, stopped in a long line of maybe eight stationary vehicles waiting for the front car in the line to turn into their chosen parking space when I saw a black Ford Fiesta backing out of its space cautiously. Charlotte was in the passenger seat and she turned to me and said 'I don't think they have seen us, mum!' I had come to the same conclusion at the same moment so tooted my horn to alert the driver that my Fiat (and the other eight cars he had seemingly failed to notice) were at his back. I expected he'd stop at that point but instead he pressed his accelerator fully down to the floor and flew at the side of my stopped Chuggy at a speed I had never seen a car reverse at!

Charlotte screamed, expecting the side of the car to crush her two legs. (It didn't, thank goodness). Léon, who was in the seat behind her, shouted 'Woah!', and Anna who was behind me burst into tears. I stepped out the car to see Methuselah himself step out of the Ford. He looked a bit like you'd imagine Basil Fawlty's grandfather might have looked; tall, grey, gangly, open-mouthed in shock. I was gobsmacked. 'What did you just do to my daughter?!' came involuntarily from my mouth before I calmed down enough to ask him his details. He looked surprised and managed 'I got mixed up between my pedals' before his wife ranted that he only had two given it was an automatic, so how had he managed to floor the accelerator trying to do an emergency stop!?

Anyway, he gave me his details, admitted all liability (in front of the witnesses) and trundled off (banished to the passenger seat) while I went about my shopping.

Chuggy's away now getting a new door and wing and I'm playing about with my free Nissan Juke hire car - I quite fancy trading the Ipsilon in for one of them, it's very nippy as well as feeling safe and heavy.

Interestingly, when I took my Chuggy to the coach builders for an assessment and a quote, the receptionist who was reading through my case told me that over the past decade she has seen a huge increase in the number of older pensioners in my area who run into other cars and then, because they are rather wealthy and they do not want the DVLA alerted to their little driving misdemeanours, come with the person they have hit and offer to pay their repairs and courtesy car cash so they do not need to go through their insurance. Basically they are paying to insure their car because it is illegal not to, but not reporting crashes so they don't lose their licences.

My elderly gentleman has gone through his insurance so will likely have to prove he's still trustworthy behind a wheel (I would say that if a pedestrian had been walking behind his car when he reversed, he'd easily have broken their pelvis or legs at the speed he hit me), but it is alarming to think the there are many unroadworthy drivers out there who are bypassing the system so they can keep their cars long beyond a point when they maybe should.

I fully realise that if you drive everywhere, losing that right is terrifying and isolating, but is it really as terrifying as potentially crushing someone's child against another car?

The 'Millennium bug'

It occurred to me the other day when I was mentioning Charlotte being a real 'millennium baby' that those of you who didn't have a baby that week might not have been fully aware of the ridiculous hoo-ha surrounding the millennium bug!

At my last antenatal visit before Charlotte's birth Y2K bug hysteria had reached a crescendo. The press was full of scare stories that all computer systems and all systems driven by computers were about to fail and we'd be plunged back into the dark ages! I wish I'd kept the actual hand-out I was given by the Queen Mother's hospital but I didn't realise years down the line that it might become a quirky and fun historical document. What I do remember of it is the following:

• Don't phone an ambulance to take you to hospital in labour as the system risked being down, use a taxi instead, or better still your own car
• Bring a torch in case the lighting system failed
• Bring a photocopy of your medical notes in case the hospital couldn't access them on their system
• Bring a sleeping bag in case the heating system failed
• Bring extra warm clothes and hats for the newborn
• Prepare your relatives for the possibility they might need to cook all your meals at home and bring them in to you
• Don't panic about complications as the one generator they had hired would be used to run theatre for emergency caesareans
• And finally, one that wasn't technology related: Be prepared to wait as there would no doubt be a rush given the huge number of millennium babies predicted across the world!

I was somewhat bemused and not overly worried given she was not my first baby. I went into labour at lunchtime on 3-1-2000, so they'd had fully two days plus to sort out any glitches. I made my own way to hospital (I lived five minutes away) at 8pm and it was dead. There were no other mums in labour that I could see, the lights were on, even the fairy lights on a tiny, scabby Xmas tree in the corner of the deserted ward seemed to be working. The radiators were hot, the fridges on and it was pretty much a repeat of my stay when I had had Marcel two years earlier! I was the only one in my ward as the great millennium rush hadn't materialised either. Definitely a bit of an anticlimax!

The baby photographer presented everyone born that week with one of these special frames!

The 'Millennium baby' has turned 18!

How old does that statement make you feel? Wasn't the millennium new year about five years ago?

I remember when Marcel turned 18 I did a collage of photos to see how he aged through the years. I will do the same below with Charlotte, to see how the last 18 years have changed her (or not)...

So here is her lifetime so far in 19 images:

Charlotte aged 8 weeks, 1, 2, 3 and 4 years (it's interesting to see her eyes didn't change from blue to green till she was 4!)

Charlotte aged 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 years

Charlotte aged 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 years

Charlotte aged 15, 16, 17 and 18 years

It has actually been an interesting exercise. If you had asked me an hour ago, without showing me any photos, I would have said that Charlotte has not changed at all since about 2009, because she has not significantly changed her hair since then, but when I look at the photos side by side, she has actually changed quite a bit.

It will be interesting to see what the next few years have in store for her as she moves on to university. Things are still up in the air as she hasn't fully decided what or where to study, but watch this space!

Last reflections before 2018

I am utterly dreading 2018. I wish there was some huge rock I could crawl under and hide for a year or even two. I can't understate the level of horror this new year fills me with.

Before us lies the biggest decision of our life, and also of our children's lives, and it is not something we can influence in any way. Over the next few months it will become clear whether we get to continue with the life we have built up here, in a house that is already 65% paid off, where the third of our kids is already in high school, where my two oldest have already reached university (yes, I know Charlotte hasn't started yet, but with 6 A Highers, I doubt she'll be getting straight rejections from UCAS this spring). I get to find out if my my husband can continue working as a consultant in areas of linguistics where he has built up a wealth of knowledge and a name for himself in Scotland. We get to find out if our company, which has been running for nine years, will make it to ten...

I am the problem, not the other six. The other six are free to come and go as they please across Europe, they will still be EU citizens at the end of 2019; I am the only one who has had their freedom to move voted away and so it is my clock that is ticking. If we want to stay together as a family and give the kids a future in a country that isn't considering skidding off the economic rails, I have to get out by March 2019 unless things take a dramatic turn for the better.

I stupidly assumed it would have been clear by now and the government's intentions would be obvious, but a more clueless government, I have not seen in my lifetime. As recently as last month May's government signed up to not creating a border in Ireland, not creating a border in the Irish sea while emphasising that they would indeed leave the internal market and customs union. I don't know if they are incompetent or just downright liars but the first two promises make the third and fourth impossible.

So as we move towards midnight, I won't find leaving 2017 behind particularly difficult. Every day we have woken up in the stressful limbo that only those of us in a mixed EU/UK marriage know. We don't think about Brexit on bad days, or when something big is in the headlines; we have lived and breathed it every minute of every tiring day since June 2016 and we are desperate to take back some control of our lives, rather than leaving everything to the whims of the right-wing press and the most incompetent Tory government every to head up Westminster.

Sadly, I can't say I have any faith that 2018 will be any better but at least at the end of next year I may have more of a clue about where our futures lie and whether my family gets to stay together or is forced apart in the short term at least.

Life's little pleasures

When all your kids are old enough to build their own snowmen, you can take the photos and drink Glühwein in the garden - class.

Funny eyes

Léon has a strange mix of blue, green, yellow and grey in his eyes. It is often hard to put your finger on what colour they are, and they simply often reflect his clothing... he has blue eyes when he is wearing a blue t-shirt, green, when he's wearing green, so for fun I decided to put a photo of him through the photoshop filter that removes all except a specific colour from a photo - I chose blue. Interestingly, it seems the bottom half of his eyes are predominantly blue, but the top two halves have come out in grey so they must be green or grey!

That hang-up again

I've mentioned it on occasion over the years - that hang-up of mine, namely being called Phyllis... I think in my most recent rant I was finally coming to accept that as I grew older, greyer and frumpier, I would maybe start to suit my Phyllisness, and come to be at ease with it, but I hadn't factored in a new issue that would strike me. It is one that has always been there, but that is only dawning on me now.

I was named Phyllis because I was born on 4/2/68 and my gran had died of cancer on 30/1/68. At her death my granny was exactly 50 years, six months and one day old. Next year on 5/8/18, I will turn 50 years, six months and one day old... and that chills me. Strange; I've never been a superstitious person, but as Phyllis Buchanan the 2nd, I feel ill at ease with it all the same. Will Phyllis Buchanan the 2nd be a luckier Phyllis? a longer-lived Phyllis? Will she break the curse of Phyllisness?

I have a sneaking suspicion the next eight months and sixteen days are going to take a long time to get through, and I may be a bit touchy, irritable and perhaps a tad over-sensitive... I may consider coming back out to play on August 6th (if I make it through till then), but in the meantime, bear with me as I question every ache or pain I suffer in a slightly hysterical manner. (I've got five kids! I'm needed on this planet!)

It really is no fun being a replacement person for a dead one...

Weather report, school-style

Last time p6 had an assembly for the parents something big was going on. There was a good deal of whispering and giggling for the best part of a week beforehand but they kept telling us that the project 6A had been working on about natural disasters was top-secret! When we were finally let in on the game, it was awfully cute! Here, thanks to the school twitter account, is Anna's class's natural disaster presentation!

Xmas songs in Silverburn

Anna and her choir performing in Silverburn on Monday (taken from the school tweet)for anyone who missed her.

Here is a video of our Senior Choir performing at @shopsilverburn to help raise money for @PPWH, accompanied on piano by one of our P6 pupils. 😀🎶🎹🎄 pic.twitter.com/3j6yRl9XGi

— Kirkhill Primary (@KirkhillPS) December 13, 2017

Family planning

Amaia's sensible approach to future family planning, over breakfast this morning:

Amaia: When I grow up, if I decide I want to be a teacher, I am going to have a few kids. I think it is important if you decide to be a teacher that you fully understand children...
Me: And if you decide you don't want to be a teacher?
Amaia: Well, in that case I'm definitely not having any. They wear nappies, mum, don't you know?!

...No, I never noticed, pet...

Pants

Thomas has been reading his grandfather's memoirs again and was lamenting the fact that he didn't make much mention of his many siblings or their personalities. Maybe that was in case they happened upon them, as they were all alive at the point he was writing them. That got us on to discussing what might be of interest to descendants, were we to write about our own lives.

Thomas was saying it would be interesting to tell people about how fashions have changed over our lifetimes. An obvious example, he cited, was ties. When he moved to Scotland, he was expected to wear a tie to work, a few years later he was expected to keep one in his desk in case of outside visitors but in general management went without, and now they don't expect anyone to wear ties in any of his workplaces, no matter the meeting.

I thought from a Scottish perspective, I could mention the evolution of the school uniform. When I was a child, skirts were compulsory in my area. Come rain, shine or snow, nothing allowed a girl to don a pair of trousers. I remember the year our school heating system broke down (winter of '79 or '80), wearing skinny jeans (leggings hadn't been invented yet), with a slightly-too-long skirt and long woolly hockey socks on top, so no one would discover I was breaking school rules. My legs were a lumpy mess but I was deliciously warm for the first time at high school! Fortunately, when the first immigrant girls arrived from Pakistan, they fought the trouser rule on religious grounds, the school gave in and then found they couldn't allow trousers only on religious grounds, so trousers became an option. It was after I'd left, but at least I knew my daughters wouldn't be hiding jeans under socks at some future date.

The item of dress, however, that would probably shock my offspring the most was 'navy blue gym pants'! This was a compulsory item of clothing. Everyone wore blue pants to school every day (unless you could actually remember when you had PE lessons) because PE forced you to strip to your pants. Given all the underage '70s sex scandals that have been coming out in the press over the last few years, you have to wonder who ever thought it was a good idea for all girls aged 4-12 to prance about in these and a t-shirt as they vaulted over horses and climbed wall bars - it must have been a paedophile paradise! Boys, as far as I remember, wore shorts, only girls were forced to do PE in underwear! Given that many girls start their period before leaving primary, it is quite shocking to think back on. I certainly never particularly liked the big, scratchy blue pants and I'm thrilled my own daughters now get to wear shorts.

Santa Dash fun

Glasgow holds an annual 'Santa Dash' every December. It's on a Sunday morning at 10am - and it isn't just any Sunday, it's the coldest darkest Sunday of the year. Sunday is the only day we can have a lie-in because of school and violin. Every year I suggest going along (not even necessarily running or walking it, even spectating, and every year everyone in the family just looks at me as if I've asked them to poke rusty nails in their eyes! I'm sure my daddy would have come along with his camera if he'd still been here - he liked mornings and photo shoots.

Anyway, last Saturday as always I came out with my nonchalant 'Santa Dash is on tomorrow morning, we'd need to get up at 9. Who wants to come?' Thomas already had his get-out - he's been in bed on steroids and antibiotics for a week now with a bad chest infection, Marcel was home for the weekend but claimed a dissertation that happens to be part of his final degree was more important, Charlotte didn't even bother to reply, she just rolled her eyes, the girls said they'd rather sleep... Then suddenly Léon volunteered! He has a broken arm at the moment so instead of sleeping long as he usually does on Sundays, the pain has been wakening him up so he figured he might as well come along!

I got up, my phone read -7 degrees, I opened the curtains and saw nothing - freezing fog so thick I couldn't see the garden bench. Léon came down, at that point the girls came down too, having had a change of heart so the four of us went in and watched 8000 Santas, half a dozen elves, snowmen and reindeer braving the Glasgow weather for a good cause. And it looks like next year I may have to come again, as they've all asked to take part next time. 😀 Maybe then the fog will be less thick so you'll be able to see more of the Santas stretching into the distance!

And here are the photos to prove what fun it was!

Sweet Anna

Anna's choir is singing in shopping centres and at school show performance nights over the next two weeks. She's learnt a dozen Christmas songs, including the one above (which is actually called 'It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, rather than alot like Christmas - hee hee - just check out my favourite point of reference on the 'alot'...) 

Anyway, taking her to bed the other night, she asked if she could sing me it, which she did until she got to the line 'And mom and dad can hardly wait for school to start again!' (at 1:01). She stopped, as if realising what it implied for the first time ever, lip trembling and spat out 'Omg, is that true?' I assured her it wasn't, and I meant it. I never long for my kids to go back to school after holidays; yes, I long for an evening off occasionally, or a week where evenings are not spent predominantly on homework, but they are only little once, and having a 20 year old too, I know that all too soon, 'Mom and dad' will be left home alone with their memories, while the kids are somewhere new making their own lives, so no, I genuinely don't wish for school to start again (especially not on a dark, freezing scrape-the-car Scottish January morning!)

My hamster-wheel existence

8-30 Take 3,4,5 to school, running late and ranting, return home.
10-15 School phones to say Léon is wanting to come home as he feels under the weather - cold, throbbing broken arm, temperature. Pick him up, return home. Get a long and philosophical conversation about how he wants to grow up to be a phonetician (is that normal when you are 12?!)
10-45 Charlotte needs dropped in Glasgow to sit her LNAT exam, return home, with Léon recounting more about phonetics in my ear while I drive.
11-15 Primary open day for an hour: cut, glue, glitter, colour in, melt in the heat of two overcrowded classrooms, return home.
1-00 Gulp down some leftover chilli, then work for one hour uninterrupted 🎆(glued Léon in front of a Danish movie).
2-30 Pick Charlotte up from train after LNAT, return home. Get a blow by blow account of the exam  which was much harder than all practice runs, rant, rant, rant.
3-00 Pick up Anna from school, return home. Get a blow by blow account of p6 activities and how thrilling and wonderful everything about December is.
4-00 Pick up Amaia from baking club, return home. Get a blow by blow account of baking club and how she'll just 'die' if she doesn't get into it again next term, especially with her best friends Ameya and Sophie.
5-09 Drink a (cold) cup of coffee I've been trying to reach for over an hour.

I'm half waiting on Marcel to phone and say he has a sudden desire to visit the family at short notice and needs picking up on the moon or somewhere even less convenient.

I refuse to go shopping for dinner - if we have no food, we're not eating. So there!😝

And I wonder why I never get time for the day job! I'm meant to do at least 5 hours Italian today. I need a 30hr day. Sigh

Thought-provoking

Fractured wrist

I knew as I reached the top of the hill (that the high school stands on) that something was amiss. Léon and Charlotte were standing by the roadside as they always do on a Friday, waiting for me. They were smiling, talking and joking together but I noticed immediately that while Léon was only holding his schoolbag in his right hand, Charlotte was holding both her schoolbag and Léon's PE kit bag -- that's odd, I thought. I pulled up and they got in. 'Oh by the way mum, I think I've broken my arm', Léon joked. 'Seriously? What? When?' So then I got the proof once again that he is a bit of a space cadet...

The story seems to be that he was standing in the busy Maths corridor holding his phone to check a message, between classes (which Charlotte assures me you're not allowed to do!), when an s5 kid, who was rushing to class, tripped over his own shoe and went flying smack into Léon's arm and thumped him against a wall, quickly apologising and carrying on his way, as did Léon, who hadn't realised the enormity of what had just happened. When was this? 10am!!!! He said the pain kicked in half an hour later so he asked his PE teacher if he could be excused from his social dancing class and sit and watch, after that it didn't occur to him to go to the medical room, have anyone call me or even ask a teacher what the best plan of action was... It was my left hand and I'm right handed so I didn't think breaking your arm was a reason to ask to go home! Give me strength!

So I dropped off the girls and went to the Vicky where they confirmed he had a 'buckle fracture' which would probably take three weeks to heal.

At first his main worry was that they might make him sit out social dancing and he didn't want to miss the opportunity to 'get the girls' sympathy!' (like brother, like brother 😉). It turns out they are trialling putting splints rather than plaster casts on them as they are short lived and not too dire, but I expect that isn't the best situation to be in with fifteen days to go to his orchestra Xmas performance - he'll be the first one-handed first violin in the junior orchestra's history - sigh. Mind you it apparently holds his wrist in 'waltz position' so he's pleased!

To cap it all, we don't even get the benefit of a long lie for the first time in five years of Saturday school when he misses his lesson tomorrow as it's the primary school winter gala day and Anna's choir is performing at that!

Cosy reading and baking pizza

Here are some of our other Primary 6 pupils celebrating book week by making story dens and getting cosy with their favourite books. 📚📖#BookWeekScotland pic.twitter.com/8GGcSigtwK

— Kirkhill Primary (@KirkhillPS) December 1, 2017

Isn't this just the sweetest idea for a Friday afternoon in December? The p6 teachers decided to let the kids bring in pillows and blankets and build dens under their school desks, then they got to change into their onesies and read their books with their friends. Lovely to see (half of) Anna with three of her best friends Inishka, Marie-Liang,  and Akshara in this tweet from school.💜

After discovering the tweet of den day, I looked through this week's school tweets and found little Amaia at baking club making pizza too and really enjoying it. Cute!

Here's our Baking Club with the pizzas that they made! 🍕🇮🇹 pic.twitter.com/rWAlpJxXdb

— Kirkhill Primary (@KirkhillPS) November 29, 2017

New word

A great new word that I think will need to enter the general family vocab forthwith...

Amaia to Léon: 'Oh stop being sooo kiddish!' 🤣