Some weeks need to be immortalised in megabytes. This week is one of them. in Hot town, summery in the city - 2017

It started on Monday (as weeks often do) with L saving a shot on goal at the beginning of her football training session. I arrived at the pitch with ten minutes to go and noticed that she was holding her arm a little strangley. The coach told me that she hurt it saving the goal and that she had carried on playing. He had to approach her to give first aid and applied an ice pack.

We got home from football training and I had a full on asthma attack. I never have had a proper one before but I couldn’t get any air in or out, everything was utterly clamped shut. T casually glanced up from instagram and said, “dad, mum can’t breathe,” before going back to her TayTay memes. Rich ran out and panicked which didn’t help my rising panic! I kept puffing salbutamol into my mouth but I couldn’t actually suck it in. I made myself calm down and remembered the advice I had given L a few days earlier while coughing and coughing: slow your breathing down. So I stopped trying to gasp for air and just tried to gently breathe a tiny bit. I had dropped my inhaler along with everything else I was holding by this point, and slowly my throat relaxed, letting small amounts of air in, each time I breathed in another small amount got through. Eventually I was back to breathing properly but my throat hurt and I was incredibly shaky.

Anyway, L borrowed my wrist splint as her wrist was hurting and we got on with the evening.

In the morning, I was staring at the blurry, blue and white image which would eventually sharpen up to be the bathroom once I woke enough to see. L came in and said her wrist was hurting even more than the previous day. I looked and saw a definite, unnatural banana shape to her wrist.

Oh bugger....

I texted my boss to let her know we would be late as a trip to A&E was imminent. I had to get T to school first but that’s a whole entry in itself! We arrived at the hospital by 8:30 and there were no waiting times, straight through to triage and onto the nurse who sent us to x-ray before coming back to see a doctor who told us that L has a buckle fracture. Her bone has bent with a crack at one side. So she got a splint in her own size along with calpol and we were at school by 9:30!

The next evening, Wednesday, I was chatting with a friend when L ran downstairs, “Mum! Oreo’s paw is huge, it’s twice the size of the other one! Come and look!”

Oh double bugger - I really can’t afford for there to be anything wrong with the cats at the moment!

So I had a look and, sure enough, that paw was fucking HUGE!

We deduced that she must have swatted a bee or wasp, as it’s one of the cats’ favourite pastimes, but we couldn’t be sure so I made an appointment at the vet for the next day.

Oreo is the cat who does not like to be picked up and I had to get her into the cat basket. It really is a one-chance-only swoop and grab mission. If you fail on the first attempt, there ain’t going to be a second, and so I ended up lowering her, head first, into the basket because she had wriggled so much that i had hold of her just above her back hips.

The vet examined her very thoroughly and found no cuts, grazes, thorns nor abscesses so it must have been a sting, and by morning it had gone down completely.

So, bad things come in threes right? Does this mean I’m done now?