Making It Up as I Go Along by Marian Keyes

  On Friday night the Praguers arrive to stay in my parents’ house, and on Saturday Dad returns from the brink of death, only for Ljiljana and Ema to fall foul of the lurgy and spend Christmas Eve thrun in the bed, competing for puking space in a basin.

  I should also stress at this stage that every bed in the house was full, as the four Praguers and the two home from NY were staying with Mam and Dad, and as Susan was away Tadhg also likes to stay (but he had to sleep on the couch because, despite my mammy’s fondness for collecting beds, there wasn’t one for him).

  However, miraculously, everyone is well for Christmas Day … but on the following day Caitríona is struck down.

  The next day – the 27th – Himself and myself go to John and Shirley, his parents in England, and it is the mercy of God that we did, because we would surely not be alive to tell the tale otherwise.

  Parallel to all of this is that Himself had been badly injured tending to his reindeers. For the past God knows how many years he’s had Rudy on the porch roof, a beautiful electric reindeer, to light people’s way. But this year, Rudy got retired and two beautiful new reindeers (as yet nameless) arrived and took their place on the porch roof. But they kept falling over and Himself kept having to lean out the window and pick them up again, and in one of those leaning-out sessions he badly bruised his rib and is still not able to cough or laugh without intense pain.

  At John and Shirley’s everything was well and civilized and peaceful, and when I rang home on the 28th for a little chat, I discovered that all hell had broken loose in Ireland. They were being felled like ninepins, ninepins, mes amies. Caitríona was still sick, Dad had relapsed, Seán had succumbed, Rita-Anne had it so bad that Jimmy had to cancel his flight to Cheltenham to see his family, then when it seemed that R-A was well enough for Jimmy to leave, Jimmy was struck down and had to catch the plane dry-retching and carrying a bag to throw up in. Then Niall got it and had to cancel their New Year family trip to Dunmore East.

  But worse, far worse than the puking, was the cabin fever. There were ten of them in a house designed for far fewer people, and competition for bed space and puking opportunities was intense. I have it on good authority that they all ‘turned’ on each other.

  In the midst of it all, my mother and Rita-Anne deserted the place and moved in down the road to my house, where they savoured the peace and quiet and germ-free air with much relish.

  Also, oh I totally forgot about this – I LOVE this, this is my very favourite! On Christmas night Luka accidentally drank a bottle of cough mixture (he thought it was Lucozade, which doesn’t make any sense to me) and he had to be forced to drink gallons of water, which made him puke.

  In one of my phone calls home I asked how Tadhg was doing, as no one had mentioned him for a couple of days, and there was this startled little pause and they said, ‘Tadhg, God, you know, now that you mention him, we haven’t seen Tadhg in a while.’ But no one was particularly worried as it was assumed that his disappearance was drink-related, and sure enough, didn’t he turn up in Siam Thai on the evening of the 29th, tucking into a beef curry and acting as if nothing was untoward.

  So there we are – is that not impressive? I am upgrading our title to Sickest Family in the Whole of Ireland.

  mariankeyes.com, December 2007.

  Caitríona and Seán’s Wedding

  With Caitríona’s wedding and all, there have been millions of people in the house for what feels like months and months. First the Praguers arrived, and because we’ve got a Wii yoke they took up permanent residence; meanwhile, we’d had the lovely, lovely Dylan staying with us, and none of this is to say that it was unpleasant, because it was delightful, but chaotic, you know. Ema being eight and Luka being seven and Dylan being three months, it was all go.

  The house was permanently filthy and you couldn’t go two steps without stepping on a baby alarm, or kicking over a glass of milk abandoned by Luka, or breaking your neck skidding on all my shoes, which Ema had taken out of my wardrobe and strewn throughout the hall.

  Then people started arriving for the wedding – Anne Marie and Jack (nineteen months) and Caitríona’s friend Denise.

  Meanwhile, many other people from New York were billeted nearby, and our house became Pitta-Bread-and-Hummus Central (it was all I was able to concentrate on in the supermarket – pitta bread and hummus is always safe. And quiche. And fecking Ben & Jerry’s, more of which anon).

  We had the hen night in the Powerscourt Hotel, a very glitzy, de luxe joint, and the next day we went to the spa, which I was very interested in because so many Irish spas are crap. (It’s a feminist issue: because they’re mostly used by women there’s an attitude of ‘Ah sure, give them any oul’ shite, any crappy oul’ rub with a bit of lavender oil and they’ll be delighted. Call it sixty minutes, but only give them forty-three, fling around the words “pamper” and “deserve” and make sure you charge them a fortune.’)

  But this one (it’s by Espa) is the real thing. Expensive, yes, undeniably expensive. I feel it’s unseemly, going to a fancy-Dan spa in these credit-crunchy times. All I’m saying is that although it’s costly, you get what you pay for. More than get.

  Then we had a week of rehearsals and hair and make-up trials and fake tan and pedicures and a rehearsal dinner with forty-five of us, then the day itself, which was truly miraculous and it didn’t rain and Caitríona looked STUNNING, like Grace Kelly and Gwyneth Paltrow, only far more beautiful, and it was all really great.

  Then I sort of thought that everything would go quiet, but it didn’t, because although the wedding was on the Saturday, we were still overrun with people (I’m not saying it wasn’t lovely, because it was) until the Wednesday, and I was so knackered from toasting pitta breads and I’d slipped way, way off the sugar-free horse and was eating rings around myself, shoving ice cream into my clob at all hours of the day and night – you see, the thing is normally I wouldn’t have ice cream in the house because it would drive me insane and I’d have to get up in the middle of the night and eat it simply to stop it badgering me, but because of the visitors the place was full of all kinds of lovely grub and between the high emotion and the tiredness, I couldn’t resist. I’m fecking HUGE and struggling to get back on the straight and narrow, but it’s hard work.

  THEN I went to Austria and Germany on a book tour. And although I was destroyed before I even started, I had a wonderful time. I LOVE Germans, I find them warm and polite and – yes! – punctual. Nothing wrong with being punctual, the world would be a far nicer place if people were ON TIME and didn’t make fun of poor Virgos such as myself for wanting to puke if I’m ten minutes late for something.

  Which brings me neatly to my birthday, which was on 10 September. I started the day in stunningly beautiful Hamburg, then on to Mannheim, which not many people have heard of but it was a nice place, and at that night’s reading, everyone sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me, which made me happy.

  It was an uplifting and rewarding tour – there were five of us travelling together – and even though we were working and travelling a lot from city to city, we had a (well, I did anyway) gorgeous time, and on my birthday, on the train to Mannheim, a man carrying an icebox full of Magnums arrived in our carriage. Isn’t that the most amazing thing you ever heard? Like, they weren’t free, you had to pay for them, 2.5 euro a go, but we all had one and afterwards my German companions said that they’d never before heard of such a phenomenon, a man laden with Magnums on the Hamburg-to-Mannheim train. Which made me wonder if I’d dreamt it, but if so, we’d all had the same dream.

  On the Friday we went to London, because Hi
mself was going to Tadhg’s stag do in Brighton and had to drink forty pints and lie on the couch all the next day, roaring for a bucket, then on the Saturday was Suzanne’s fortieth birthday, also Seán and Caitríona were back from their honeymoon in Italy, so we all met up.

  THEN, when we got back to Dublin, both myself and Himself had massive dental work done. THEN my dad took a tumble and cut his face and broke his glasses and got a terrible fright. THEN myself, Himself, Mam and Dad all had to go to Newbridge to look for Mam’s mother-of-the-groom rig-out for Tadhg’s wedding (she would go nowhere else but Newbridge, even though there are hundreds of shops in Dublin, but shur feck it, what harm is there in indulging her).

  Dad was going round with his cut face and crooked glasses offering his styling services to other customers, and I’m sure the people in the shop thought I was guilty of elder abuse and that I must have pushed him and broken his glasses, because I kept shouting at him to sit down and stop helping the other shoppers.

  THEN on the Friday night it was Susan’s hen night.

  THEN on the Sunday it was Dylan’s christening.

  And as I write, it’s going to be Himself’s birthday on Saturday, also his father’s eightieth, so we’re going to the UK for that, then back for Tadhg and Susan’s wedding.

  Himself is after doing something to his back and he’s not able to sit in his chair, he has to type his emails while kneeling on the floor, and last night in bed he couldn’t lie on his right side because his back hurt, then he couldn’t sleep on his left side because his back hurt, then when he lay on his back, his back DIDN’T hurt but it triggered his persistent cough, so in the end he had to get up and go downstairs and sleep sitting up on the couch. For the love of God!

  I made him go to the doctor because I’m sick of it, and I expected much resistance because even if his head has fallen off his shoulders and is rolling around on the floor, bumping into the legs of chairs, he always says, ‘I’m fine, I’m GRAND, what could a doctor do for me?’

  THEN Himself and I had a scrap about the meaning of ‘persistent’. As in me saying, ‘While you’re at it, talk to the doctor about your persistent cough.’ And he said, ‘What persistent cough?’ And I said, ‘That cough of yours that has persisted for the past week,’ and he said, ‘It’s a cough, I grant you, but it’s not persistent,’ and I said, ‘But if it has persisted for a week, which it fecking well has, then it’s PERSISTENT.’

  Of course all of this was just delaying tactics by him to get out of going to the doctor.

  But he WENT to the doctor and got a prescription for Solpadol. Do you know it? A delightful codeine-based painkiller. I had it last November for a throat infection and, mes amies, I was OUT OF MY HEAD on it. Extremely pleasant, so it was. Well worth the sore throat!

  Luckily Himself is a stoic and fears painkillers, thinking if he takes more than four Anadins a year he’s in danger of being ‘addicted’. Amateur. Therefore I ferried away his lovely packet of tablets to my medicine press (as big as other people’s walk-in wardrobes) and I planned to fob him off with Nurofen, which is grand but nothing like as nice as Solpadol, and he will never know.

  Meanwhile, I was wishing for something painful to befall me so I’d have a legitimate excuse to lie in bed OUT OF MY HEAD, mildly itchy (that’s the codeine) but otherwise in great form.

  But then Himself approached me and ASKED – yes, ASKED – for some Solpadol. He claimed to be in terrible pain. I turned down his request. I said that he wasn’t meant to take lovely tablets on an empty stomach, so he did something unprecedented, he said he would eat something even though it isn’t a mealtime (he is very, very, oh yes, VERY different from me). I will give you his exact words. He said, ‘I will have a Solpadol sangwidge.’

  In the guise of concern, I snapped two caplets out of their foil and gave them to him with a glass of water, in the hope of obscuring the fact that I was fobbing him off with Nurofen. He’ll be grand.

  Anyway, he’s going to see a specialist soon. He must have slipped a disc or something, God love him.

  mariankeyes.com, September 2008.

  Various Family Events

  We’ll kick off with Himself’s ongoing health debacle. He was sent for an MRI scan, and while we were waiting for the results he was in absolute agony and my old friend Solpadol wasn’t even touching the sides of the pain, so I flung myself on the mercy of the neck pain specialist (because it’s always easier to do it for someone else, no?) and he gave Himself some (to quote the pharmacist) ‘very potent painkillers’ – MORE potent than Solpadol!

  But even they didn’t do the trick. It was late Friday afternoon and we were in Dundrum with baby Dylan, and Himself was grey and sweaty and glazed-eyed with the pain, and I thought, ‘Cripes, we can’t go into the weekend with him in this much agony,’ so I rang the specialist again but couldn’t get him, so I rang the local GP and they had to see the ‘potent painkiller’ prescription before they’d do anything and it was all very messy.

  But at the eleventh hour, just before the chemist shut, the scrip was faxed through and the receptionist scored a NEW scrip for (and once again I quote) ‘opiate analogues’, even stronger than the ones that were stronger than Solpadol, and if they didn’t work, the next step was to admit Himself into hospital and put him in traction and on a morphine drip.

  God, it was horrific, but I was convinced at this stage that Himself had slipped a disc and that it would all be fixable, but it turns out that no! No disc was slipped! The result of the scan shows he has some sort of degenerative condition where some bone in his neck is growing against ‘a bundle of nerves’ and that’s what’s causing all the pain.

  We looked it up – it’s called Cervical Spondy-something or other. I wish I could tell you more, but every time I tried to read it I thought I was going to faint and had to stop before I toppled over and crashed face-first into the keyboard.

  It’s horrible when someone you love is in pain. I wish I could take the pain from him and feel it myself. (Of course it’s very easy for me to say that, as such a transaction is impossible and if it WAS possible, I’d probably waste no time trying to give the pain back fairly lively – ‘Take it, take it, for the love of Christ, take it!’)

  He had to embark on a variety of anti-arthritis pills and madzer painkillers and wait for two long, horrible, agony-riddled weeks for a series of steroid injections. I was convinced that the steroid injections would fix him entirely, but no, when the day rolled around and he got the injection, the specialist said that physio was the next step and if there wasn’t an improvement, Himself would have to go under the knife and have the offending bit of sticky-outy bone removed (i.e. sawed off).

  Meanwhile, TONS of stuff was happening. Including poor Himself’s birthday, which he shares with his dad, and it was his dad John’s eightieth birthday and we went to Saffron Walden for it, and I suppose between this far more dramatic celebration and Himself’s agony, Himself’s birthday was somewhat overshadowed.

  THEN no sooner were we back from England than we repaired to County Clare for Tadhg and Susie’s wedding! In Gregans Hotel in the wilds of the Burren. It rained so much on the way down that the roads were impassable (honestly). Father Ted was filmed in Clare, and you know the episode where a priest gets trapped in Craggy Island Parochial House because the bad weather meant ‘they’ve taken in the roads’? Well, it was a bit like that.

  Himself, maddened by the cocktail of drugs he was on, took a notion to go some bizarre back route known only to him and his fevered imagination, and because I forgot that he was out of his head and stone mad, I let him, and by the t
ime we’d been driving on a single-track boreen for half an hour, getting precisely nowhere, it was too late.

  Anyway, we eventually got to the hotel, and the biblical-style rain ceased for the day of the actual wedding and it was blue and blustery and very beautiful. (I LOVE County Clare.) Susan looked stunning and everyone was very happy and it was all great fun.

  Newly-weds Caitríona and Seán were over from New York, and Niall, Lilers, Ema and Luka were over from Prague, and apart from the hand-to-hand combat that ensued as we all tried to get a go of Dylan, we had a great time. (Dylan is now nearly five months! And the most sweet-natured, smiley, squashy creature you could hope to meet. And he has gorgeous bright red hair!)

  mariankeyes.com, October 2008.

  Himself’s Health Improves

  Well, the great news is that Himself is much improved. Things were bad, bad, bad and he continued to be in appalling pain or out of his head on painkillers or both, and there was no let-up, and I know that it wasn’t my agony so I’ve no right to whinge, but like I said last month, when someone you love is in pain, it’s horrible to witness, and suddenly I remembered all those articles I’d read about people living with chronic pain, people who’ve been in car crashes or are cursed with bad arthritis, and I realized that for every day of their life they’re in agony and their main purpose every day is to manage that pain, and suddenly I was wondering what ‘manage’ meant.

  It made me realize how very lucky he and I’d been previous to this. That we’d been going along, not realizing how very beautiful our lives were, simply because we were living each day without pain.

  Mam is forever saying ‘Your health is your wealth’, which usually generates much mockery from me and the rest of her children, but the older I get the more I’m inclined to agree.