My sister on the phone this afternoon: I just took Mam's blood pressure, it's 199/119. What should we do?

Me: Eeek!!!

Turns out the NHS have an app for that: https://www.nhs.uk/health-assessment-tools/check-your-blood-pressure-reading

Give it your reading and it tells you what you need to do. 199/119 is urgent GP appointment today, or call 111 now territory.

Andrea rang 111, they got her an appointment at Urgent Care, the doctor at Urgent Care said A&E, now. So Andrea drove her straight to Darlington rather than wait for an ambulance.

A&E were advertising a six hour queue when they arrived at 5:30, but Mam got rushed through the system, and every time they checked, her blood pressure was lower, and when her bloods came back fine they sent her home about 8:30. We're no wiser as to whether it was adrenal, current infection, meds, or just being wound up with everything that's going on, but hopefully it's settled. (And it's a hell of a lot better than having to wait until near midnight to be seen).

All the things crossed for no crises tomorrow.

My original plan was to be away for two or three weeks: go up the week before my brother-in-law's funeral to help with organising, then stay a week or two depending on what I could help my sister or mother with.

The funeral went fine,these things are never great, but we had a polished set of undertakers (same ones we used for my dad) and our parish priest is so good at his job he lectures at the Vatican. He was perfectly happy to do a Catholic-lite ceremony, Alan wasn't Catholic, but my sister said she needed to feel it had been 'done properly' and he wouldn't have objected. The barman at the local club was one of his drinking buddies, so afterwards almost organised itself.

Post-ceremony it was obvious that my mother's household admin (which my sister normally handles) was far enough behind I'd better stay the full fortnight to help get it caught up. Then my sister pointed out that if that meant I was planning on travelling on the 30th, then I'd be leaving the day before my mother's birthday, so I shifted my plan back a couple of days, then realised that put it pretty much into the last round of train strikes, so three weeks became four and travelling last Tuesday.

And then I woke up on Tuesday, and wondered "Why is the room spinning?" And while the dizziness wasn't so bad that I couldn't get up, I really didn't think five hours on a train while dizzy was a fun way to spend my day. So my sister had to dash down to the station for me and re-book my tickets (plus assistance)  - £10 admin fee, but on their most restrictive (aka cheapest) fare that didn't seem too bad. Annoyingly I'd probably have been okay to travel by late afternoon, though admittedly I did sleep an extra six hours or so during the day. As inner-ear bugs go it was a fairly mild one, though I was still vaguely feeling it right through until Sunday.

So I ended up coming back last Thursday, for 29 days away in total.

Which is a lot.

 My sister Alexa-called me today to talk about what's going on with her husband's chemo treatment, because his consultant had called them today with an update and spent 20 minutes talking about stuff (never mind it's less than a week since they saw him).

She was telling me how he'd been discussing trials and how his prime contact is "Dr Greystoke at the Bobbie Robson Centre" and I just had to wave at her and say "sorry, but I'm going to have to burst out laughing" - because my mind immediately went Greystoke, Bobby, Greyfriars Bobby! Which fortunately was okay as apparently hers had done exactly the same thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greyfriars_Bobby

I was talking to my sister earlier, who's just had her second appointment with a physio.

"She only has one arm. How did I miss that the first time?"

From her description she's wearing a cosmetic prosthesis, but missing noticing it when she's giving you a physical examination is impressive.

In less amusing news it turns out she has managed to give my brother-in-law Covid, but it doesn't seem like it's a severe strain and he's been offered anti-virals. Just as long as she hasn't given it to my mother, fingers crossed.

Does anyone have any recommendations for a guide on how to academic writing?

My sister, as her school's SENCO*, has to do a masters level Postgraduate Certificate in SEND*  (it's a legal requirement of the job), but the guidance she's had is pretty poor, roughly "Academic writing is very different, don't use first or second person and reference everything". Sadly I'm not exaggerating how skimpy it is - I read through it on Sunday morning in under 10 minutes, though it takes a couple of pages to say what I've reduced to a sentence. (I suspect they just haven't taken account of how unsupported people are when everything's being done remotely - three online days to date - and they haven't done academic work in several decades).

Obviously a slightly more useful guide might help her get a better idea of what's expected of her. So is there anything out there? It doesn't have to be subject specific, just cover academic writing in a more useful format.

* Special Educational Needs Coordinator

** Special Educational Needs and Development

 

My sister rang me this afternoon to check I was okay.

She's the one with Covid, I'm the one who's fine.

I think the issue was she'd sent me an email and hadn't heard back - which was because it hadn't arrived. Plus she's bored.

Her PCR test came back positive, but she's still waiting to hear about the antivirals - that's supposed to start with a phone call with a couple of days. Ironically she did a lateral flow test today and it claimed she didn't have Covid *headdesk*

So the whole point of going to visit my folks at the end of the month was to overlap my sister being off-work due to half-term. And I've delayed sorting out Planning Fail until I could speak to her in order to figure out if there is anything we definitely need to do together when I'm up.

Only for her to turn around today and tell me "when I was giving you a hard time about not having bought your train ticket yet, I was talking about Christmas. I'd completely forgotten you saying you were coming at half-term."

*headdesk*
 

My sister has been off work for a while, first a prolonged chest infection, then various other stuff, but everything was back under control, even the new chest infection that popped up about a fortnight ago and threatened to throw a spanner in the works. (This isn't unprecedented, she typically gets a lot of chest issues during winter due to her asthma). So last week was spent organising a phased return to work - afternoons next week, full days the week after (and half term holidays the week after), agreement she wouldn't do gate duty in the mornings, extra Covid precautions and so on. Or that was the plan.

5:20PM last night she gets a text, from the NHS. "You have now been added to the shielding list and should follow the following precautions, ... if you cannot work from home you must not attend work ... ".

So she had to ring the school's head and say "You know we agreed yesterday I was starting on Monday, well..."

She must have been hovering on the borderline of the shielding list for the whole last year, and it's taken until a fortnight before it is finally lifted on the 31st for them to finally decide which side she's on. It's likely the multiple steroid prescriptions since Christmas that have done it, but she spoke to her doctor last week and he gave no indication it might be a thing.

Fortunately there's quite a lot of stuff she can do from home, given she's deputy head and normally has the SEND and looked after kids portfolios anyway, and on the positive side it does mean there's not really any way they can whinge about the length of time she was sick given it's culminated in her being rated as Clinically Extremely Vulnerable.

Which now means I'm the only one in the family who is not Clinically Extremely Vulnerable, while simultaneously being the one with the most obvious medical issues. I find this ironic.

My sister and I picked up a couple of Amazon Echo Show 5s on Prime Day (half price at £40 and I had a couple of £25 vouchers to use), on the theory that they're potentially simple enough my mother will agree to have one - zero chance of getting her to use a smartphone or tablet, never mind a desktop - and so be able to see me even if we're stuck at opposite ends of the country.

So we've just spent two hours trying to get them to talk to each other. As soon as we'd gotten each other into our Amazon contacts they'd happily call our phones if we said "Alexa Call <sibling>", we just couldn't get them to call the blasted Shows instead and couldn't work out what we were doing wrong. So eventually we agreed to give up for the minute and I'd go off and do some research.

So I queued up the youtube vid I'd watched before buying, hopped to the bit where he calls his dad, immediately stopped it again, and *headdesk*ed a couple of times, because the command isn't  "Alexa Call", it's "Alexa Video Call". *headdesk*

I suppose it does show the limitations of Amazon's documentation style, which in the case of the Show amounts to four not very packed credit card sized pages, but that's still annoyingly obvious.

My sister rang earlier: "Do you know if my passport is at Mam's house? I had it when we went to the bank before Christmas. Did you have the papers from that?" (Why we needed to go to the bank is a story in its own right, involving at least five separate errors on their part)

Me: "Don't think I saw it at Mam's. What papers I had from that are in the next room, hang on a minute and I'll check."

Me again: "No, not there."

Her: "It's okay, I've literally just found it."

Me: "Good, though now I'm wondering where mine is, because I thought it was with those papers."

Her: "David!" (You know the tone!)

Fortunately I found it relatively quickly. It was where it's supposed to be in my desk, I just didn't expect it to be there yet, given I'd been using it. But the prospect of something being missing after all the throwing out we did in the last fortnight is slightly terrifying!