Be careful what you put in your mouth!

Monday January 13^th.

OMG. I am a stupid, stupid cow. 

I am supposedly an intelligent woman and yet I have just gone and done the most idiotic and painful thing imaginable. I have no excuses. I can offer no defence. If I wasn’t a cook of over 20 years’ experience [I started when I was a little girl] there may be some mitigation. As it stands there is none at all.

I mean, I know the one thing you never ever do with a freshly baked apple pie, for example, is attempt to eat it straight from the oven. It is gastronomic suicide to stuff scalding hot fruit into in to your mouth. Yet I have done exactly that. OK it wasn’t apple but I should have known and been more circumspect. Now I am in agony because of it and I look like being so for days. It actually serves me right.

The background to all this is Monday night’s meal at Dad’s. We raided the freezer and found some frozen pork loin so I decided to do a casserole of pork with prunes and apricots. I had eaten it somewhere once before and the combination of tastes is very pleasing to the palate. No problem there then.

Using Dad’s Aga I slowly cooked the pork and fruit mix and prepared all the other veggies; creamed parsnips, baked potatoes, carrot and peas, broccoli so they were all hitting the kitchen table at 6pm so we could listen to the BBC Radio 4 News and scoff our scran at the same time. We used to do this all the time when I was a child, we don’t so much now as my work at the solicitors’ doesn’t finish until 6 so we are usually listening to the Radio 4 comedy slot at 6.30 when we eat.

I digress.

We piled our plates with veggies and then I brought the offending casserole straight from the hot oven onto the trivet. The colour is unprepossessing but it makes up for it in the taste, trust me on this. I scooped out a ladle and a half each and we ploughed in. Normally I eat methodically round my plate; veggies first: meat last. [I blame my Mum for this…] Anyway after a taste of each vegetable I decided to give the meat a try. The pork was totally delicious; it was moist, tender, quite juicy and with a definite taste of the fruit to it. The key thing to stress here is that it didn’t appear to be over warm, it wasn’t tepid, naturally, it was probably like Goldilocks’ favourite porridge – just right.

Having chewed through this tasty morsel of stewed pork, I primed the tines of my fork with another piece and also a piece of prune and apricot. They slipped off my fork into my gob with no problem but the apricot just seemed to slide straight down towards my stomach without waiting to be chewed. I don’t normally do this with food, it is a waste. I could sense it was fairly hot and the bloody lump seemed to lodge itself by my vocal chords and sear away at the lining of my oesophagus.

You know how you can feel something is too hot in your mouth and you try to spit it out? This was the feeling I had with the apricot, except, with it being so far down my gullet, I couldn’t spit it out. It tried to swallow some more to make it go down which it didn’t so I ran to the sink and swooshed gallons of cold water down my neck. The pain where it had lodged was awful and even worse was the feeling in my throat that was a large lump blocking my oesophagus. Laura thought I was messing about at first but she soon realised I was serious when I started crying.

I left the rest of my meal, obviously. I made the Lollster finish hers because it was too nice not to, and I drank a pint of milk straight from the fridge. The swallow reflex was really horrible. It felt as though I had something sticking into my throat. I had a bit of a panic as I wondered whether the whole thing would close up and stop me breathing, so I showed Laura how to do an emergency tracheotomy, should that happen. She went as white as a ghost and tried to reassure me that it wouldn’t.

Eventually, after about an hour I summoned up the courage to call Robert [one of Dad’s friends who is a doctor, locally] to ask him what I needed to do to get an appointment at his surgery tomorrow. He was very nice on the phone and asked me what I’d done and how serious I thought it was. I am sorry to say I started sobbing down the phone to him, so he said, “Hang on I’ll come round and see you.” I tried to put him off but he insisted.

He lives in the next village along and was at Dad’s in minutes. He was calm and confident and reassuring. All the things I wanted to have in my doctor. I was still a bit tearful. OK, a lot tearful. He calmed me down and told me that I had given myself oesophagitis. It often happened in children [thanks for that Robert] who hadn’t learned about hot food properly. There would be inflammation and scarring for a few days and it would eventually recede by the end of the week. Swallowing would feel difficult for the next 24 to 48 hours but it should start to get easier after that. He suggested I ate things which would be easy to swallow, like I would be told to do if I’d had my tonsils out. [I haven’t but I understood what he meant.]

I almost made a joke about blowjobs but luckily common sense prevailed. It was just a shame it hadn’t prevailed while I was eating the bloody casserole! He was gone in what seemed like a flash, cluthing two bottles of Uncle Hilmar’s wine [last year’s still hasn’t all gone] as a thank you, and I felt doubly awful. The pain in my throat was dreadful and I knew I was a complete idiot too! I had a brainwave after a bowlful of ice-cream with yogurt poured over it. I remembered there was some ‘Dequacaine’ in the cabinet in my en-suite. This is for sore throats and has an antibiotic and a local anaesthetic. I spent the rest of the evening numbing my entire mouth with these throat sweets.

I made the blowjob joke to Laura who told me to shut up! I had given her quite a scare and had worried her beyond belief with my talk of cutting open my throat and stuffing a tube into it. I guess my sense of humour can be pretty weird at times.

The rest of the day leading up to this event was spectacularly uneventful. It was grey and raining; par for the course. We went to the pool, pottered about in Cockermouth and did not a lot of anything much really. We exchanged bodily fluids a few times and spent a large part of the afternoon experimenting with different ways to bring each other to Orgasm. I am pleased to say we actually do this a lot. I will not go into details.

We both walked the dogs up Tall Hill in the drizzle and then hit the charp feeling whacked out [me] and stressed out [Laura]. I was surprised that I actually managed to sleep. I thought my throat may prevent it. But no, I zed pushed with the best of them.

Tuesday January 14^th to Thursday January 17^th.

What a few days this has been.

I am starving and still in pain. This is the shortest entry to the blog I have made to date because I have done so little. Swallowing was almost impossible for most of Monday night and Tuesday. Even water proved a major challenge. The Dequacaine idea seemed to afford some relief so I have spent the last few days steadily going through a whole packet of them one after the other. The saliva has probably lubricated the site of the scald and given it some relief too.

I Skyped Susannah on Tuesday morning and she had a major laugh at my expense until I started crying and she realised I was seriously in pain. I told her what Robert had said and she agreed with his diagnosis. She also recommended lots more liquids to prevent dehydration and to keep on doing what I am doing. Maybe cut back on the ice cream a little and try soup without lumps in which has been allowed to cool down. Mmmm, really sounds appetising. She did mention there were some steroidal tablets I could have been prescribed but as Robert had not done so he must have thought they were unlikely to have helped.

Dad and Louisa have gone up to Geraldton for a few days to see a long distant cousin [even I didn’t know about him] so they weren’t on hand to make jokes about my predicament. Dad is going to have a field day with this, I can tell. Annabelle was out with some of her friends.  Jeff was playing cricket on the local oval with some school friends. The school holidays have another two and a half weeks to run yet and she and the others have been out and about all over the place.

Jill was in and she and I had a long chat when her Mum went off to do something in the kitchen. She has split up from the guy she was thinking of having sex with as he has gone with another girl! The other girl has been boasting about how they had “it” and “it” was lovely.  Jill was a bit down and all for killing the girl, I pointed out it was the guy she needed to be angry at. He was obviously just trying to use her and when she’d proved reluctant he had showed his true colours. Apparently that is what her friends have been telling her so maybe Mad Aunt Vicki saying the same thing may carry some weight.

I am sort of pleased in a way and sort of saddened for her too. She is obviously more upset than she is letting on but it is a valuable lesson learned I hope. Guys are not to be trusted when sex is concerned. Ian and I were different, in that I was the predatory one and Ian the innocent. He must have thought all his birthdays had come at once when I persuaded him that sex would be a good idea for both of us. I didn’t tell Jill this. She knows Ian was my first “real” boyfriend but she doesn’t know the details. When she is older, maybe I’ll share the wisdom. [Wisdom? Ha!]

On a more positive note they went and collected my Ashes Bet winnings on the weekend and Dad is bringing the cash home with him when he returns to England in a fortnight. Jill is really happy that I will be coming over during their winter for a month and that I am bringing Laura with me. Obviously we have chatted over the internet together so they know what she is like but the real thing will knock their cotton socks off.

After the call I tried various different foods but yogurt is still the best one. Even watching Death in Paradise offered no relief. I liked this programme but killing off Ben Miller was a bit drastic. Dramatically it made a lot of sense, so the script writers had obviously thought about it.

Wednesday proved equally as frustrating and painful as Tuesday. Plus with an added dimension, I haven’t had a poo since the yogurt inspired one on Monday evening. I guess it is the fact I have had nothing inside me [apart from a tongue and some very naughty fingers trying to take my mind off things!] which means there is nothing there to get rid of. I expect I may end up losing some weight as a result of all this. It is a rather drastic method of weight reduction though. I don’t think I would make a fortune if I marketed it!

The Lollster surprised me today by bringing home bunches and bunches of flowers to cheer me up. She knows I love white flowers and she brought as many as she could find. I have tulips, roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, lillies and even freesias! They are absolutely gorgeous. It was a lovely surprise.

As a physical thank you, I showed her the ‘using a Rose as a sex aid technique’ that Richard used to use with me, which proved a very distracting couple of hours.

I had a minor relapse this evening. We had baked some fresh bread using Dad’s machine and because it smelt so wonderful I decided to try a piece. Stupid bloody idiot! Even despite chewing the thing until it must have been reduced to the size of its constituent atoms in my mouth, it still hurt like buggery when I swallowed the stuff and a whole pint of iced water couldn’t stop it hurting for quite a time afterwards.

Thursday proved a little better, despite the bread set back of the previous day. I was still eating only things which had no lumps or roughness about them and, on the whole, eating very little indeed really. I was keeping my fluid intake up so that I was peeing a river for most of the day. Laura fetched a second packet of Dequcaine and they have been a godsend really.

The dogs have only had local strolls for their calls of nature or even have just been shooed out into the paddock for a while to attend to their business. The weather hasn’t made me want to venture out on to the fells anyway, which would have been awfully frustrating.

Mum called and apparently the “Blink” thing we are going to see at the Crucible on Friday has had brilliant reviews in both Sheffield papers and in the Guardian. [My Mum has always been a Guardian reader. I rebelled in my youth and went with the Times, which I still read even though it has just gone up 20%!]  We should be in for a treat, if my throat can stand the stress. She thinks I am a very silly but very lucky girl. I could have burned my oesophagus much more than I have done and so I should be thankful for that. It is hard to feel thankful at the moment but I understand what she meant. She has even said we can come and stay at hers for a few days if we want rather than coping at home. Will I be expected to play the role of her little girl again while she plays my doting mumsy wumsy? Am I an ungrateful bitch for thinking such a thought? Probably so.

In answer the Beckett question [How’s your bowels?] The answer is still the same; barren! There is a prize if you know what the hell that Beckett reference is! ROFL.

Why the hell didn’t I exercise my normal caution with hot food? I have certainly learned my lesson. Can I have my throat back now please? This is proving much worse than when I did my ankle in, at least then I could eat what I wanted, even if I had to hop everywhere.

We haven’t swum since Monday, which is no surprise really. Tomorrow the plan is for me to take the Dog’s to the kennels, near Aspatria, while Laura loads up the Quokka. Then we’ll just swap cars at Dad’s, lock everything up and head south. Lollster will drive us back and we are going to take the A66 to Scotch Corner route again, so Laura can have a feel for the route as a driver instead of as a passenger.

I just have to be careful what I put in my mouth in future, won’t I? LOL.