Remember, remember the 4th of November

Someone asked what NaBloPoMo is (I got it right this time) and since I didn't know the name properly I looked it up and found this page:
http://www.blogher.com/blogher-topics/blogging-social-media/nablopomo
which was a surprise, because I didn't realised that you registered for it and there were prizes and things. I haven't done more than glance at this because I'm exhausted, but I will at some point - it's all to do with blogging every day for November, though. Anyway, I'm not doing it properly because I've already missed some days.

To continue from yesterday - I'll not write about the morning (castle and enormous building site) just now but skip on to the afternoon, when Mum suddenly took very ill at about 3. Her main symptom was almost complete incoherence apart from saying over and over again things like, "I feel terrible." She could manage short repeated sentences - she said, lots of times, "Can anyone help?" - but most of the time she sounded as if she was talking (with remarkable fluency) a different language that sounded a bit like English, but wasn't. I can't remember anything precisely, but she was saying things like, "Cart oval fring sporn fallt premmed." And she would gaze at me expectantly, waiting for the answer, as I played this over in my head, trying and failing to make sense of it.

Anyway, in short, I called an ambulance and she was taken to hospital, where we spent many hours in a receiving ward, she getting more and more ill and agitated and unable to communicate and me talking to various rather baffled nurses who ran tests on her. We all wondered if she'd had a stroke but she also seemed hot and uncomfortable while shivering and shaking, so she seemed to have a temperature though in fact, according to the thermometer, her temperature was only slightly raised. She also had a urinary infection, but she'd had this for a few days with no apparent ill effects.

Eventually, at 10, she was taken on to an assessment ward and given more antibiotics and I came home, very worried. If there one thing that my mum wouldn't like - and neither would any of us, but maybe especially my mum - it's not being able to talk.

This morning Dr Son, who has just finished 8 days of night duty during which, as you will perceive, he didn't shave (hmm) came down from Perth for the day to visit us and his granny. When I phoned the ward, however, I was told that she was much better, which cheered us up. Here he is, unshaven but cheery.

"An old lady [patient] told me that I was a hunk," he informed me. "She didn't seem to notice that I hadn't shaved. She said that if she was 40 years younger, she'd marry me."

Cassie ran up Son's front, an operation not entirely without pain for him, and sat on his shoulders. You can just see Mr Life's toes in the bottom right hand side of this photo. He was lying on the sofa in his pyjamas, with a rug and Sirius over his legs.

So Son and I went to visit Mum and she was pretty well fine. Slightly muddled as to what had happened even today and unable to remember much about yesterday, but basically back to about 90% of her usual ability to speak.

I went back this evening and she was again fine.

I'm not a person who gets very tired on the whole but right now I am, as I said before, exhausted. But very very relieved. Urgh.

Happy Guy Fawkes Day, British people.