I am not going to lie – I haven’t really enjoyed 2021 compared to me reflecting previous years. It has been so easy for me to dwell on the challenges instead of the positives and the meme below pretty much sums me up though in terms of my sick sense of humour:

In the build up to the end of 2021 a family member suffered a stroke and was hospitalised which inspired my very wise daughter’s advice . Even earlier than that it was the death of Coco.

So as I approached the end of the year I resolved that I was only going to reflect on being thankful for all the good things as we slid into 2022. However the issues of life are trying their damnedest to provide me with copious examples of the opposite – right up until the end.

Last week I was on annual leave and I thought to myself that I could get cracking again with writing and also updating the blog. My sister rang me to ask whether I could take my mother to the doctors. We had all been concerned with how she seemed to look as though she was deteriorating quite quickly in such a short matter of weeks. Mum has stage 1 heart failure which is managed with medication. In the surgery the doctor looked worried as he checked my mother’s ECG and blood pressure. He quietly indicated to me that he will need to send her into hospital, that same day and he subsequently broke the news to my mother.

This was the first time I saw a vulnerable human being in the doctor’s surgery and not the firecracker matriarch that I was used to seeing.

I took mum to hospital but was not allowed to remain with her, to reassure her and to let her know that everything will be ok. With this piggin’ ‘New Normal’ – I had to leave her and let my NHS colleagues do the very thing they’re absolutely brilliant at – to keep her alive. Mum and I exchanged looks which basically said that we were not sure whether this was going to be the last time we were going to see each other and I cannot honestly remember the journey home.

Now before I continue let me share with you a dream I had towards the end of November. I have a bit of a ‘deal’ with the Lord. Whenever the ‘curve balls of life’ are thrown at me – like the mega, super duper, “Oh heck!” kind of curve balls – I tend to receive a dream to prepare me and enable me to knuckle down and take the hit. This has resulted in me not having a complete mental breakdown. The dreams would always include either a black tornado which represented bad sometimes immensely stressful but manageable warnings, or tsunamis which are linked to life threatening circumstances like when my son nearly died. Their size and where or what I was doing would determine how I should then cope when an incident arose in real life. Towards the end of November I dreamt of a mega black tornado which hit land fall on the horizon of the old family home where we lived in when I was a kid. The dream had Coco who needed to be let out just at the point when we had to seek shelter in the house. When I felt anxiety for the fact that I wanted Coco to be back in safely, I remember her running back into the house unscathed with a male voice saying “it’ll be ok”.

So I had initially thought the dream referred to my cousin’s stroke along with the stresses of deadlines at work both falling around the same time. But the reality could well be the combination of a range of curve balls coming all at once or close together. Or it could have been meant for the uncertainty of whether we were going to lose our mother as we go into 2022.

For all of these curve balls the one main thing that keeps me going is the promise that I will get through this and that I am not dealing with this on my own. It is this main thing that I am thankful for and the one that gives me strength. Encouraging words from work colleagues other family members and close friends has helped me through this latest storm.

Yes, it will indeed be ok.