galled again

The reason I've been around so much the last couple of days is that my bladder of gall has decided to kick up and gall me as much as possible in the limited time remaining to it. Aside from a black coffee and half a mango consumed in a friend's studio five minutes walk from Baroque Mansions on Saturday, the only thing I did all weekend was that poetry reading on Sunday afternoon. And jolly exciting that was, too! For two or three brief hours I forgot to be galled.* And I was home by eight.

Anyway, that's probably not connected. But I spent yesterday mostly in bed, with pretty constant twinges and flashes of pain, and steady achings in my upper right quadrant (as they call it; I like that it sounds like part of the world). It's not as if there's anything setting it off. I could not, somehow, face either of my two local grocery emporia - and, to be honest, could not face the frozen prawns that lurk, limp and wet, in my freezer - so my nourishment yesterday consisted of the following: 0%-fat yogurt with fruit; 0%-fat yogurt with maple syrup; plain bread with nothing on it; a Weight Watchers ice cream product with 2.1g of fat; a truly disgusting Ainsley Harriott dried packet soup with about 1g of fat in it;** and some leftover tomato sauce with tinned tuna in it, and rice. Total calories about 1,300. Total fat about 1/10th of my total daily recommended allowance (or, more accurately, yours).

Basically, if I am getting nothing to eat, neither is my gall bladder. So what gives! I slept, I padded around the house with twinges in my side, I opened the fridge, swore, and shut it again. My innards should have been sleeping like lambs.

So here's the deal. I went to the doctor this morning. The doctor has given me a prescription for painkillers and a note signing me off work till after the operation.

So here's the deal. I have an editing deadline; a tricky re-editing job to do, which could be outsourced I suppose, except that I'm the one who edited it the first time so I understand the document; two lots of design job to oversee; and a handover to organise for when I'm "really" off sick in July.

I could do the editing at home, but it will be harder to do the admin at home - and anyway, the HR department won't like "signed off sick, but editing at home" - it goes against all their principles. They probably won't even let me: I could edit this thing anyway, naughtily, and just email it to the chief exec, I suppose.

I've also cancelled an engagement for tonight, that I was really looking forward to. Just a quiet drink with some of my best friends , my old gang - me drinking juice, them eating dinner, probably, me getting a cab home. But now, me sitting home, them eating dinner.

Your correspondent could just cry. In fact she nearly did, yesterday. Oh, and today. It is doing her head in.


* Not to the extent of actually eating the food, I hasten to add. I had two glasses of a pleasant dry rosé, sitting in a pub garden, which seems moderate to me, if not to my you-know-what.

** If I was a professional cook I would SO not allow my name to be put on anything like that. It does taste vaguely of dried peppers but it is not really like food.