Trying to keep it together!

It’s official – I have the best boyfriend/fiancé ever!

I’ve been a bit down over the past couple of weeks. I keep thinking about Gloria and doing the ‘what if’ bit...what if I’d picked up her symptoms sooner…would she still be alive? What if a different nurse had been on duty that day? Would they have picked up Gloria’s deterioration quicker than I did?

I must be driving Matt mad with it, because it’s all I can think about. It’s made me super-vigilant at work though, and I’m looking at every patient through sepsis-tinted glasses. Matt’s so patient though and wanted to cheer me up. So, when I arrived home from work one night, he had taken all the shiny new certificates from all of the courses I’ve recently completed, framed them and put them up on the wall in the dining room!

He’d even put up my Slimming World certificate, proudly announcing the loss of a whole stone of fat! I have to be honest, it’s been more of a ‘Slimming Plate’ diet combination as I’ve been following the diet while following the goings-on on ‘Rate My Plate’; some of it has been enough to put me off food for life.

 I made the mistake of introducing my mum to it, and she has become some kind of keyboard warrior, taking the art of scathing comments to a whole new level. I also made the mistake of telling her I’d lost a stone to which she replied ‘A slice off a cut loaf is never missed’. Ouch!

But I should’ve known, that would be just the intro to her diatribe…

 Mum had a right go at me the other night. She said that I’d forgotten about my family and I never saw them anymore. She even asked if I’d gone off the idea of getting married to Matt as I wasn’t interested in planning every detail down to the ‘n’th degree! I won’t lie – I lost it a bit then. Told her I didn’t care whether we got married in a lay-by off the M6, and that it was the marriage bit I was interested in, not the whole wedding malarkey. She huffed and puffed a bit and went silent for a few minutes before she announced that she had her reputation in the WI to think about and how could I think about letting her down?!!

Once I’d finished cackling with hysteria, I sat down and made some more wedding plans (in other words, she told me what she’d arranged and I nodded like the dutiful daughter she wishes she had, although I drew the line at agreeing to have a song from Dirty Dancing as our first dance – Rate My Plate’s finest efforts won’t shift that amount of weight before the wedding and I don’t want Matt breaking his back).

The thing is, what with preparing for the Band 6 interview, studying, working, fitting in my love life and spending time arranging this wedding – I’m knackered. I told Matt about it, and in his usual level-headed way, he told me that I needed to do whatever I felt was most important at this moment in time. He knows that I desperately want the promotion, so he says I should put everything else on the back burner, and that there’s plenty of time to sort the wedding.

 He suggested we move in together so that we can see a bit more of each other rather than spending time travelling across town on buses each night. I said I would think about it; it seems to be quite a big commitment, but then so is getting married!

Steve at work told me that he’s a bit worried about me. He’s noticed I’ve lost weight (hallelujah!) and said I’m looking a bit stressed. I told him about all the plates I’ve got balancing in the air at the minute and he told me that if I didn’t stop trying to do everything, I would drop them all. He’s looked at the rota to see if there’s any way that he can give me an extra rest day, but there’s not a lot that can be moved with Jo still being off.

 I plucked up the courage to ask about her, as she’s all I need now to top up my levels of stress, and he gave me his special scary glare and said ‘You know I can’t talk about it Florence’. I must’ve looked a bit sheepish because he softened a little and told me to chill out, that these things take time but I wasn’t to worry.

I’m not only worried about her coming back to work – I’m worried she will gate crash my wedding, rugby tackle me at the altar (or the burger van if we say our vows in the lay-by) and marry my Matt!

Anyway, I’ve decided on one thing, and it didn’t take too much thought.

Matt is on a late shift today, so I’m spending the evening framing his certificates and putting them alongside mine in the dining room.

I’ve still got one more than him though – he hasn’t got a Slimming World one – lucky git doesn’t need one!