Weekend Roundup: Sucky Faces, Superman & Foot Fluff

This weekend went a little differently to normal. The highlight of my Saturday was purchasing the very first vacuum cleaner I've ever bought myself - a Henry Hoover. One of the most grown-up purchases I've ever made, and I insisted that I needed it to have a face on it. Henry and I are getting along famously. He's nothing short of fricking awesome with his majestic, impressively sucky nose. I have hoovered the house twice in as many days, which is more times than I did aaaall last month! Maybe everything I dislike doing should have a big ole smiley face on it to up the novelty factor and make me do it. Can you put a smiley face on mornings?

Today, after vacuuming the house for the second time and settling myself down in front of the Xbox to gleefully sap all the productivity from my day off like sucking poising from a snake bite, I received a text from A. He needed a lift to A&E after training for his football (soccer) coaching course had gone a bit tits up for him. A tackle had left him unable to walk on one of his feet.

Got to the hospital where A was urged to bounce like a human pogo stick to the doctor's room to be prodded, poked, x rayed and sodomised (I don't know what they do in those rooms. Just hazarding a guess).

I'm fortunate in that I've rarely had to sit in the accident and emergency section of a hospital. And so on the rare occasions when I do have to go, I fully expect to be met with a gory scene of spraying blood and bawling adults rolling around on the floor in agony as their limbs dangle from their bodies, held on only by thin strips of flesh...Like a hammed up world war movie scene. Not so. Just a group of well behaved people politely obeying the unspoken, unwritten waiting room rule of "Thou shalt not speak....but though shalt quietly cough from time to time to prove that there is actually something wrong with you and that you deserve to be seen next".

I was in that waiting room for a good hour or so (quite speedy compared to the usual bellyaching you hear about the NHS....Politics, motherbadger! Go team NHS!) on my tod, and here is what I saw:

- Woman on crutches wearing a Superman hoody. Unsure if the hoody was intentionally ironic. Made me smile either way.

- Small child of unknown diagnosis (she had a bit of a puffy eye...allergic reaction?)torturing her littler brother by shouting "Iiiii'm infecteeeed!!" and running after him as he frantically tried to flee her diseased clutches.

- Teenager proudly showing off what looked like a large dog bite to a modest crowd of "oooh"ing people.

- Other teenage girl of a curvier stature in bum flashing denim hotpants and those fake-suspenders-type tights making the gaggle of pensioners present gasp and giggle like toddlers watching You've Been Framed (british clip show mostly featuring people falling over and accidentally flashing their pants - popular before we found Youtube and cat videos). "You can see her bottom, Doris!"

A eventually called me over to the waiting room he'd been wheeled to, and I got to see the INSIDE OF HIS FOOT WHERE ALL THE BONES ARE! I haven't seen many x-rays in my time either... and, and, I got to watch them put the plaster on his foot! Nurse practitioner declared that there is a little knobble on the x-ray that looks unusual and "a bit fluffy" (direct quote) and that we'll have to go back in and get it checked on again tomorrow to see if it's actually broken.

Next on the agenda for our Sunday adventure fun times was to rescue A's Volkswagen Golf from the leisure centre car park it was sitting abandoned in. As the only one of us with two functioning ankles, I had to drive A's car. To give you a background of my driving experience, it took me a year after passing my test to stop squealing like a pig whenever I hit a bump in the road, and every car I have owned was and is the power equivalent of a hair dryer...and not even a fancy, expensive hair dryer. In cars, instead of horse power, I opt for donkey power.

Ass power, if you will.

Compared with my car, A's Golf has the power of an army of asses, and I never want to drive it again, as I may inadvertently kill someone else or myself. You might have noticed that I have included less swear words in this post than normal...this is because in a fifteen minute drive, I've used up an entire week's quota of F-bombs and S...grenades (..?). A girl racer I will never be.

Anyhoo, home now, along with A and his fluffy foot. Any footballers out there, take heed - tackle correctly, or risk being the reason someone loses their footballing career to foot fluff. No one wants to be that guy.

*solemn head shake*

Here's a photo of the injured bit of the patient's anatomy. Please leave messages of sympathy, well-wishing or condolences for A's foot in the comments box below (please do! The attention might distract him for a moment so that I don't have to pick things up for him for a while. I'm trying to play on Tumblr. Cheers!)

Hope your weekend was smashing, darlings!

Davina McCall Threatened My Face

I spent my evening at a house party last night, trying my best not to let the fact that I was expecting to turn into the Elephant Man at any given second show. Not exactly how I thought it was going to pan out.

Yesterday afternoon, I decided that it was high time that I covered the badger stripe of brown roots running along the middle of my head, and bought a brand I hadn't used before for a change. And because the Live dye I usually buy is making my hair whiter with each use. Time to tone the colour down a bit lest I start glowing in the dark. Which would be pretty cool, but still...

The fact that the brand is advertised by my new arch nemesis Davina McCall (see older post "Davina McCall Took My Legs") should've set off alarm bells from the beginning. Once I secured my dye, I marched on home and proceeded to chuck the whole lot over my head willy-nilly without doing the advised patch test for allergies. Because I've never had an allergic reaction to dye before, and because I'm a fucking maverick. Thirty mins later, I hopped in the shower to rinse the lovely horse piss smell that blonde hairdye emits off of my head. I conditioned, sang some songs loudly and out of tune and hopped back out to dry my new mane. All good in the hood.

Then I called my mother dearest for one of our lovely chats.

"What you up to then, mum?"

"Not much, waiting for the boiler to be fixed etc etc...(not a direct quote, I'll be honest). You?"

"Just dyed my hair. Lips feel a bit weird, though. Sort of numb."

*audible gasp from other end of line*

"Nah, it's okay. I went running in the cold earlier, so they're probably just dry or something."

"Oh my God, go to a doctor! Are you alone? Is your face swelling? You could go into anaphylactic shock, you could die! People DIE dying their hair!!...etc etc" I laughed it all off and assured her I'd live, and then went about my business. And by business, I mean that I went foraging for snacks that I could drop all over my pyjamas at four in the afternoon. That's just how I roll.

THEN I chanced to glimpse my face side-on in the little portable mirror that lives in my living room. My hand flew up to my mouth, and I felt my pulse quicken. With sweating palms, I inspected my features further. There was definitely a small but noticeable amount of swelling over each of my eyes. Especially the right one. Well, that was it, then. Mum was right. I'm was going to die.

My reaction was the same as that of any internet-loving serial hypochondriac's - I googled the fuck out of my symptoms. Obviously no good can come of this. I was treated to pages upon pages of horror stories about people's faces ballooning overnight to the size of footballs. All of them included graphic pictures of faces that resembled giant potatoes with creases for eyes, but no solution as to what you should do when you think you're going to experience an explosion of the face. A facesplosion, if you will. So, I lay in the dark in bed at five pm because I'd decided that if I was going to have to accept my fate as the wearer of a giant, pus-leaking head, I'd rather be napping through some of it.

After an hour or so, A returned from work to find me lying in the fetal position under the covers, still wide awake and freaking out.

"Don't look at meee!"

Anyway, you don't need to know every single detail of the night that followed, but as you've already read, I went to the house party. I'm not blogging from a hospital bed either, so all is well and normally proportioned on the face front. Instead of looking like the Elephant Man, my deformation only got as far as Crap Extra From Star Trek. Most of what little swelling I had stayed hidden under my fringe like a good allergic reaction, and my face didn't eat my eyes.

Lessons:

- Always patch test for hair dye, even if you dye your hair as often as I do and haven't reacted before.
- If you do experience a reaction, do NOT turn to Google or your mum for advice.
- Davina McCall is the antichrist and can't be trusted.

Happy Sunday, all!