stocking fillers

My fellow leiomyosarcoma sufferer and blogger, Karen who is currently on a cruise wrote a few days ago about wearing flesh coloured compression stockings with shorts on her swanky deck. I sympathise, I too have been that woman (the stockings and shorts bit not the cruise...yet!) and let me tell you no-one has flesh the colour of these stockings and even Norah Batty would have shied away from their elastic proclivities. It did however bring to mind a funny incident in Dresden.

After the operation, they had given me surgical stockings, a nice white colour not pretending to be anyone's flesh unless ghosts have flesh and I don't think they do. But to be honest they were far too floppy and comfortable for my high maintenance legs which had begun to bloat up to the size of tree trunks. So I fished out the Jobst, top strength, aforementioned flesh coloured ones and attempted to put them on. It's my right leg that needs them most and my right lung that had just had major surgery; at the best of times I count putting on my stocking equal to the exercise you get say climbing Everest or completing a triathlon; it ain't easy. With drains and stitches and a stretched ribcage it was nigh on impossible.

The sensible thing would have been to call a nurse but Stewart was there so I engaged him in the process. I knew it was doomed to failure, I had once tried to get him to take the damn things off and it beat him. Anyway we set ourselves up with our backs to the door, me sitting on a chair and him kneeling in front of me. I instructed him in rolling the garment up and hooking it over my toes, quick pull to the heel; but no it all stuck and he was grunting and groaning and pulling and pushing and I was thrusting myself back on the chair to give him some purchase; shouting out yes that's right or no a little harder; when of course one of the nurses appeared at the door. She gaped, apologised and made a quick exit.

I can only imagine what it was she thought we were up to but with or without stocking it doesn't seem a bad idea... sorry readers the cold is clearly improving.