I’ve been totally silent, I’m aware, since I arrived here in Footscray with a determination to see out my days in this little old flat. My impression of it – the flat itself – hasn’t changed: I love it dearly, with all its little-old-flat faults, because it’s what I am, at heart, used to. I hadn’t realised … But since Footscray arrival everything has changed, and not for the better.

I think I must’ve known from the start that I wasn’t going to be able to make it work, because otherwise I would’ve done as promised and posted here about it, in joy, with photos. Why didn’t I …? How could I have known …?

In something like my second week, I fell over. This isn’t a gasp-making scenario: I’ve fallen over several times in the past 6 or 7 years. In fact, I live on a Level 2 Home Support Plan specifically because of that tendency. And it could be said not to have been my own half-witted fault: the paths in Geelong Road are appalling, made of asphalt and thus pitted and rutted and well as being almost constantly dotted with hard little round nutty things fallen from the Council trees growing in the nature strips. That fall resulted in a haematoma on the upper left of my left shin – still obvious and going to be for several months – and multiple X-rays of varying kinds.

A few weeks thereafter, I slipped in the bath. Yeahyeah, I know, she said resignedly: I should never have taken on a flat with shower over bath. Sighh … I’d bought a couple of “bath mats” made of hard little batons with suckers underneath to put in said bath and stop me falling, but they didn’t reach right to the getting-in end, where there’s a really good grab-rail. I’d reached for the rail and put my right foot in, where it was on nekkid bath: foot slid away to the right carrying body, hand still had hold of rail, so left foot/leg were yanked up into the bath, slamming ankle against its top on the way.  😦  Fairly amazing bruising, lots more X-rays and another haematoma but this time on the right side of the left leg’s lower shin. Jesus. The staff down at Footscray Private Imaging rolled their eyes on seeing me again.

More weeks passed. One day I was out on my way to … somewhere (whose nose ?) when I felt pain on top of my left foot and looked down: the entire top of it was covered in the largest bruise I’d ever seen. And one of the ugliest. To this day I have not the faintest idea of how it had happened. I do understand that the blood-thinner I’m on exacerbates bruising; but honestly, shouldn’t I at least KNOW what I did to my own fucking foot to result in even, let us say, an ordinary bruise ?

And then I realised that I was having some problems with balance: stepping past the Boodster, between him and the little table on the living-room rug, became something of brief anxiety. Turning around on the spot (any), ditto. I needed, it became obvious eventually, things to hold on to or at least be there to be held on to if not actually grasped. Not all the time, not by any means. Just enough to have the ancient brain kicked into gear on the topic.

It could be vertigo: my mother suffered from it and my younger sister does, quite badly. But that’s no help to my situation, having an explanation: it has still to be managed somehow.

I can see only one solution to this dilemma. It’s a solution I had never once thought I would need to reach because the possibility of it had never once occurred to me, in my wildly vain assumption of permanent good-if-not-perfect health (overlooking my GP’s opinion about atherosclerosis because I don’t believe the fat|heart hypothesis).

I’m going to have to move into aged care residential.

ME ? – M-R ??? AGED CARE ENVIRONMENT ?????

I don’t think I need to describe to you my reluctance to give up being me, M-R, and becoming one of a gaggle of old people with false teeth and bad perms (well, the women, at least).

That’s where I am right now: not just contemplating but getting going on this horrible plan.