All good news

Well, when Ness makes up her mind about something, she really doesn't muck around: she's home! She made leaps and bounds after we saw her last Tuesday in Intensive Care, was moved to a ward on Thursday and sent home just in time for New Years Eve on Saturday. She has a lot of rest ahead of her and her partner is doing a great job organising visits so that we don't tire her too much in our enthusiasm to see that beautiful smile. I'm booked in for tomorrow morning - yah!

I can only imagine how confronting this has been for Ness - it certainly shook everyone around her. Not at all what we had planned for her or her for herself. Waiting for news of her progress, I couldn't think of anything else. It was like having a movie of our lives going through my head and I found myself searching through boxes of stuff to find photos of times we'd shared or things we'd bought each other as kids. I kept thinking of funny anecdotes about our families that we've shared - stuff that no one else in my life knows about except maybe my siblings and probably not even then. That's the thing about knowing someone for so long, they have all the back-story of who you are and how you came to be that way and it's pretty damn special. I remember my Grandma telling me when she was elderly that everyone who knew her as a young girl had died and how incredibly sad that felt. It was like a bit of her had died with them. I'm so not ready for that.

I'm trying to figure out the year for this...I think maybe it's 1985 and we are 17. It's Christmas afternoon when all our family friends would come to visit. That's me second on the left (dag) and Ness next to me on the right (cool). Nothing much has changed! Although what you don't know is that was a major milestone for me: I'm wearing a skirt! When Mick met me I had several pairs of overalls, drawers full of Bond's t-shirts and a backpack was (still is) my preferred bag. For my 30th birthday I received no less than 7 handbags from concerned friends who obviously felt I had entered my adult life the wrong way around. I'm much better at the girlie stuff these days, and quite enjoy it. Ah well, that's what happens when you grow up the only girl in a family of boys!