A Change is as good as it gets.

I wobbled back and forth as the train sped South, pressing the wrong letters on my phone key pad with awkward sausage fingers. Hedges, and sheep  and fields whizzed past.

I wanted to go and I didn’t want to go. Others said I was brave. Especially at my age, apparently. I am brave, I suppose, in a way.

I was learning the language on an app. I was surprised at myself, the way I felt validated by the approval of the nodding, thumbs up animations. How I frowned when they shook their colourful little cartoon  heads.

I just didn’t think it through. Thinking it through, would have  meant a victory for the “what ifs?”, and once they won a battle, they didn’t stop til they  had invaded and conquered the entire brain, with a little help from their allies in the “not good enough” department.

So here I am, sausage fingers and all, wobbling my way down South in standard class.

“A  change is as good as a rest” they say, and a change is as good as it gets, is what I say. I’ve changed job many a time. I’ve been a cleaner in a pub, I remember staring down into a trough of pish, glob and cigarette doughts and wondering where to start. But start I did, not stopping til I got pulled up by the boss for using too much bleach. A quick hoover round the lounge and an hour peeling tatties in the kitchen, then I was  promoted to waiting tables in the afternoon.

Anyway, after that, i moved on to other jobs, working in a pub at night, pouring pints of lager, light and heavy whilst the Guinness ran, in time to “ A Boy Named Sue”. Next came stacking bottles on and off a line in a whisky plant, the sound of glass on glass rattling round in my head for hours after a back shift. A cash in hand job washing down a restaurant for a developer before he covered a multitude of sins in metal splash boards. Talking over his shoulder to me, whilst he took a pish in the open plan toilet.

I applied for a job in a local woman’s  house once too.  Just up the road from us, an  elaborate castle-esque 90’s build, complete with turrets and crunchy gravel. So different from the council house we lived in, but yet, at the same time, not. I didn’t get that one. Probably for the best.

A newsagents came next, the most boring job I ever had, made bearable by the ready supply of chocolate and a read at “Take a Break”.

A nursing ticket later, I went  through a portal into another world. I waded my way through  people from in utero to recently deceased. There are not enough adjectives to describe the experience. Babies delivered in peaceful side rooms to alternatively shiny bright clinical theatres, me sliding down the wall as the surgeon  cut through layers of skin and yellow fat to haul out a mewing new life.

Walking through a leafy Avenue, under a blue sky with a bunch of unique young people, only to turn and find that one wayward teenager had stripped herself to the waist and ran into the picnic area, giggling and laughing and wobbling all over the place.

Being shouted at and threatened by a young man,  and not minding as he had had everything and lost it all. And I dont mean anything as superficial as a house or money, I mean skin and bone and muscle and the power to move them.

Walking beside an ambulance all the way up the road as the patient, mistaking me for God knows who, wouldn’t let me in the ambulance.

Washing, and dressing, and shaving, and toileting and feeding and chasing and injecting and brushing and wiping and talking and taking blood and listening and documenting it all for years.

And in between taking my own turn as the patient, delivering, going under, getting injected, cut, stitched, wiped, helped, listened too, joked with, listened too, not listened too, taken seriously, not taken seriously.

And being the relative, crying, worrying, hoping, grieving, holding on to every word.

So, yes, I’m brave,  just as everyone else is too. Just doing what I have to do. And I have to do this.  The train is slowing, wheezing, taking it’s last breaths, and I’m reaching for my bags, moving on to the next thing. Never mind the “What if’s”, a change is as good as a rest and a change is as good as it gets.