Sent home!

Back to work for me today. Although I’d been in on Tuesday night for Book Club it has been nearly 3 weeks since I’ve worked and I was slightly dreading being on my ankle all day. Typically it was already quite throbbing and stiff when I woke up this morning (another dawn waking, earlier this time at 4am, not at all sure how to break this habit) so I put on the ankle support bandage thingy.

Ady took Davies and Scarlett off to do store visits with him for the day so I waved them off and then headed into work early. One of my jobs at work is to coordinate the ordering of books for the five reading groups run from Lancing library. There is the book group I belong to and four others – one which is WI members, one which is U3A members, one which came about as a result of a few streets in North Lancing getting together to try and prevent the closure of a small local post office – they failed but decided to carry on with the social aspect of meeting up and started a book club and one which is very established and all it’s members have MAs or PHDs in Literature and they meet to critique writing. It can be quite a frustrating task as often they all seem to want books that are really popular and have been featured in Richard and Judy’s book group reviews or various literary prize nomination lists and because I am only there for 11 hours I rarely actually see any of the reps from the book groups myself. So for a while I’d been angling to try and arrange an event and invite all the book clubs to come along so I could explain how our service works and manage their expectations a little more realistically, to get some feedback on how they think we do and to put my face to them as a contact and know who I am ringing if I need to chase things up. We came up with the idea of a Coffee Morning event and with some pushing on my part I got a date set, invitations sent out and RSVP’d to and it happened this morning, run by Brenda, the Principle Librarian and me. I only realised after it had all been arranged that it would be my first day back at work after the holiday so was keen to get in early and sort stuff out in preparation.

The event went well, we had 20 people attend and despite a glitch in the timetable over teabreaks for the rest of the staff meaning Brenda disappeared for a while in the middle leaving me to it it was a definite success :). Another thing to add to my CV I guess. That took me to lunchtime, half of which I missed as I was moving tables back and clearing coffee cups.

In the afternoon my ankle had swollen up quite a lot and was pretty painful. I’d been given mostly sitting down duties but I had to take the ankle support off as it was cutting in where it had swollen and colleagues were shocked at how puffed up it was. At 415pm I was offered the chance to go home – I suspect I was looking a little grey – and for the first time ever in my working life I went home from work early! I don’t have another full day shift until next Friday when fingers crossed it will be improved enough to manage a full day on my feet.

Ady and the kids were already at home so I laid on the sofa with my feet up and an ice pack on and it soon reduced in size and felt better. I am concerned that we are now on day 16 and it is still so swollen despite most of the bruising having come and gone now. I am also almost out of my prescription painkillers so I might make a GPs appointment for more of those and get it looked at at the same time just to check there is nothing else I should be doing.

The others had found a video in a charity shop of the film Loch Ness so we all watched that together in a reminising fashion of the holiday :). I read some chapters of Alone on a wide, wide sea and then it was (ha!) bedtime.

Dinner for Ady and I, we watched some Outnumbered on dvd and I am about to have an early night with some painkillers and see if I can push past the dawn waking phenomena!