If you're reading this, that's a miracle in itself...

Because the last two times I've tried to write a blog, I've failed. Once because I didn't know what I was doing, and the second time because I still didn't know what I was doing, but was in the rather more dangerous position of thinking I did. Wrong button pressed, 3 hours work disappeared in a nanosecond.
Anyway, I'd better introduce myself. Firstly, by way of explaining the name for this blog. I have joked throughout my adult life of wanting one of those lives that, in visual terms, would look like a hearbeat monitor flicking across a screen - straight line, little jolt up, little jolt down, straight line again - and what I've actually ended up with is the kind of display you'd get if you wired up a monitor to someone who'd just dropped an electric fire in their bath.

A little precis of my life as it stands, dripping forlornly in the rain with its broken umbrella, may help... . I love introductions almost as much as I love being asked to give myself some kind of 'witty' moniker at selling parties where someone gives you a name sticker and asks you to describe what kind of cook/reader/body lotion user you are. So, I'm going to do mine in the manner of Maximus the Gladiator: I am 39 and in my 40th year, Mother to a an Arthritic Son, Wife to a Recovering Husband, Loyal Servant to a Stroppy Pre-Schooler, Frustrated Writer and generally Woman on the Edge.

I shall begin with the start of 2007. Christmas was fine - in the way 'fine' can be quantified when your husband discovers he is to be made redundant in February, your arthritic son has taken a drop in dosage of his horrible-but-essential medication (its magical immuno-suppressant qualities being a touch too magical) and your 3 year old discovers early onset Attitude. However, such was the Walton-esque festive vibe in the house, that I was rather looking forward to a new year. We had been through a lot, we felt, what with Arthritic Son being diagnosed in 2005 and not stable until mid-2006, Husband having already been through one redunancy when Teenage Toddler was born in 2003, and 2004 taken up with minor problems like a spot of marital separation, attending Relate meetings and the like. Things were so good, in fact, I couldn't help wondering where the catch was.
Anyway, we'd been invited to Loaded Friends for a party to see in the new year. We're talking Bacchinalian feasting, rivers of quality alcohol, a bedroom with its own en-suite and the first morning of 2007 spent detoxing in the sauna and dipping in and out of the indoor pool... in short, for cap-doffers like us, a bit of a tip-top mini-break at no charge other than having to be Entertaining - which isn't exactly demanding in those circumstances. However, 24 hours before we were due to go, Husband ended up on a course of antibiotics for his window-rattling cough and Teenage Toddler had transmuted into King of Snot. Deciding to err on the side of caution, especially in light of Arthritic Son's compromised immunity, I spent New Year's Eve watching other people's fireworks through the haze of cheap fizz, not unhappily, and chiding myself for being such a glass-empty kind of psycho moan beast that I could even wonder about 'catches'. I resolutely determined to be more positive in 2007 - and therefore attract a more positive kind of luck.

It is now the beginning of April and since New Year, I have spent the equivalent of one month in and out of hospitals and surgeries, and probably another one just driving to and from them. People at my son's school are now starting to look at me as if I have Munchausen's by Proxy and the pharmacist in our local surgery has begun to seem really quite pleased there's a two-foot thick wall separating us.

The husband ended up with what is known as a 'pleural effusion', which is a lot of nasty fluid on the lungs. Thanks to spectacularly bad handling by a GP at our local surgery, he had six courses of antibiotics, a mis-read x-ray, none of the appropriate tests and had reached almost collapse point before this got diagnosed. At which point, during the February half-term, I phoned aforementioned GP for advice and got asked what I wanted to do. Thankfully, another GP referred him under BUPA cover (part of the work package) and we got onto the treadmill of What Caused It. One ultrasound scan, a mini-fluid drain, a CT scan, endless hassle with BUPA, a stay in Papworth Hospital, a full chest drain, four more x-rays and a couple of pleural biopsies later, we now know, as of the end of March, that it's not cancer. Thank God.
As well as having a Very Sick Husband (and, in fact, a husband at home for two months), dealing with the endless running around to and from appointments, the driving to and from hospitals in Cambridgeshire (we live in South Norfolk), the Dark Places you go to when you hear words like 'biopsy', there's also been the worry about Husband's job. In between being Sick and Very Sick, he'd attended an interview (complete with fake-tanned face and resolution not to take off suit jacket in order to try and hide new-look Concentration Camp physique), and somewhat miraculously, got the job. But of course, all things being equal, half an hour after he took the phone call being offered it, subject to references and a medical report from his doctor, he received a call from his surgeon to say he'd ordered a biopsy.

Given that while all of this is going on, I am still dealing with two full-on boys, my mother is away in Spain for 5 weeks, my sister is hospitalised with vomiting and my husband's family think that I'm over-dramatising a bit of a winter cold (oh, if I had a pound for every time someone asked me if he had man-flu), to say all of this - the not knowing, the waiting, the sheer physical and mental toll - has been stressful is a little like describing the Iraq War as a 'wee hiccup' in Tony Blair's career.

People I know ask me how I cope. Take this example.
It is the week after half-term. My parents are abroad, my in-laws are in Scotland. I have four days out of five planned with hospital visits, three with Sick Husband, one with Arthritic Son - an eye check-up, which he has every 6 months (alongside monthly blood tests, three-monthly clinic visits and physio sessions) as uveitis can be a side-effect of his type of arthritis. I have already spent my Saturday trying to scrounge childcare from women at school and playgroup - which I feel bad about as it's for the first day back and I know what it's like and I'm wondering if any of them are secretly thinking I might as well ask for a kidney donation while I'm at it.
I've spent my Sunday treating the kids to a visit to the car wash (which we had to go through twice as it didn't work properly first time and then we got stuck behind an old man whose driver's side window got stuck) and a trip to the park. Arthritic Son runs headlong towards the playground and stops short clutching both knees. This is the second time in a week he has told me his knee joints have started hurting again. The first time you put it down to something like the weather, the second time you just feel sick and start having visions of going back to the 'Tiny Tim' days.
On Monday, I take Sick Husband to Cambrige for an ultrasound and a supposedly straightforward chest drain. It does not go well. Words like 'complicated', 'not quite what we thought', 'something solid behind the fluid' are bandied about. Husband has smoked for years, so it's no mental quantum leap thinking about the difference between something being wrong with you and something being wrong with you because you smoke. (Yes, I know. I KNOW.)
On Tuesday, I take him for a CT scan - Cambridge again.
On Wednesday I take Arthritic Son to hospital. I'm driving round and round the car park trying to find a space when Son asks me if I remember the last time we came and I shouted at 'that woman'.
'What woman?' I am genuinely mystified.
'You remember. The lady in the car park who didn't have any children in her car.'
'Who?'
'The one who parked in that space you saw and you asked her if she minded if you had it 'cos you'd been driving around for ages and she said no, and then you a bit annoyed and then she said tough and something about boats, and then you argued for a bit because you said the car park was meant for kids, and then you got really cross and went all red and got out of the car and I thought you were going to hit her. That woman.'
I cringe so badly, I crick my neck.
'Oh, THAT woman,' I say brightly. 'Oh, I'd forgotten all about that. It was just a silly little-'
'No it wasn't mum, don't you remember? You shouted at her that people like her made you sick and I wondered if you were going to puke in the car park, like on your shoes or something.' Laughs in the way of 8 year old boy at mention of puke.
'Ah, ha-ha-ha-ha-HA!' I enjoin. 'Well, grown ups do do things they shouldn't sometimes when they're very, very tired. But it was wrong of mummy and you must never copy it. Never.' Rapid change of subject.
We then enter the hospital, in the wrong side because I'm so tired I've lost the plot, and walk for a mile before sitting for an hour in a waiting room full of children with TB who've weed on the radiators, or so it seems – a perfect place to contemplate what a nutter/failure of a mother I am. There's not even a Grazia to cheer myself up with (well, at least I'm not Paris Hilton). Son talks endlessly about Dr Who. Pre-eye test examination happens. His are fine, mine I realise, with ageing horror, are not. See consultant. Son's eyes are given the all-clear. We talk about his drugs and I realise how this once-foreign medical language now trips so easily off my tongue. Fight off sadness about that (at least he's better than he was thanks to Nasty Wonder Drug). Head for WRVS shop as is our way - it being formerly the best method to rid him of the impression hospitals were all about needles, pain, tests, physio regimes and cortico-steroid injections - to buy chocolate. Stand in queue at till. Son skitters off to check out toys. Woman in front and woman behind till have following conversation:
'How's your mother?'
'Oh, better than she was now she's had the breast off. I can't talk about it too much though, it upsets me.'
'Oh, I know. I had the lung out a year ago now. I know what it's like with the cancer. You give her my love and tell her I know what she's going through.'
At this point, watching customers on other till hurtling through, thinking how much I do not want to be listening to this, Son runs up and tugs my elbow.
'Mum! They've got Dr Who toys!'
'Have they? That's nice.'
'Can I have one?'
'No.'
'Just one?'
'No darling,' I say wearily. 'Not today. You've got Maltesers.' Unfair exchange I know, but you have to draw lines at times like this, coming here the amount we do.
'Oh-uh! Not fair! Why not?'
I look at him. The snap in my voice comes out much harder than I meant it to. 'Oh well why not have five! What do you think?'
The two women stop talking and look at me like I'm Satan's Bitch.
Drive home with the word 'cancer' buzzing round my head like a fly I can't swat, feeling my stomach trying to ingest my spleen. Have incessant Dr Who conversation about the merits of Christopher Eccleston vs David Tennant with Son. Drop Son off, go to collect Teenage Toddler from nursery who greets me with a bottom lip the size of Wales because I'm 'not daddy', and refuses to let me see the picture he's made because it's 'just for daddy'. Get home, load washing machine from gargantuan pile overtaking landing upstairs, cook pasta for kids, prepare supper for us for later (way too full of healthy veg, garlic and chilli for kids, plus accessorised with salad) get accosted by Sick Husband who is up, sweating and trying to rage about his boss, who he's just found out put him on Statutory Sick Pay after the first two weeks he was ill. Open fridge, swig from half-drunk bottle of wine I'm trying to abstain from until weekend. Clutch it fiercely to breast and intermittently slug while lighting cigarette and smoking outside back door (I know. I KNOW). Sick Husband looks at me with faint disgust and says, 'What's up with you?'

So there you have it. The truth is you don't really 'cope', you just have no choice. You just look like you're coping to the people who know you because if you're anything like me you don't fall to bits in front of them.
What would they prefer to see?
There are times I have wondered. How I've resisted self-harming - like carving Justify Your Bloody Salary on my torso and chaining myself to the roof of the doctor's surgery screaming for Watchdog - because I've felt so angry at the treatment of my husband by that one GP. Or gone so mad at a complete stranger, I wondered if I need locking up/sedating for the protection of the public. I've obsessed about someone who's pissed me off to the point of almost creating an internal ulcer, cried enough to make myself look like the Face of Boe (Dr Who again), talked to myself enough to wonder if it's too late - I've already gone mad and realisation is just as fleeting for me as moments of madness are for the normally sane.

Well, I'm a writer. And my coping mechanisms are whinging a lot (hence this blog) and being as mad as a box of badgers. Which pretty much fills the bill for writing a blog into cyberspace where no one will ever read it. If nothing else, it's an outlet for me, and I'm aware I need one. The most contradictory thing of all is that you'd think after all this, with good news (it's NOT cancer), you'd be skipping around with joy in your feet and sunlight in your heart.
Well, in one way you are. But in another way, all the adrenaline I've lived on for the past three months, all the worry and the waiting and the coping and the caring has taken its toll. Think of it like the mother whose heart stops at the sight of her child running out into a busy road. Does she grab that child when she realises its safe and cuddle it to her speaking calm, happy words of reassurance and delight?
Does she hell.