Waiting for Jack Bauer (In the meantime making do with Andrew)

I never in my wildest dreams, and I have some wild dreams, I can tell you, imagined I would be frantic to find a Betterware catalogue. But a week or so after someone had pushed it through my letterbox I am desperate to trace it. Somewhere within the pages is an item I now cannot live without and no one else seems to sell it. The latter probably is not strictly true but the I can’t live without it part, most certainly is. Of course up until a week ago I really couldn’t have cared less if I had one. After all I had Andrew (my husband) then. Ah, yes, that has got you thinking and wanting to read more. What has Betterware got, you are thinking, that can replace a husband? You are now thinking, could you use one, in fact, you are probably wondering, if perhaps you may even need one. In my case it was a culmination of things really but throwing Andrew out of the bedroom is the primary reason it is needed. Good god, I hear you women cry as you reach for the Yellow pages to search for your local Betterware representative. Although, of course, in this day and age of Technology, you are probably reaching for your Blackberry’s and searching on Google to find the item that can replace a husband in the bedroom. Why is it though, when I do not want a Betterware catalogue or any of their goods do I continually fall over the damn thing until the rep finally collects it? But when I do want it, it miraculously disappears only to turn up in the most unlikely place? Anyway, I found it, and there on page five is the item I covert. Of course, none of this would be necessary if I had a perfectly good thyroid and no they don’t sell perfectly good thyroid’s at Betterware but they do sell the next best thing. So, you are wondering what my thyroid or lack of one has got to do with all of this.
Last Monday, I had a second dose of radio iodine therapy. This in very simple terms means I am radioactive for 12 days. The lovely lady who administered the dose, well, if you call handing me a capsule in a long tube, administering. I rather think I performed the dirty deed actually. Yes, come to think of it, I remember they had all legged it before I had even brought my head back up. Anyway, she was quite stern about all the precautions I needed to take. The worst part is that you feel perfectly fine for the first forty-eight hours while you are spewing radiation everywhere. The power is quite intoxicating. The temptation to walk into Tesco and shout, ‘Step away from the Mackerel’ is overwhelmingly tempting. But of course, I didn’t. Instead I went straight home to a very happy Bendy who purred around my legs.
‘Go away,’ I cried. ‘Shoo, go next door.’
Not the usual greeting he receives. Of course, he ignored all my efforts to keep him at bay and has done for the past week and for some odd reason he seems to be more in love with me while I am potentially killing him then he ever was before. I phoned Nuclear medicine three days later in a panic.
‘What is the procedure regarding pets. After all they are very small and I have had a double dose.’ Anyone overhearing me would probably wonder what kind of double dose I had contracted. Dear me, one dreads to think. Accept no one is likely to get close enough to overhear for fear of death by radiation.
‘There is no legal requirement regarding pets, so he is ok.’
I tried to absorb what she was saying.
‘But it was a double dose.’
‘There’s no legal requirement.’
What she means is, If I kill him, I will be quite safe. The RSPCA can’t touch me. I continue with my shoo shooing to no avail. I even go into a massive panic when the pigeons fly into the garden. I don’t want to be the cause of a mass pigeon slaughter. I struggle to keep my towel separate from Andrew’s but he keeps mixing them up. I shout at him when he gets closer than an arm’s length and order him to the spare room at bedtime. This may sound easy to most of you but in our case the spare room is not even in the house! And no, I haven’t banished him to a hotel. Our spare room over the past few years has slowly become an office. So, we built a good size summer-house which converts into a very nice spare room but it is in the garden! Every night, we say a miserable goodnight to each other over the phones intercom. Of course, for many women this might be a dream come true. However, take a few seconds to consider the usefulness of your man, apart from the obvious, which we won’t even go into, except to say that when you are radiating radiation, it puts something of a damper on your libido. In my case, he has reluctantly become the spider catcher. Just five seconds of me screaming hysterically, while standing on the bed, usually after knocking over a glass of water in my trembling frenzy, is enough to have him grabbing a pillow and squashing the thing to death. Why don’t you kill them with radiation, I hear you ask. Well, they are hardy little suckers, these spiders. But the big problem right now is that Andrew shows no signs of rapidly turning into Jack Bauer in the near future. By the time he answers my frantic intercom ring, gets dressed, comes into the house, climbs the stairs and leisurely enters the bedroom, of course, the damn monster has gone. I spend the night lying in bed a quivering wreck. So, the answer is the spider catcher. At five pounds fifty pence, it is a bargain. The question is will I be able to get close enough to catch the spider? Watch this space.