When you go the Little Museum of Dublin, as you should, you’ll book a tour time for the main rooms–give yourself some time before or after to explore the other rooms, though.

The Little Museum, situated in a Georgian house, has over 5000 artifacts of city life donated to the museum by Dubliners. The 30-minute tour gives visitors an overview of some of the more important ones, tied to important incidents in Dublin’s history. The other artifacts are stacked around the museum, so peek into every case and every corner.

A few of the rooms are themed–there’s a U2 room, an Irish Times room, and a room devoted to Alfie Bryne, Lord Mayor and Shaking Hand of Dublin.

Yesterday in Conversations with my ER doc:

Him: So I see in your chart that the disc problems are chronic. What are you doing for treatment at the pain clinic?

(I tell him.)

Him: I don’t understand. What makes today an “emergency”?

Me: Today I can’t dress myself or go into a standing position on my own. My goal for today is to get back to being barely functional. I’m not asking you to cure me, but my son should not have to help me go to the bathroom.

There are days when pain wakes me up.*

But most mornings start with a cat or an alarm.

There are a few moments between sleep and waking–when the sleep paralysis is still wearing off, when my whole body doesn’t know it hurts. But then the pain rises. My trigger points** feel like they’ve been burned in a kitchen accident. My back tells me whether I will limp, whether I will be able to bend over; my neck tells me whether I can turn my head. I stretch, hoping that the muscles under my scapula and my calves won’t start to seize, but since I haven’t had my morning muscle relaxers, they do.

I check to see if something will give–my right ankle usually pops, as does an arthritic toe. Sometime my neck cracks; every once in a while, my sacrum does.

My lungs and eyes and nose tell me about the pollen levels before I see the weather report.

It takes a moment before I can turn on the light or check my phone, because my hands are either still asleep or frozen into a claw, which is what someone with Viking Hand (Dupuytren disease) has all the time.***

This whole time, a song has been playing in my head, because one always is.**** It’s usually the same song that has been playing all night, there when a cat jumps on the bed, when my arm falls too asleep for me to stay asleep.

Karma Trivia

*When my asthma wasn’t under control (before I had insurance), I would often wake up in a dream about orchestras tuning up–it was actually the wheezing in my lungs.

**We have given up on trigger point injections. Not just because they don’t really work–also because the last two doctors who tried them couldn’t get the needles in–my muscles were too tight. And the more they pushed, the more my muscles would spasm. One doctor, looking at my back, asked me if I’d seen Alien. I assured him that an alien was not going to jump out at him, even if it looked like it might.

***It’s a heritable disease that runs in Scandinavian families. My grandfather had it.

****Having a song in your head all the time (as opposed to the occasional earworms) is now understood as a form of OCD. This morning’s song, the Carpenters’ version of “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” inspired the title of this post.

Yesterday, with the scheduling staff person at the medical center.

Me: Okay, see you in six weeks for more injections.

Her: Great!

Me: Oh, wait. Actually I’m going to see you tomorrow–I have an appointment with whatshername.

Her: Why do you have two sports medicine doctors?

Me: He does my hips; she’s got my shoulder.

Yesterday in Conversations with My Doctor:

Him: I see you saw my colleague for a UTI a few days ago. She sent me a message afterwards, actually. I’m trying to remember what it said.

Me: Was it about how I wouldn’t go through my medication list with her because I knew you would go through it with me today?

Him: Yes–that’s it. Is that what you told her?

Me: I said, “Paul is very thorough.”

Him: And she let it go? She’s a . . . very strong woman.

Me: So am I.

Even though I was sad to leave Oxford and everything and everyone I love there, I was excited about finally going to Ireland.

There were several misadventures, though.

I have to use Uber in the UK, since they don’t have Lyft. I had a ride scheduled to pick me up at 8:30 a.m. for a 9:01 train. Uber didn’t actually schedule it. At 8:42, they were still thinking about it, and there was an incredible wait for customer service. And I couldn’t schedule a different ride while they were thinking about it.

Finally, I called a cab.

When I got to the train station, there was an enormous line–the entry doors into the station weren’t working.

I got through at 9.

And then the train came.

A man offered to help me with my bags, though he was carrying four coffee cups in a cardboard container.

My heaviest bag fell backwards, and the coffee fell onto him.

(He wouldn’t let me give him money for a new shirt.)

I made my way to my seat, which was a window seat. The main in the aisle seat said to the stranger across the aisle (not to me): “there’s no assigned seating on this train.”

“I can sit somewhere else if you like, but my ticket has a seat number.”

I showed him the ticket.

He let me sit down, but explained that I was wrong because the reservation lights weren’t lit.

So I offered to move.

“No, no. It’s no bother.”

So I was stuck with him.

All of that made the traffic jam I hit taking a cab from the train station to the London City Airport seem much less stressful.

However, at one point in the cab, a guy tried to hail my cab when we were stopped. The driver told him he had a passenger.

The man walked to my window and said, “And what do you think you’re doing here?”

“Ummm . . . sitting in a taxi?”

The man mumbled things about us as he walked away.

My driver said that although he’d been a London cabbie for years, he had never had something like that happen before.

Yesterday, I sat with a few other lovely people in the gorgeous gardens of Wadham College, watching Wuthering Heights, adapted by April de Angelis and directed by Michael Oakley.

It was glorious.

The story about two difficult people in love is a classic, but the writer, director, and players made the play enormously entertaining, both funny and heart-wrenching in turn.

I spent a lot of the time trying to figure out where I’d seen Nelly (Helen Belbin) before. I bought a program just so I could ease my mind. (Call the Midwife!) I wanted to know about all of the actors, though, since they were all so good.

The set was simple, and there was no backstage. Instead, the costumes flanked the set, making it easier for the actors to change, to provide musical accompaniment and sound effects. It’s a wonderful lesson in how good theatre really is all about the script and the performances.

Get thee to the garden: fall in love.

As I mentioned in my last post, I toyed with the idea of using online dating platforms to find a playmate in Oxford.

Bachelor Number 1. This was our entire conversation:

Bachelor Number 2. This guy said he was a wine geek and invited me to his house for some, but I met him at a rooftop bar instead (I always feel safer in the UK, but not that safe). He spent the whole time insulting the view, British women, England, and Oxford. I had a glass of wine. He had nothing. He apparently never drinks wine in England unless it’s from his massive collection.

Which I am determined to never see.

Bachelor number 3. The profile picture was with a cool carved tree. When I asked about it, I got a Labyrinth reference, which was enough to set up a date. After talking about our shared geeky stuff for a while, we decided to get some dinner. We walked around the Westgate, which had quite a few options. I deliberately didn’t lobby for my favorite, even though I had just gotten a loyalty card for it.

Him: This may sound boring, but out of all of these, I want to go to Nando’s most.

Reader, I’m dating him.

Visiting Sally Lunn‘s is a must on a trip to Bath. The restaurant is in one of of the oldest buildings in London. Sally Lunn, an immigrant to England, worked and lived there in the 1600s. She made a famous bun, which became the base for sweet and savory dishes. The legend is that her recipe was found in the wall years later and that it is passed down with the lease to each new owner.

I made sure I was hungry when I went–I definitely wanted to try the bun. For 17.58, I got a chicken and ham trencher plate, a pot of the incredible house tea, and a big slice of apple cake. I hadn’t had a trencher before. Here, half a bun is used as the base for a stew–this is how it was done in the old days, before plates were common and cheap. (They still put a plate under their bread plate, though.)

If you get something to eat or drink, you are allowed into the museum. That word is pretty strong, considering I’m about to show you everything in two pictures.

Before leaving, I bought a bun (for about two British pounds) and took it with me to Oxford. It happily gave me breakfast for my first two mornings there.