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I did, however, discover I could multi-task.  During a particularly violent coughing fit, I began sneezing as well, I farted and wet myself!  Who knew?  

It seemed a good idea at the time.  Going on holiday that is.  We hadn’t been away during 2014 so we made the effort to find somewhere different from the usual ‘convenient’ places we had visited in the past.   We chose Bulgaria, getting a lot of astonished responses from various folk who still associate the Balkan countries with being at war with someone or other.

Bulgaria is a beautiful country.  I can’t recommend it highly enough but – and unfortunately, there is a big but – there are no smoking restrictions anywhere and being non-smokers, and someone who has allergic reactions to cigarette smoke – within a few days I was ill.   OK, so armed with antibiotics which I have to take everywhere I go (as a legacy from my brush with leukaemia and death) I managed to get over the chest infection within a week or so.

The flight home is what caused the problem.  Lots of people were coughing and within a few days of being at home, both of us went down with the Mother, nay, the GRANDMOTHER of all colds.  Almost 5 weeks later and I am still coughing fit to burst and sneezing and other assorted nasty emissions.  I did, however, discover I could multi-task.  During a particularly violent coughing fit, I began sneezing as well, I farted and wet myself!  Who knew?  

Casey hasn’t encountered sickness at this level before.  He knows that I’m either really lazy  spending my time on the sofa just to be near his greatness or he has sussed out that he’s landed on the back door step of an imperfect and broken human.   He’s probably wondering, even as I’m writing this, how he can opt out of the unwritten contract and moonwalk down the path, out into the alley behind the back gardens to another unsuspecting, yet willing ‘victim’ to take on his daily requirements.

But actually, like all my cats before him, the Original Daily Mewsers (every one of them missed with a passion) he stepped up to the plate when he saw me snuggle down under the duvet on the sofa, with tissues stuffed up my nostrils to stem the tide of – well, you know what it is.  He came over to the sofa, stood up on his back legs, front paws on the edge of the sofa next to me and sniffed my face.  He probably wondered what in Holy Haddocks was going on – he knew of body piercings and tattoos because he’d watched programmes on television which showed such things.  Was this a new trend, he wondered? He knew I was a coward with regard to pain (I was in my 40’s before I got my ears pierced!) so perhaps the tissue up the nose was a new way of standing out from the crowd instead of being inked to within an inch of one’s skin and pierced like a pin cushion.

He did what all my cats have done.  He got up on the sofa and made himself comfortable at the back of my legs. And we slept the afternoons away while I coughed, sneezed, and generally ‘multi-tasked’ – he did it all without complaint.  And when I’d ask him if he wanted any dinner, he actually had a look on his face which seemed to say: ‘Are you sure you’re up to it? I can manage without if you’re going to explode at any minute.’

Where would I be without my beloved Dr Casey?