I thought this volunteer driving thing was going to be easy until I met Eileen -- let's call her that.
Not a woman, a sheer force of nature!
Got there on time to take her for her blood test and she insisted I was early.
Not on my Job Sheet I wasn't.
But her insistence had its way.
So we left late.
Her schedule, not mine.
Then she told me she'd had a dry biscuit for breakfast and so wouldn't meet the "fasting" criterion.
So up we went into some godforsaken part of the metro area where she had to "negotiate" the whole thing with a Malaysian pathologist.
Intervene as I may, these two (bearing in mind that Eileen is 92 years old, but going on 15 in her attitude) could not communicate.
Turned out, the path lab could send a blood-testing person to her retirement home tomorrow at some time.
But Eileen insisted it had to be before 9:00.
By then, she demanded, she'd need some breakfast.
Shit, can she get her way?
So, we're on the way back home and she tells me I have to detour via the chemist's to pick up her script.
Otherwise she'll run out of pills and the Menière's Disease will take over and ... goodnight nurse!
(I have some personal sympathy with this condition, BTW).
So, off to the chemist's and not an ACROD bay in sight.
I park illegally and usher her (very slowly) in to the chemist's shop.
Phew: a break and a Jester's pie shop near by.
After about a quarter of an hour, she's out of there and wants to go and check her Lotto ticket!
I leave her at the newsagent and keep moving the car around.
Not so easy in a huge Ford I've never driven before.
(Holden bloke writing, OK?)
When I finally get her home, filling out the paperwork -- this is nearly three hours later -- she phones up the Minjup Shire Support Association and asks if I can be her next driver.
Apparently her regular, John, is down with Swine Flu.
I'm running scared!
