Stick Men

My Dear Fellows & Dear Princess,

This is what analysts do for a living. I took a phone call from someone while I was meeting with Lemon and told her, "Oh that's okay, I'm totally interruptable, me and Lemon are just drawing pictures of stick men holding balloons."

"They are ELLIPSES," hissed Lemon.

After I hung up, Lemon told me that her younger boys had seen her working at home one time and were wide-eyed that she got paid to do THIS. Apparently they came back ten minutes later with lots of doodles of stick men holding balloons and asked her for ten bucks.

Cazza is away to Waihi today. It is for a girl's weekend which didn't originally start out that way, it's just that all the men dropped out. It is actually some sort of party/commemoration of Macca's Leg.

Let me explain. Macca was part of that whole Edinburgh backpacker scene, but left for London after a year where she stayed with Libby and LouLou. She stayed in a really festy* flat. Cazza visited once or twice. She described it as the sort of place where you feel that, after having a shower, you immediately need to re-shower (in a different shower).

Nevertheless, Macca seemed to like it and was living it up in London but began to feel a bit run-down. She woke up one day feeling AWFUL and with what looked like a bug-bite on her leg. Given the festiness of the place, she wasn't surprised.

She went to the doctor who said she was most likely coming down with the flu, and told her take aspirin and sleep it off.

She did. But awoke a couple of hours later feeling much worse and the bug-bug had swollen to the size of a dinner plate. She called NHS 24.

"Call an ambulance NOW," they said. Which is really not want you want to hear. But she did, and they diagnosed necrotising fasciitis. She still has no idea how she caught it, but Cazza reckons it was the flat wot done it.

Anyway, she didn't lose the leg (or her life) which was, they told her, incredibly lucky. She also happens to be related to a plastic surgeon, who advised her on the reconstruction of her upper leg after having most of it cut away. But that was the event which saw her return to NZ and she's been back here ever since.

So that is what Cazza is doing this weekend; memorialising the leg incident with Libby, LouLou and Macca (and Feefs). At least, that's the excuse. I expect there will be less of that and more of drunken singing along to Guns n' Roses.

S.

* Kiwi word to describe something grungy and gross. Someone who doesn't change their knickers for a couple of days is "a bit festy".