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Monday morning saw Mum and Dad in the waiting room of one of the Sheffield hospitals for mum to have a CVS, I won’t go into all the gory details, but basically it was a test to see if the baby Mum was pregnant with also had DMD like me and if it had, what would they do? Mum, having worked with DMD boys in their teens had no illusions as to the effects of DMD she wasn’t wearing rose coloured spectacles as they say! Dad wasn’t sure, so they decided to go ahead with the test anyway. Also they wanted to try again to get some blood out of Mum to see if she was actually a carrier of DMD, or if I was a mutation (sounds like something out of Alien!) Actually I came to realise over the following years that people in hospitals are obsessed with sticking needles in you and taking out whole armfuls of blood; they just do it by default!

Anyhow, the test was done, and they actually got some blood out of Mum. Mum then had to go back home, go to bed, because the CVS could have caused a spontaneous abortion, and wait for the results. You will come to realise, if you carry on reading my blog, that patience is certainly NOT one of Mum’s virtues!

 

So, basically that really was agony for Mum.

It has just dawned on me that I have not actually explained who the Odd Socked Octopus is! I guess, however, that most of you will have already realised; but for those of you who struggle when one of their two brain cells has gone walkabout. The Odd Socked Octopus is the name we all came to refer to my Mum by. An octopus, because she always had loads of things on the go at the same time, work, children, her parents and mother in law, animals, keeping fit, gardening, being on lots of committees and so on and on, she was NEVER still.

Odd socked, because, as a family, we very rarely had a matching pair of socks! Our washing machine used to eat them! (Mum once actually rang Dad up at work, very excited, because a whole pair of his socks had come out of the washing machine) Indeed Roger came to take a perverse pride (he could be very perverse) in always wearing odd socks for his rugby matches even though when he was captaining Derbyshire they took a dim view of it.

Oh heck, as usual, I’ve gone off on a tangent! Any road up, so the OSO (work it out!) had to sit in bed and wait to find out if the baby was affected and if she was a carrier. The news came through, four agonising days later, that the baby was a boy, but was not affected, and that Mum was not a carrier of DMD.

 I should also point out, that a couple of weeks earlier, Mum had a scan to check the baby, to be told it was twins. She was more upset I think because she had just sold one of the two cots they had, thinking they would no longer need them! However, going back for another scan a couple of weeks later, there was only one. I reckon as Alistair (he was the baby) who was born the following May weighing ten pounds five ounces actually ate the other one and that it’s still probably there inside him to this day! But I will tell you more about that another time.