Water, water every where!

 

 Annamaria's post of Monday has provoked me to write this blog. 

On Sunday morning a middle aged female patient of mine, we’ll call her Angela, walked into the treatment room and burst in to tears and just said that 'Sofia has died'. 

In those circumstances you sit down, encourage the patient to sit down, hand them some tissues and say very little. Just let them talk. Angela had obviously kept a lot of emotion pent up during the drive to the practice with her husband and two children. And once she was in the warm room, her emotions just gave way. I was trying to place Sofia in her family, not one of her children and not her sister. And then Angela said she felt so stupid, and there were few people she could tell exactly how she felt as 'after all, Sofia was only a car.'

Sofia had been her wee Audi. It was the car that the patient got when she had her first child, it was the car of kiddies car seats, gonks, baby onboard stickers. Sofia was the car of the school run, brownies and quick trips to casualty.

What Angela was actually crying about was the end of an era. 

So if we just go back to the Thursday before I was in the motorhome up the Lochside, editing. And eating cake.

'He' had said there was an amber weather warning for rain and did we want to go home a day early. I said I wasn’t cutting my mini break short and I had a lot of work to do, so we were coming back on the Saturday morning. The trip that normally takes me 1 hour 15 minutes- took me nearly 3 hours.

The west of Scotland got a month’s worth of rainfall in twenty four hours.  And we are really good at rain.

My village always gets cut off with excess rain, except for cutting up the brae and dropping back down into the small section of the main road that is still visible. That adds about thirty minutes onto the journey. The main 'coast to Glasgow' trainline runs just north of the village, and it was impossible to get under any of those bridges, each had three, four feet of water. So folk were stranded either over there or over here.

The main flood at the village is a nasty one. There’s nothing built there, it’s been a flood risk for years. Folk just look out the window, look at the rain, and go a different route. There was a car stuck in the middle of that flood. It was a BMW. The driver must have thought the car was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in aquatic mode. During the day, the flood waters got worse, in the end the car disappeared totally under the waves.

And, on that dreadful drive home, as we went over the Erskine Bridge (holding onto the steering wheel for dear life, as the wipers were going treble time and not quite coping! ), there was a fire appliance coming in the opposite direction, towing a RIB.

I told Angela that story once we had commiserated each other over the loss of cars we had loved. Somewhere on the north side of the Clyde ( a river that shrugs off flood water ) was an old person trapped by rising water, waiting at a window to be rescued, or a woman in labour stuck in a car, about to pulled out  by six cheery firefighters in yellow wellies.  

At the time of writing, Sofia had been pulled from a deep flood and was drying out, awaiting diagnosis and prognosis.

Sad to say that our new roof on our house didn’t quite  hold up, nearly but not quite.

Caro