If ever I have had a bittersweet experience it happened during the course of last week.
If I may start with the sweet part, that came towards the end of the week when one of my grands, Bianca Boyce, made her mother and father, Kelly and Pedro, along with all of her relatives and friends, extremely proud by landing a Barbados Scholarship.
In gaining that achievement, she followed in the academic footsteps of her older sister, Gabrielle, who took a Barbados Exhibition two years ago.
This now means that I can look forward to being very well taken care of in my sunset years, from a medical point of view.
The reason is that like her sister, Bianca has also opted to enter medical school. So imagine me a few years from now having two “grandoctors” in the family, along with my present unofficially adopted daughter, Donna Matthew, to make miserable with com- plaints about my every ache and pain, sneeze and cough.
By coin- cidence, it was aches and pains, sneezes and coughs that combined to make the start of the week very bitter for me when I was floored by what I assumed was the other side of the Crop Over sweetness I had enjoyed while jumping in a band on Kadooment Day.
By last weekend, the wear and tear on my ageing body as I was chipping and wukking, chipping and wukking along the miles (I understand eight) from the Stadium to Spring Garden, at times in the hottest sun, at times in the most drenching rain, left me with muscles that I had long forgotten were in my feet and legs, knotted and cramped in pain and agony.
Just as bad, or even worse, was the pain in my lower back, the obvious reward for trying to prove I could take on the several challenges of younger and young shapely female revellers, who were able to easily follow such instructions in song as ‘bend down, touch your toes, pooch back and let your bamsie roll” without the slightest stress or strain.
So by Sunday I was coughing the night away with little or no sleep, leaving me to face a Monday morning that should have been sunny and bright, depressed with a cold that felt more like a chikungunya assault.
Monday night was even worse, with the cough and sinus congestion combining to prove which was worse and forcing me to find myself in Donna’s office the next morning for
a check-up. I especially wanted to make sure that I was not coming down with anything like pneumonia which, in my case, would have to be “oldmonia”.
Fortunately, it was nothing that a little more bed rest, lots of fluids, some Vitamin C and a three-times-a-day dose of extra sweet, bad-tasting cough syrup could not take care off.
For the sinusitis, her prescription was for me to return home, put on my swim trunks, drive down to Batts Rock beach, get into the water, swim out and do some diving.
Today, I am still a bit congested in both head and chest but am feeling 100 per cent better than I did at the beginning of last week. By the way, I also resorted to my own old-fashioned prescription of a night brew of good bush and lemon grass tea.