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I need some more help with another part of my novel

Timia Breederveld

New Member
Hi, John B helped me with a few pages (many many thanks) and I need some more help because English is not my native language. Any help is welcome. Especially comma use because I am very bad with commas. Also, does someone know how to delete something posted? Or how to make a single post and not a thread? THANKS!!!!


A day after I got my diagnoses, a very well fed, average sized, and optimistic looking nurse, who introduced herself as Mabel Thompson, showed up at my front door. I used to have a very good and extremely well paid job that came with an excellent healthcare package, but I didn’t really need or want a nurse. I felt the same as the day before and the day before that, in other words; I felt just fine. Before I let her into my house, I tried to get rid of her in many ways, but they all failed. She was about fifty-five with an extreme work ethic. She came to do a job, and hell would freeze over before she would not do it, or was sure a doctor had me declared dead. It was very obvious the woman wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I let her in, thinking I would be free of her after an hour or so. I took her into my living room, made us a cup of tea and explained to her in great length why I didn’t need her. It turned out she was an extremely stubborn woman, and to whatever I said she had a reply I couldn’t argue with. I can say without modesty that I am an awfully good communicator, it was my job after all, but I was no match for this woman. My former boss would hire her in the blink of an eye if he knew she existed. It became quickly clear to me nurse Thompson was going to stay whether I liked it or not. Just as I was thinking I would have the house to myself again around five p.m., she told me she needed to step out for a minute to get her suitcase out of her car. Apparently my ridiculously well covered health care package provided an around the clock nurse including an alarm system in my bedroom and the spare room I reluctantly assigned to her. I still wanted her gone, so I decided to change tactics and became very rude to her in the hope she would pack her suitcase, rush to her car and tell her employer she never wanted to step foot in my house again. Whatever I said or did, didn’t make the least of an impression on her; she kept a smile on her face and stayed friendly always. When that evidently didn’t work, I made it my mission to find out what her most favorite activities were. That mission didn’t give me much pleasure because it took only twelve seconds to ask her the question and to get an answer; it was reading, and believe it or not, as if things couldn’t get any worse; and cleaning. I had no less than one thousand very thick books in my house, so I took her to my library and told her she could read anything she liked at any time, in the hope she couldn’t resist it and would leave me at least alone if she was not going to leave any time soon. That didn’t work either. About twenty seconds before bedtime she quickly grabbed a book, thanked me with a big smile on her face, and took it to her bedroom. I was rapidly running out of ideas by now. In bed I thought of all sorts of ways to distract her, or to get away from her; I could go to a motel, but I was sure she would follow me, I could put sleeping pills in her tea, but after the one cup of tea I had made her she had taken control over the household tasks and she made the tea. In the end I came up with nothing. I fell asleep and dreamed I would wake up in a nurse Thompson free house in the morning.

Nurse Thompson came into my room every morning at seven o’clock sharp to make sure I was still alive, and to bring me coffee and breakfast. She opened my curtains for me and always made a positive remark about the weather whether it was raining, hailing, storming or snowing. If we were in the eye of a hurricane she probably would find something positive to say about that too. After breakfast I took a shower or a bath, and she used that time to quickly clean my house. The woman was fifty-five but had the energy of a twenty-year old and the speed of a greyhound dog. In the shower I decided that, if I found out that there was really such a thing as reincarnation, I would make sure that in my next life I would find a crappy job with even crappier healthcare. When I came out of the shower fresh clothes were on my bed. She even denied me the fun of walking to my closet and to pick out what to wear. I don’t know how she did it but the clothes on my bed were always the ones I was thinking of putting on while I was brushing my teeth, and I made a mental note of advising her to change her career and to go into stock trading. The woman had so many talents it dazzled me, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why she was a nurse.

In the spotless living room the paper was on a tray next to a fresh cup of coffee accompanied by a glass of water and all my medication. The medication went inside a pocket of whatever I was wearing when she was not around, and I made sure I drank some of the water before she came in. When nurse Thompson was in the room, and she made very sure she almost always was, I took the pills but didn’t swallow them and spat them out in the toilet later. I was dying anyway, so why bother taking all those pills? Even though I was apparently very sick I felt healthy as a horse and could do without the dozens of side effects described in the leaflets that came with them. As soon as I came back from the toilet she took my blood pressure and temperature, and did all sorts of other things with me that are too complicated to describe.

I still was not very happy with nurse Thompson disturbing my peace and quiet, and I even went so far as to call the insurance company to ask for another nurse, preferably a lazy one with no real talents to speak of, but the guy on the other end told me my package was exceptionally well covered so no way he could sent me a less capable nurse, and he was very sorry but she was the best one they had, and he was even more sorry but I would be stuck with her whether I liked it or not. I thanked him for his time and he told me he was very happy to help, and please not to hesitate to call again if there was any problem.

After I got used to her being around all the time, I found out nurse Thompson was a nice and cheerful woman. She had a very appealing, moon shaped; almost wrinkle free face with pronounced cheeks. She always wore dark purple lipstick on her beautifully shaped full lips and the look in her eyes suggested she didn’t miss much about what was going on around her. She was positive about absolutely everything and smiled almost all the time. She told me she had been a nurse for most of her life and loved her job because she wanted to take care of someone, and to please call her Mabel. Her husband was a plumber named Walter and they didn’t have any children. They tried everything; doctors, adoption agencies, more doctors, but a child never came. Walter was doing very well as a plumber and he was working at all hours and almost never home, so after she taught him how to bake an egg she became an around the clock nurse when needed.

Although the woman was slowly starting to grow on me, I hated it that she wouldn’t let me do anything; she cleaned, she cooked, she made coffee, she did the dishes, took out the garbage and anything else that keeps a person busy during the day.

I desperately needed something to keep me occupied. I had a lot of very thick books in my library but they were no option to entertain myself with because I already read them all. As a part of my wish list, I had read, “The one thousand books you have to read before you die” in the time when I was sure that dying only happened to other people, and I didn’t want to start reading a new book that maybe I couldn’t finish. There were more things on my wish list but, when I thought about it, I realized that the list had served its purpose; it had given me the pleasure of longing and hoping, more I didn’t really need from it. I had no intention of quickly running from one big adventure to the next before I went to my grave. I had always been a relaxed person and took my time while doing things, maybe sometimes too much time. Why would I change that now? Besides, if I had wanted to do something on my list really badly, I would have done it already. The stress of chasing dreams in the shortest possible time would probably kill me twice as fast.

Except when I was in a thoughtless state in the pub after work, I never liked watching television very much because the three minutes of film followed by six minutes of the most annoying thing ever invented by humanity irritated the crap out of me. I was, however, very aware that these six minutes financed very good television series that I became very easily addicted to. I used the Internet to download the best series, totally commercial free, on my Mac. But in my current situation, watching TV series was a very bad idea. I couldn’t stand the thought of missing the last few episodes. And what about next season?

I went on the Internet to look for things to do when you are bored, but trying to decipher hieroglyphs, act like a spy or trying to not think about penguins didn’t appeal to me so I gave up in that department. I tried to play some games, but it was quickly obvious they were all never going to end, so no way I could ever hope of finishing even one of them in time. Making a lot of new friends on the many social networks also seemed a waste of energy, and all the useful information the Internet provided was of use to everybody but me.


Going to a health club to sport didn’t seem such a good idea either. Why on earth would I want to improve my health? In my opinion that was a no-brainer, and looking at all those very healthy people with years ahead of them was something I could live without.

Another thing I always tremendously enjoyed was eating. I am a woman so you are probably not surprised when I tell you there were limits to what went into my mouth. Now, with only a short time left, there was not a chance of getting fat, no worries about diets, a flat belly, pimples, health, fitness, having to buy bigger clothes or feeling bad about it. Heck, I could even try a Japanese Fugu dish if I wanted to. But then again, how much can you stuff into yourself in a day, in a week, in maybe a month? First I ordered Indian food, enough for at least four people, because I loved big shrimps, coconut, almonds and curry, especially when all these ingredients are all on one plate. I invited Mabel to join me but she declined because we had a fabulous lunch, another one of her talents, less than two hours ago. I ate until my stomach almost exploded, and the following three hours I spend on the couch trying to recover from cramps. The next day I took Mabel, at least six hours after lunch, to a Japanese restaurant and I promised myself not to eat so much, but after reading the menu, I ordered almost everything on it. The cramps came during the night and the next morning I spend a full hour on the toilet.

Of course, like most women all over the world, I spend a lot of my free time shopping. I could stay in a bookshop for many hours and an equal amount of time in my favorite boutique. Shoe shops made me very happy too and I never left one empty handed. When I was in a shoe shop, all those shoes screamed at me to please buy them and of course I could never resist. My closets were filled with more clothes and shoes than I could possibly wear in my remaining lifetime, and it seemed very useless to get even more. Mabel did the grocery shopping over the phone, so my shopping days were definitely over.

My somewhat narcissistic boyfriend left me the day I came back from the doctor’s office, and traded me in for a similar, environmentally friendlier model in an equal price range in less than twenty-four hours. He took most of my CD’s, claiming they were his, my coin collection, claiming that was his too, and my first editions of the complete works of Edgar Allen Poe. I let him get away with it because I knew he would sell them and they would end up in the hands of collectors who would most probably take very good care of them. He also tried to take my mother’s Bauhaus swivel chair and at that point I told him that shooting him was a risk free activity for me, and he hurried to his car. With another activity to keep me busy with gone, I started thinking about dating and tried to imagine what that conversation would be like. I know most people lie but I was never very good at that. Talking about the job I didn’t have would be kind of awkward to begin with, and since there was an almost non-existing form of activity in my life, I guessed I wouldn’t have much to talk about. What if I somehow survived the date and the guy was really into me and wanted to see me again? “Sure, lets meet at a cremation,” or, “Sure, but we better hurry, I have only time to see you once,” didn’t seem the best answers. And even worse, what if I finally had mister where have you been all this time in front of me? There is a first time for everything after all. No way I wanted to let that happen! So I concluded dating was yet another thing I could not to do.

I didn’thave a lot of family to speak of. My father died when I was two, and my mother died years ago. My parents didn’t have brothers or sisters so the only family left were the children and grand children of the siblings of my grand parents who I didn’t even know. I was actually glad there was no family around. When you are as close to death as I am people start to behave differently. They try to avoid the subject and start talking about absurdly happy things, they cover you with pity or they try to avoid you altogether. The same goes for friends. I realized that the best time in your life to find out whom your real friends are is when you are about to die. The few that were left were not much fun to spend time with though. How much “How are you feeling? Is everything okay? How are you doing? Are you coping all right?” and about three hundred and six variations on that sentence, can a person take? It was bad enough that Mabel took almost all my daily activities out of my hands, but it was even worse to have friends come over to treat you like an invalid when you are feeling absolutely fine. Caring for others took up no more of my time because all people wanted to do was care for me.

Mabel noticed my boredom with her all-seeing eyes and attempted being less helpful, but she was too much of a workaholic, and it went straight against her principles so it didn’t last very long. At that point I decided to start planning my exit.
 
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No one out there who speaks American, lol?

I have another question. If you write in MS word, is it best to use an A5 format to write in or another one? If I write in A4 and use Calibre I get only pages with too many words on it......
And another one; If you use p.m. in a sentence and the sentence continues, can you place a comma after the dot of p.m.? Or does the last dot change into a comma? Or delete the whole p.m. all together?
example; Just as I was thinking I would have the house to myself again around five p.m., she told me she needed to step out for a minute to get her suitcase out of her car.

I use Calibri, 12 pt, Is that okay? Any suggestions are more than welcome, thanks
 
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