Rag Doll Moving On

By Ange Hilstron

This is the third book in the series about the adventures of Rag Doll. Coming to terms with the effects of having a stroke and the onset of old age, Rag Doll faces more challenges. The comedy continues with settling into a new luxury retirement community and brushes with the medical fraternity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728391410

Ange Hilstron

Born in 1929 Ange Hilstron describes herself as an artist, author, potter, garden designer. educator, interior decorator, explorer, traveller, mystic, mother and grandmother. She lives on her own in a converted farmhouse on top of a hill in the County town of Dorset, U.K.

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© 2020 Ange Hilstron. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 07/03/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9140-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-9141-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

PART 1: WINDING DOWN

Chapter 1 Arrival in Toytown

Chapter 2 Invasion

Chapter 3 For the Rest of Our Lives

Chapter 4 Out of Touch

Chapter 5 I Keep Busy

Chapter 6 I Cannot Treat You Unless You Have It Done

Chapter 7 It’s All in the Preparation

Chapter 8 Murphy’s Law

Chapter 9 An Autonomous Social Pod

Chapter 10 Isolation

Chapter 11 Rag Doll Rewound

PART 2: REWOUND

Chapter 1 An Unpleasant Discovery

Chapter 2 Waiting

Chapter 3 An Even Longer Wait

Chapter 4 A Small Growth

Chapter 5 You Will Not Die from It!

Chapter 6 All in the Preparation

Chapter 7 I Know Nothing About It!

Chapter 8 Intensive Care

Chapter 9 Did They Turn the ICD Back On?

Chapter 10 Regeneration and Recovery

About the Author

To Nicole, Adrien, and Julian

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge the care and dedication of the teams in the cardiology ICD unit, the breast cancer unit, and Macmillan nurses at Dorset County Hospital, United Kingdom.

PART ONE

Winding Down

CHAPTER 1

Arrival in Toytown

I always said that I would never live in this purpose-made village because it was too much like suburbia. Yet here I am in God’s Waiting Room, comfortably set up in a one-bedroom luxury flat in Toy Town. The circumstances that led to this point have been described in my two previous books, Rag Doll for Christmas and Rag Doll Revisited , but for those of you who have not had a chance to peruse these accounts, I will give a brief overview.

In 1960, my husband decided we should emigrate to New Zealand. Three children and a divorce later, I was living an active life in a seaside village just outside a city in New Zealand. Although I was physically and mentally strong (I had carved out a cliffside garden and gained a bachelor of arts degree), I had never been strong constitutionally. I’d had several major operations and various ailments of one kind or another. I got by emotionally, since I felt I had to be strong for my family. Although I had several relationships with interesting men after my divorce, I never felt I could make another full-time commitment, and I never lived with anyone else. Something always held me back.

When my 23-year-old daughter decided to return to Britain, it gave me a wonderful excuse to travel overseas, and I was able to make regular sorties to various parts of the world. Eventually, after my two sons had married and were settled, my daughter encouraged me to return to Dorset. She maintained that her children needed a grandmother.

With the proceeds from the sale of my house in New Zealand, I was able to take furniture and all my effects to Britain. I bought outright a two-hundred-year-old cottage in the same village as my daughter and her family. It was idyllic, with oak beams, a large inglenook fireplace with a bread oven, and a crooked staircase. From a strip of grass out back, looking across water meadows, I made a wildlife cottage garden, full of birds, insects, flowers, fruit, and frogs.

I soon fitted into the local community, becoming involved with various activities at the local school and social clubs. I made trips Down Under to visit my sons and their families, although saying farewell was always a wrench. But I had not been in my cottage for long before I broke my ankle, slipping on a sand-covered path down to one of the coves in this area. A spate in hospital gave me the courage to have a biopsy on my breast that confirmed breast cancer, ending with a mastectomy. I was grateful I did not have a husband or partner who might be put off by my only having one breast.

I did not notice I was ageing. I helped to look after grandchildren, designed and made a large mosaic for the local school, joined the Women’s Institute, and made trips to see the family. Then, suddenly, I was 78. After a visit with my youngest son in Australia. I noticed that I could not walk as fast as I used to, and I felt extremely unwell. One evening, just before Christmas 2007, I had a stroke that paralysed the left side of my body. I was like a rag doll.

My doctor, who was treating each individual symptom, missed the fact that I was having severe heart failure, which had caused the stroke. Eventually, after several blackouts, I was fitted with an implanted cardiac defibrillator that regulated my heartbeat and gave it a kick-start if it failed. I was now bionic.

It was during one of these blackouts that I fell backwards down the stairs. My family decided I could no longer live in my cottage. I came straight out of rehab into my present apartment block. My eldest son spent his much-planned trip from New Zealand for my 80th birthday packing up my house and helping me to move. My daughter whisked me to IKEA to replace the cottage furniture with Swedish modern, and with my own paintings on the walls and books in the cubbyholes of the wall unit, it felt like a nice place to live.

I cannot yet call it home. It does not cuddle me like the cottage, but it is a pleasant enough place in which to live. I have a second-floor balcony that overlooks the park-like land belonging to the luxury apartments in the old converted lunatic asylum opposite. Huge beech trees house rook tenements, and the noise from them at nesting is unbelievable. Other birds shout to make themselves heard.

I have Mediterranean plants in pots and a bird-feeding tree that the birds studiously ignore, from which I have hung a basketful of geraniums, a potted plant, a peanut holder, and a seed tray. A chrome and glass bistro table, the teak folding chairs from a previous picnic table, and a sun