The Kidney Infection

It didn’t take too long for Whisky to worm his way back into my affections again. There had been apologies after apologies from him. He’d denied cheating until he was blue in the face. Eventually, I gave in. My heart wanted him back. I wanted him back. Don’t we all deserve a second chance?

A few weeks after we reconciled, Whisky got out of bed in the morning, kissed me on the forehead, and left The Flat to go to work. On the same morning, approximately two hours later, Bestie came in to wake me up and found me unconscious. One nee-naw ambulance ride later and I was being stabbed in every available vein, had every available fan on me, and was being fed every available drug in the hope of bringing my dangerously hot temperature down.

I’d been suffering from a recurrent urinary tract and kidney infection, and my doctor wanted to try a different, stronger type of antibiotic. The usual varieties just weren’t doing the job for me anymore. I agreed wholeheartedly, willing to try anything to stop the pissing-razorblades agony.

Those antibiotics did not agree with me at all, it seemed. I had an allergic reaction to them as my kidney infection got much worse, and it was an all-round unpleasant experience. Still, a week or so in hospital sorted me right out, and I couldn’t wait to get back home to my bed, my Bestie, and more importantly, my boyfriend.

“We need to talk about him,” Bestie said, barely five minutes after I’d returned home.

“Really? Right now?”

“He LEFT you in bed like that. You do know that, right?”

I rolled my eyes. “He got up and went to work. Probably didn’t even realise, or notice. Plus, we haven’t exactly been talking, have we?” It wasn’t an excuse, but it was the truth. Things were still really frosty and up in the air between us, because of the whole ordeal with his Best Mate’s Girl.

“Bullshit,” he said, with a pulsating vein on his forehead. That’s how I knew that he was really, really mad. “I saw you. Felt you. Smelled you. There’s no way he wouldn’t have known.”

We argued about it for a bit longer, then Bestie made a really good point that I couldn’t argue: Whisky hadn’t gone to the hospital to check on me. He had lived in my flat, though. Eaten my food. Drank my beers, from my fridge. I tried not to show it, but I was actually really hurt over it. I’d been too preoccupied with not dying to realise, but Bestie was right. Where had my boyfriend been while I was deathly ill in hospital?

A few hours later, Whisky came home from work. Bestie had just left for work, ten minutes before that, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief that they hadn’t come face to face. I wasn’t strong enough to deal with their dick-swinging contest.

“Hey, Whisky, why didn’t you visit me at the hospital?” I asked him.

“I did.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, the first day you were in there,” he said, shrugging and helping himself to a beer.

“Oh, okay. No one saw you, that’s all.”

“I was there. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

I nodded and smiled, and didn’t say anything else. I wanted to, though. Oh, boy, did I. First of all, I was in the hospital for a whole week. Seven days and six nights. One visit was not enough, and definitely not if had time to hang out in my fucking flat. Secondly, his words felt like lies. I couldn’t prove or disprove it without asking to see the hospital’s CCTV, which I’m fairly certain wouldn’t have been allowed. So, I just let it go. I swallowed it down and enjoyed the rest of my evening with him…

But it still felt weird. It was the first inkling I had that something wasn’t right. I should’ve listened to my gut instinct more.

The next blog post in the dating timeline is this one: Haggis.