Throwback Thursday – Dealing with Crisis Big or Small

Lauren is our host this week. Find out more here
This week’s prompt is: Dealing With a Crisis

I have known some people go into a panic over a broken nail, and one eight year old child go to pieces when she lost a front tooth thinking it would ruin her modelling career.
I should point out here that her mother was a diva, the child a spoilt brat, and the father already counting the proceeds of his daughter’s port folio after her having just one photograph taken by a professional photographer who passed a flattering comment.

Crisis: I like to think I’m the sort that deals with it at the time and when it’s over, that’s when I shake and likely to throw up.
Hubby fell out of the attic when the ladder bolts shattered and cut his arm down to the bone. Recently qualified as a first aider at work, I put pressure on the wound, bundled him in the car, left the dog outside as usual, and got him to A&E within fifteen minutes.
Asked if it was urgent, he relaxed the pressure and gushed blood all over the floor. He was seen in five minutes, and would have been sooner had not a head injury come in seconds after him.

When my father died, it was a bit of a crisis because it was unexpected and his affairs were in a mess. Give my sister her due, she got all the finances sorted and I was grateful that Mum and Dad had been living with her at the time, so Mum was not on her own.

When I had my breakdown, it took months for me to get myself sorted, not just enough to return to work, but to re-organise my life. I guess at the time all my coping with crisis over the years ganged up on me because I was a wreck.

I remember when we lost Barney in the New Forest. He’d gone charging off after a deer and despite our calls and whistles, there was no sign of him. I walked back to the car just in case he’d made his way back there (it was a mile away from where we last saw him) and Hubby stayed where he was, calling and whistling. After half an hour, I started to make my way back to Hubby and to my relief saw him with one dog coming towards me. He said Barney had seen him and come when called, so he couldn’t be angry, and we didn’t know who was the most relieved, the dog, or him. Barney never went far after that.

On the day we lost him in March 2005, we got him to the vet within half an hour, taking turns to stay with him while the other got dressed, and I stayed with him on the floor when he was sedated. It was a horrible day, and even now raw in my mind, but we did what was best for him. The grief came later in spades for both of us.

We’ve had a few panics losing Hubby’s wallet, one being really lucky as it had fallen out of his pocket under the wheels of the car and in shadow, so couldn’t be seen. I mislaid my building society passbook and the shambles that followed getting a replacement was worse than losing the damn thing in the first place. I found it about a year afterwards at the bottom of a drawer, but I was certain it had been the first place I’d looked!

We were on hand to help our neighbour when her husband died three years ago and were at her side in the hospital forty minutes after she rang us . It was fortuitous she had our card in her purse with our number on it. We were there with her when he passed away, and have tried to be there for her ever since.

Hubby has been my rock through my cancers, but we never saw them as a crisis. It was annoying and I was angry at my body being invaded by this parasite, TWICE, but we dealt with it, and the support I had from our friends and here in WP was second to none.

However, there are times when things just get too much, and it could be something really trivial that opens the flood gates.