A Night on the Couch
Wednesday, September 16, 2026 at 6:51PM 
Please click the photo above to play the daily videoSome days arrive quietly and then keep adding to themselves. This was one of those — the sort that starts with one item on the list and ends somewhere entirely different, with you sitting in a room you hadn't planned on being in, wondering where the hours went.
It began, reasonably enough, with the Starex. It's being sold to make room for the new car, which is the unglamorous half of buying something — the part where the old one has to be moved on, priced, described, and eventually handed over to someone else's driveway. There's no great sentiment about it. It's a vehicle. It carried people and shopping and the occasional argument about directions, and now it'll go and do that for somebody else. Still, there's a small pause in it. Cars accumulate a surprising amount of ordinary life without ever asking permission.
That, though, turned out to be the easy business of the day. Anita's stomach trouble, which had been an irritation over the weekend, decided to get properly serious — the sort of worsening that stops being something you manage at home and starts being something you do something about. So: admitted, and put on a drip for fluids, which is one of those interventions that sounds more alarming than it is and works rather better than anything you could have offered her from the kitchen.
By the afternoon she was improving, steadily and visibly, which is the best kind of improvement — no drama, just a gradual return of colour and conversation. Relief arrives quietly in these situations. You don't announce it. You just notice, an hour or two later, that your shoulders have come down from around your ears.
There was a brief escape for dinner at Upstairs Cafe — quick, functional, eaten with one eye on the clock — and then home, not to stay, but to collect clothes. There's something faintly absurd about packing a bag for your own hospital-room sleepover, standing in your own bedroom at an odd hour, deciding how many shirts constitute optimism.
Back to the room, then, for the night. Hospitals have their own peculiar relationship with time — the corridors never fully dark, the sounds never fully quiet, and the furniture designed by someone who clearly believed that visitors don't really sleep, they merely wait horizontally. Luckily, tomorrow's a public holiday, which took the edge off the whole thing considerably. Whatever the night did to me, at least it wasn't going to be followed by a full working day.
I went down early, which felt like a small triumph at the time. Less so this morning, when I woke up with a back that had strong opinions about the couch and wasn't shy about sharing them. Sore in places I hadn't previously thought of as places.
Still — she's better, which is the only line of the day that really matters. Everything else was logistics. The car will sell, the back will recover, and the holiday is here at exactly the right moment, which almost never happens.
Family, Hari Malaysia, Upstairs Cafe, admission, hospital, illness in Diary, Family 
