Worms In The Carpet

Daisy (not her real name) next door, who's 93, has been hallucinating: Orange worms in the carpet, birds and flowers in the room, garden netting attached to the doctor's head and other weird garden related stuff. They weren't, as I thought when she was telling me, the side effects of radiation therapy or any of the pills she's on, but symptoms of what she called a 'water infection', by which I guessed she meant cystitis. I had to google it afterwards to find some confirmation because it all sounded so bizarre.

Although understandably a bit frightened at the time, Daisy was alright and had been rational and sensible throughout. She'd mentioned the visions to her visiting hairdresser, who'd called the doctor in. At one pont, she hallucinated her late husband in the chair next to her: "I thought he might be trying to tell me something."

Antibiotics cleared it all up in two or three days, which Daisy found remarkable: "To think that six tiny pills could make it all stop." Her generation is largely unused to the possibility of distortions in reality from taking just half of a tiny pill, but the path back to reality is longer than the path away from it.