Chapter 01 / Monday morning
The unopened box
Mara slid an electricity bill under the sugar bowl to make a space just wide enough for the cuff. The box had spent eleven days on the table. For the first four, she had left it by the fruit as if it were part of the groceries. Then she had moved it to the chair where her brother used to drop his jacket. Twice she had sat on it while putting on her shoes.
She had bought it after a routine appointment. The clinician had asked her to bring a short record of home readings to the next visit. Mara had nodded the way she nodded when someone explained a detour from the passenger seat. It seemed easy enough while someone else was pointing.
Inside the box there was a coil of tubing, a folded manual and a little bag of batteries. She found an old school notebook in the drawer, wedged under the takeaway menus. The first nine pages were lists from when she had been moving house. One list, underlined twice, said Find the kettle. She turned to a blank page.
Her first attempt lasted less than a minute. She sat on the edge of a stool with one heel off the floor, pumped the cuff over her sleeve and kept answering a voice message while the screen counted down. Then she spent longer looking at the result than she had spent getting it. She tore off a corner of an envelope to write the numbers down and immediately wanted to take another reading she liked better.
Instead, she sent her brother Cal a picture of the unopened manual. He wrote back, “I see you've identified the problem.” Ten minutes later he sent another message. “Do you want me to come over, or do you want me to shut up?” Mara wrote, “Both, in that order.”
Chapter 02 / Tuesday evening
The crossed-out line
Cal arrived with a loaf of bread and the thrift-store lamp he had been promising to fix since August. While he hunted for a screwdriver, Mara read the instructions. She moved from the stool to a chair with a back and put a folded towel under her arm. When she opened the notebook, she wrote the date and drew a line down the middle of the page. The two columns looked like a scorecard, which was a mistake. She drew a third and called it What was happening.
She wrote that the first attempt had been over a sweatshirt, during a conversation. She put a single line through the old entry so she could still read it. Then she took the evening measurements the way her clinic had shown her, leaving a minute between them. The bread cooled on the counter. Cal took the lamp apart on a dish towel and found three screws where there should have been four.
“Should I put a star by the better one?” she asked.
“If you do, what will the star tell you on Friday?”
She looked down. Already she had forgotten which reading was first. She had been so busy making one of them mean that the evening was going well. She drew an arrow from the first line to the second, then added a note that Cal was still in the room. On another day she might want to remember that taking a reading had felt easier with someone nearby.
Write the whole evening down, including the part you wanted to cross out.
Chapter 03 / Wednesday after work
The browser tab
On Wednesday she left her phone on the counter while she got the chair ready. It lit up with a photograph of a friend's new dog, then with a message from work, then with an advert she had seen before. The product in the advert was called Cardio Shield. She opened it in a tab and left it there while she took off her shoes.
What appealed to her was the idea of doing one thing, once. Open a parcel. Put something beside the kettle. Go back to being the person who could leave the house without turning around to check whether the cuff was still on the table. A purchase was a task with a last step. Keeping a record had no obvious last step, just tomorrow's space on the page.
When she came back to the phone, she could remember the name of the product and little else. She opened the notebook to the back and wrote four things she wanted to know: the full ingredient list, the amount of each ingredient, who had studied the finished product, and what a pharmacist would want to know about the medicines she already took. The questions occupied half a page. There was no space left for the shopping list she had started there, so she copied dish soap onto her wrist.
Later Cal asked whether she had ordered it. Mara said she had saved the link. The small distinction mattered to her. It gave her time to find the answers before making a decision. She closed the shopping tab and left the notebook open.
Chapter 04 / Thursday lunchtime
The label
The pharmacist near Mara's office kept a pair of reading glasses on a chain. He took them off to listen and put them on to read. Mara showed him the questions first, then the page on her phone. She had expected to feel silly handing a stranger a notebook with a butter stain on the cover. He pulled a stool toward the counter and asked what she currently took, including the things she bought without a prescription.
She listed her prescription and the tablets she sometimes took for a headache. Halfway through, she remembered the powdered mix she put in her water bottle at work. It had lived beside the tea bags for months. She'd never thought to include it in a list of things she took. He suggested bringing a full product label before starting anything new so they could discuss the ingredients, amounts and possible interactions together.
At lunch she made the list on a fresh page. There was a blank where she hadn't remembered the strength on one box. She texted herself a photo of it that evening and filled in the missing line. That was the one job she gave herself for Thursday. It took a minute and made the next conversation easier to imagine.
Cal called while she was washing the cups. He'd found the missing screw in the fold of the dish towel. The lamp worked now. He said he might keep it at his place until he found a bulb that didn't make the whole room look like an interrogation. Mara told him to bring it back as it was. She had a good use for a light that made small print legible.
Chapter 05 / A week later
The appointment
By the next appointment, Mara had seven days of pages and a crease where she had folded the notebook into her coat pocket. One evening was missing because she had worked late and gone straight to bed. Two lines had arrows. Beside one reading she had written coffee just before. She nearly copied the whole thing out neatly on the bus. Instead, she left the pages as they were.
In the exam room she placed the notebook on the desk and turned it around so the clinician could read it. The clinician asked which arm she used, how the cuff fit and whether she had brought the monitor. They checked it together. Then they talked through the record, including the day she'd missed. Mara had expected to be asked for the best reading. She was asked how she had been taking them.
The product questions came last. Mara said she was considering a supplement and showed the clinician the list she'd made at the pharmacy. They discussed what information would be needed to evaluate it and agreed she would keep following her prescribed plan while they worked through the home readings. She wrote the date of their next check-in below the list. For once, she thought to ask what she should do if she got a reading that worried her. She wrote down the instructions while they were still talking.
Outside, the bus was pulling away. She watched it go and bought an orange from the shop on the corner. It had a loose patch of peel at the top. She stood at the stop, peeling it a little at a time, and realised she had told the clinician about the messy first reading without lowering her voice.
Chapter 06 / Sunday morning
A second cup
Cal brought the lamp over on Sunday. It leaned a little to the left when the shade was on. Mara set it on the sideboard and turned it so it lit the place where the notebook opened. Then she cleared the rest of the table. A library receipt went in a drawer. The electricity bill, finally paid, went in the recycling.
She took her readings at the time she and the clinician had discussed. One number was higher than the day before. She wrote down both readings, along with the time, and turned the notebook so Cal had a place to put his mug. They talked about whether the bakery near his flat still sold the tiny jam doughnuts they used to get when their father was doing the Saturday shopping. Neither could remember the name of the bakery. Both could picture the door.
Mara had kept the Cardio Shield link in a folder with other things she wanted to look into. She still had questions about it, and she had made no purchase. There were a few evenings in the notebook when she'd added a question mark beside the readings. Before, a question mark had felt like an instruction to find an answer by herself that night. Now there was someone she could ask, and a date in the diary when she'd see them.
Cal finished his tea and stood up to rinse the cups. Mara asked him to put the kettle on again. He sat back down while it boiled. When he asked where she wanted the lamp, she pointed to where it already was.