Kath's Health

From a personality point of view Kath was less "passionate" than my dad and I. She didn't get as excited about things or as deeply involved. We were all Fire subjects - my dad was a Leo, I am an Aries (almost Taurus), and she is a Sagittarius - definitely the coolest of the three. She got on well with people and had the skill which I think her family must have called "making conversation" - all three of us together could talk for hours. When we were not doing things.

There is only one thing that she always had and that was a kind of minor lack of motor skills - and I remember this from when I was a child. My dad and I were always good in that department, but she often had to be helped or shown several times how to do things with her hands. It is very hard to express this satisfactorily but it was enough of a feature to be memorable - as I say, from right back in my childhood. Along with that, the other thing that sticks in my mind was that she used to get butter on her fingers whenever she used it. Having said all that, she was certainly skilful enough as a seamstess, and she and I used to make our own clothes when I was a teenager. Probably her motor problem lay in getting her mind and hands around a set of actions for the first few times.

She was rarely - if ever - sick. My only memories are of appedicitis when I was very young, some anaemia, and some years later a slipped disc, which the doctor dealt with in good old-fashioned style, ordering 3 weeks bed rest with a board under the mattress. That injury did return to haunt her later, causing scoliosis of the upper spine which was aggravated by a minor car accident. So she has had reduced mobility for about 11 years, becoming more and more bent recently. Before this accident occurred, I can remember twice in one night waking in a sweat to a clear vision of her bent and tottering on her feet. Once in a night is bad enough but twice was unspeakably dark and foreboding.
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