Look at what you would have won

Yesterday was a much calmer day. I don't know if this is a result of 'Black Thursday", but Vicki was very quiet and after a period on her new laptop seemed lost in her own thoughts. This echoed back to just before and after her ICU event, when she was dwelling on her condition.

Determined not to let the cogs that were whirring in her head spin any faster I knew I had to find a distraction. I headed for the games cupboard and found 'Upwords'. I decided that we would play this with a twist. Bonus points would be added for proper nouns, acronyms, slang, deliberate misspellings, made up words, and most of all anything that made us laugh. I also decided that the value of the points would be determined by the opposing player. Finally a special creative bonus for a word that was placed with no connection to any other word. Yes, we took the rules of 'Upwords' and tore them up.

In fact so much fun was had playing this version of the game, we joked about marketing it! We had visions of "The World OddWords" championship taking place, and selling the TV rights to the company who were prepared themselves to break all the rules in showing it, like inappropriate product placement, credits at the beginning, mixing in other game show formats to deliberately confuse the viewer, stealing someone else's theme music, placing flashing text over the key things the viewers were watching etc.

Whilst this was entertaining it was also clear that Vicki was not always entirely engaged in it, and was often drifting off again. Still a long way to go, but we all need to pull together to keep her upbeat. Incidentally, for the record, Vicki won by a country mile. Not that I'm a bad loser, but this was in part due to one of the nurses randomly awarding Vicki 100 points! Sometimes you just can't win!