Before My Time

I gasped, trying to clutch reality, trying to stop the world from completely slipping from my fingers.  I can do this, I tell myself.  I cannot believe otherwise.  If I do then where will it end?  The world, my world, my life, everything will fall away, it will be the crash of a tower of bricks, a slight wobble here and there, the slow bend of the tower  but then the inevitable crash.  It will fall.  And all will be lost.

I tell myself to hold tight, I grip my hands tightly,  cramped-ridden knuckles that rarely seem able to straighten anymore, as if life, health, self, world could be something tangible, something that could be grasped, something that could be kept held of.  I can’t keep hold of them; they’re more slippery than fine sand grains.  And the tighter I grasp, the faster they are squeezed from my grip.  I cannot win.

I gasp, every breath is a struggle.  The physical world around me swims.  The ridged concrete path swirls in a blur of motion.  The metal fence posts alongside do tricks that no fence post should ever be able to master.  The world will not stay put.  It will not allow me to get a handle on it.  I cannot keep it still.  I grasp out at it but it moves, slippery and fast, and unreachable.  Everything is beyond me.

You’re not meant to get motion sickness walking.  But I do.  It’s not like I have mastered some locomotive state.  Or maybe I did once.  Once upon a time, I was able to keep up.  Keep up with what?  Life, self, health, world.  No more.  I am slower than the World’s Slowest Walkers.  I know.  They keep overtaking me.

I struggle to breathe, like an asthmatic at the end of a sprint.  But I have gone nowhere fast.

My body ridicules me.  Me, that self I dream of being.  I cannot be.  I am crippled and handicapped and fighting a body whose war I barely even understand.  I am conspired against daily.  I lose daily.

I no longer feel safe walking by myself.  I don’t have the breath to think let alone scream in defence.  I feel shaky, vulnerable, weak, frail.  I am not myself anymore.  I can’t walk out into the world with the bravado that I used to.  I can’t take the time to enjoy a moment of solitude or the world around me.  I am too busy fighting.  There are days when I walk so slowly past front gardens that I get to know each and every blade of grass by name.  I don’t admire flowers, they get boring when you’ve spent five minutes walking passed the same one.  They taunt me, moving free in a breeze.  They have more speed than me.  They move whilst I am motionless.  One day snails will overtake me.

I muddle words and can’t remember whether I had conversations out loud, in my head or in my sleep.  I can’t remember what needs doing or even what I have done.  I forget where I am halfway through a recipe.  I forget ideas halfway through sentences.  I forget.  I forget.  Me, who has always been a memory keeper.  Me, this is my role, this my usefulness in the world, because I can remember.  And I can’t.  What have I left?  I console myself with sarcastic humour, reminding myself that at least at some point I will forget that I ever even had a memory.  But at the moment?  Oh no, I remember.  I remember the glory days.

The glory days that never were.

A golden age only exists in nostalgia, a better time compared to current woes.

And I do remember that there have never been glory days for me, I have never succeeded, not even at being myself.  And now I feel perhaps I would have a chance but it is all being dashed away from, like that tower of bricks.  I cannot stop them falling, I cannot stop the present and I dread the future.

My hand shakes.  I am weak and vulnerable and pathetic.

This is not me.

This is not who I want to be.

This is not who I should be.

I forget names, faces become foggy.

I mix up all my nouns.  If I can even remember any.

I get my sentences backwards.

More vicar, tea?

I don’t know if the world notices but I do.  I notice.  I see every single mistake, every single failure.  I, who have tried so hard my entire life to hide my weaknesses, my problems, now have them writ embarrassingly large across each and every conversation and each and every day.

This is not me.

The slow, painful steps that I am taking through life and the world.

This is not me.

I sit motionless, lost, unable to find the strength to do anything.

This is not me.

I cannot form sentences.

This not me.

I cannot remember.

This is not me.

But it is.

It is who I have become.

I didn’t get a choice.

I would have liked a choice.

Because I would really like to have life back.

I want another chance.

But something tells me it’s too late.

The sand has tumbled from my hands, I never had much anyway, and it cannot be found again.

I have lost.

Everything.

I have lost me.

Testimony from a Bad Day

This is a post that I wrote many months ago when I was really struggling, it never got posted for some reason.  Today, I’m struggling again and fearing what that means.

Whilst I cannot pick out the threads that Depression weaves through my life and thoughts, I am very aware of the limitations that ME puts upon me.  I know how my life could and would be so different if I didn’t have to fight this mongrel-beast every day.  However, I doubt myself and the severity, sometimes even the existence, of my illness.  Maybe it doesn’t help that ME is shrouded in confusion, political intrigue and complete incomprehension and lack of care.  Maybe it doesn’t help that people don’t take me seriously.

This is how my life gets.  Judge for yourself whether I’m making it up or whether I can really just try harder.

Do people really awake refreshed and eager for their day or is that just some fairy tale or something that only toddlers in on the secret of perpetual energy and motion know about?  Some mornings I wake and get out of bed in one move, perhaps my brain hasn’t quite woken up yet and told my body how and where it hurts.  Sometimes the pain, the ache, the stiffness kicks in as I round the corner of the bed.  Sometimes I can get all the way to the bathroom and back.  Maybe it’s because lying itself just gets so painful that my body is just glad to be stretching, moving again.

I feel every bump, dip and metal spring of the mattress, I feel every crease and wrinkle in the sheets, some nights my best friend of a duvet becomes a suffocating mass squashing the air out of me.  It’s just as well that I’m as flabby as this otherwise I’d have my bones to contend with too.  As it is, my joints can’t take their own weight and pressure and whichever side I lie on goes numb so quickly, fighting poor circulation and pins and needles all the night through.  I can’t regulate my temperature so even in the middle of summer (if we have with appropriate temperatures) I can find myself needing a hot water bottle, clutching it tight because I’m frozen through.  Other times, cold nights even, I will suddenly be  boiling hot, almost feverish and throwing the covers off.  Other times again a heat source such as a hot water bottle will scald my exterior but do nothing to take the chill away, it’s truly disconcerting having both extremes of temperature at once.  Lately, I’ve been finding that I don’t have enough strength to sleep on my side, I was using an arm to brake myself, hold myself up but I can’t even do that anymore.  I fall in a crushed tangle and I find myself more often or not sleeping flat on my face, which doesn’t help the breathing or the overheating, with my two firsts up by my head, baby style.  Babies can’t hold themselves up either.  It’s pathetic and uncomfortable.

I know a lot of people seem to think that it’s the norm to take a shower every morning, as if you’d self-implode in a miasma of bacteria for one missed shower.  Well, sorry to break it to you, ME will change that for sure.  Sometimes I have to think so far ahead, planning not just for each stage of my toilette but the rest that has to be calculated to allow me to make it out of the door in one semi-civilised piece that I have my shower the night before so I have plenty of night hours to sleep off the effects.  I rarely have one in the morning anymore.  Mornings are too much.  Especially if I’m expected to be out and about.  If not, it might be the middle of the day like some slovenly adolescent, especially in midwinter when the bathroom is freezing cold.

The shower poses particular changes.  When I stayed at someone’s recently I realised however that I should be very grateful that we have a shower tray rather than a bathtub.  I could barely climb in and out of that!  The biggest problem is the amount of energy showering requires; there are the standing and the heat and the steam and then the cold afterwards.  I can’t stand for very long at all.  And I’ve already mentioned that I struggle to regulate my temperature.  Sometimes I only realise how dead and cold my feet are when I feel the scalding water on them, slowly bringing them back to partial life.  Sometimes I have to turn the water hotter because it feels too cool.  I worry that one day I will get burnt.  I’m glad too that we have a shower that you can leave the temperature set rather than have to turn it through from off to hotter, I trust blindly that the temperature is the same as yesterday.

 After nearly every shower now, I end up resting on the bed afterwards.  Then there are days when I’m not well enough to take a shower at any point, even with nothing else to do.  I struggle with this, guilty because of this culturally induced belief of miasma.  I hate not having clean hair.  Even when I’m Depressed, unable to motivate myself to anything, I wash my hair.

Even if I take a shower the night before, my morning schedule still has to be simplified and reduced to the barest of elements in order for me to be able to manage a morning commitment.  Sometimes I get everything ready the night before and sleep right up as close to possible as to when I need to leave.  Other times it seems to work better that I get up about an hour earlier, do what I need to then have a nap before going out.

Just writing about getting up is exhausting!

There are so many things that need doing, so many things that I desperately want to do.  I lie or if I can, I sit up, in my bed and see the reminders of these things around me.  How easy it would be to pick up a book or a duster!  But is it?  I don’t even have the strength for that.  And it makes me feel wretchedly useless.  I lie thinking that I need the toilet and it takes me half an hour or so to summon the strength to get out of bed.  I walk slowly, stiffly to the bathroom then to the kitchen to wash my hands.  I’ll grab a drink or something whilst I’m up so I don’t have to get up again.  And then I have to collapse on the bed.  Exhausted.  For what?  I’ve done nothing.  I’m hungry but I don’t have the energy to prepare some food.  I go without.  Or wait until the next bathroom trip to grab a snack.  The washing up and washing piles higher.  But I can’t lift or stand.  Nothing gets done because I genuinely can’t do it.  It breaks my heart and destroys my soul every single day.

I’m so glad that we have a flat, all the rooms are close together and there are no steps between levels.  I can’t do stairs anymore.  And when I do have to go out then gravity usually helps me down, I don’t have to worry about the slow haul up the stairs until I come back.  Which is just as well or I’d never get out.

I can’t follow instructions anymore, even recipes.  I forget where I am and what needs doing next when I’m preparing the simplest of dishes.  Who forgets how to boil pasta and stick commercial sauce on the top?!  It’s ridiculous, stupid even.  And I hate it.  I can’t open lids and I can’t grip and turn tin openers.  I struggle to lift a pan of pasta only because it’s my responsibility to feed us both.  Graters are difficult too, dangerous at times.  I can’t slice cheese much less anything else.  The world’s sharpest knife might as well be blunt in my weak and clumsy grip.

I could go on but I don’t have the energy or the courage to face anymore things that I can’t actually do anymore.  It breaks my heart, and even my soul.  ME isn’t a choice, ME isn’t me.  But this is my life.

Related Articles

In Which I Attain New Levels of Screwy but Believe it’s Real

A Thousand Things (reposted from No Poster Girl)

Two Little Letters

WOE:  Freedom

A Spoonful of Medicine

Well, it seems that a spoonful of medicine makes the world go down a whole lot better.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of pill popping.  I’m one of those proud, stubborn creatures who would rather endure something than surrender to a drug ((wo)man up as the Americans apparently say and take the pain is my view, especially if the alternative is needle-pointed).  Besides then what would I do if it got worse once I’ve given up and taken something?  Exactly.  And if it’s just about to get better than it really wasn’t worth being a sissy and taking something anyway.

I know.

I’m stubborn.  And the jury is still out as to whether that’s a good or bad thing.

I’ve had to rethink my attitude towards medicine lately.

Firstly, there’s the matter of ‘supplements’, which as far as I’m concerned is medicine with a small m, it’s fairly natural stuff after all.  A lot of the American ME patients take supplements and the Hummingbird Foundation presents quite a lot of evidence in favour of supplementing in chronic illness.  Like good teeth, taking vitamin pills is something that the Americans are much more au fait with.  The grin and bear your lot, stiff upper lip and all that school of thought isn’t so keen.  Besides, surely if you can eat a good enough diet then what’s the need?

I hate to break it to you all but there’s less and less good in even the healthiest aspects of our modern diet.  In 1940 McCane and Widdowson published their first study into the nutritional content of food.  In 1991 when the fifth study was published, a scientist chap compared the findings between that latest study and the original 1940 one.  It’s not good news.  Whilst we associate boring, unattractive vegetables with the 1940s, they seem to have been much healthier in terms of nutritional value than our modern superfoods (with a price tag to match).  For example, the humble spud had 30% more magnesium, 35% more calcium, 45% more iron and 47% more copper back then.  Scared?

(Actually, I’ve just checked for you.  Potato still outranks blueberry on minerals and vitamins, except Vitamin K.  I’d keep playing top trumps with the groceries but I’m a little tired).

There are also two other factors involved in this supplementing decision, both involving that simple aphorism to ‘just eat a good diet’.  (I’m getting a little suspicious of any phrase that’s preceded by ‘just’).  I can’t afford to.  It’s embarrassing to admit that.  Fruit and vegetables are luxuries on my budget, as are proteins.  They’re all essential but expensive.  I get what I can reduced.  Then there is my health.  It takes a great deal of ingenuity to make our very limited budget tasty (or just plain edible) and ingenuity requires energy.  I don’t have it.  Some days I don’t have the energy to even make plain, boring, simple pasta with commercial sauce.  I don’t have the energy to prepare fruits and vegetables.  Isn’t that shocking?  It drives me mad, I find it embarrassing and shameful.  But that’s the truth.  It isn’t easy to ‘just eat a good diet’.  Not for me.

But the problem with supplements is the cost.  To start a whole new regimen is a serious investment.  A relative kindly helped me out and I’m slowly starting to take some supplements as recommended on the Budget Plan, I’m introducing a new one every two weeks to minimise reactions (and to work out what I’m reacting to).  I can’t say for sure whether they’re helping me, my health is so variable that I’d have to live a day with and without in parallel to tell the difference and that isn’t apparently possible.  Fortunately, actually.  Because I’d just be seriously confused.  And having to live each day twice is got to be too much energy.  And stress.

The ladies in the vitamin shop (it’s one of those chain shops rather than a proper health food shop, I’m afraid) were astoundingly helpful.  I don’t make a lot of sense at the best of times and I kind of make for an awkward customer sometimes.  I found it very amusing that in the end, the closest multivitamin combo to the Plan was the Senior.  Yep, my body has OAP needs.  Great.  I’m also glad that one of them warned me about the um, consequences of taking B vitamins because otherwise I would have freaked.  (You can do your own research there).

So I’m a pill popper now.

My new doctor (I may tell you all about that another day) recommended that I take a Medicine (with a capital M) for the pain.  I was sceptical.  unsurprisingly.  But it seems that I’m secretly a sucker for magic bullets after all so I acquiesced.  They’re tiny tablets unlike most of the vitamin pills and taste of Refreshers.  I’m quite happy to take those.  I took it for a couple of days then realised that there was something odd happening.  It was really weird.  I didn’t know what it was.  I spent two days wondering what on earth was wrong with me.  Then I clicked.  I wasn’t hurting.

I’ve had serious chronic pain for months.  I can’t remember when I last didn’t.  Last year?  On a good day, I’m a 6 or a 7.  On the chronic scale, acute pain has a different scale.  8 is bad.  Very bad.  9 is screaming out loud and giving in to painkillers.  The painkillers don’t really touch it.  There is no 10.  10 is a nightmare not yet discovered.  It could always get worse after all.

My pain is 5 and below.  I’m going to have to rediscover all the different lower stages again.  I don’t remember them.  I still have some pain when I do more physically, the odd specific symptom with pain but I’m not hurting all over constantly.

It’s weird.  Seriously weird.

But I think I could get used to it.

So I’m a pill popper now.

As I was taking all these pills already, I decided that I really needed to get back to my happy pills.  You know what I mean.  Only mine is technically liquid not pills.  I am really struggling, there’s a lot of stress and stuff going on again in my life and well, my chemicals don’t usually work in my favour anyway.  I hadn’t been taking it again because the birds stole my syringe (well, maybe not technically) and then I was on antibiotics for my second tooth (or un-tooth seeing as it had been ripped out) that stated no alcohol.  (What is it about medicines that say ‘no alcohol’ that suddenly make you want to have a drink?!)  They were really nasty antibiotics anyway.  But the liquid has alcohol in (don’t get your hopes up, it’s not worth counting unless you’re already puking on another medicine and it tastes totally vile besides).  So I had to wait.

Once all these barriers had been sorted, there was still the psychological to cross.  One, I don’t like to take medicines.  (That was the original theme of this post, if you vaguely remember).  Two, it tastes so vile that I cannot actually bring myself to make myself take it.  It is the kind of thing that an evil doctor or parent would ram in your gob for you.  You don’t do it to yourself.  Yuck.  It makes my toes cringe.

So I did it.  I took another Medicine with a capital M.

Admittedly, it doesn’t taste quite so bad when served up in a dosing syringe because it kind of hits the back of throat immediately rather than sits in your mouth as you reluctantly suck it off the spoon.  (Toes cringing at memory).

I’ve been using an online mood testing thing which sounds a bit of a gimmick but I thought I’d give it a try.  It’s been interesting, I thought my mood was fairly constant (albeit low) but apparently not.  And when I thought I was having a bad day, I scored my highest score (22%).  Crazy.

So I took one dose of the happy pills (in liquid form) and by the following afternoon I was feeling really weird.  Properly weird.  I couldn’t place what the matter was with me.  I don’t normally feel like that at all.  By late bedtime (my circadian rhythm is up the creek again partying with the grasshoppers), I had this gut feeling that I should retest my mood.  I hit 47%.  (I’d been averaging 11% for most of the week before).  Woah.  No wonder I felt weird.

So I’m a pill popper now.

In liquid form.

It’s amazing what a spoonful of medicine can do.  It certainly makes the world go down a little better.

Related Articles

 

• A Visit to the Dentist
• The Hummingbirds’ Foundation for M.E. (external link)
• What’s in this Stuff? (external link)
• Nutrition Facts and Analysis for Potato, Baked (external link)
• Nutrition Facts and Analysis for Blueberries, Raw (external link)
• Trying Solves Everything
• Moodscope (external link)
• Progress and Happiness
• Overrun

Progress Report

Me

I am not an hysteric, I just don’t like the dentist.  At all.  I died.  I’m sure.  And have had my face, skull and jaw completely reshaped courtesy of some wrestling moves by the dentist guy, that’s why they make you wear those safety goggles you know, so that they can spend an hour leaning all their body weight on your eye socket.  Oh and wisdom teeth are absolutely massive with two long pointy down things at the end.  Did you know that?  I spent four hours sleeping off the local anaesthetic (dude felt the need to wave a foot-long stabbing device around and stab me three times with it) and six trying to stop the bleeding.  It took me another hour to manage a slice of cake.  Still feeling quite sorry for myself.

More Importantly, the Blue Tits

I reread that article about hand rearing passerines.  I have to admit that the first time my eyes just stopped at the hand feeding which was such a priority then and the reason we were searching for information.  Can we feed them?  What do we feed them?  How do we feed them?  There is a lovely big section on fledging too so I think we may have enough information to guide us forward again.  The babies seem to know what to do themselves, which is so remarkable.

It was reading down through the article that I noticed something very useful.  How to identify your babies!  Two words: nail varnish.  Thankfully my mature tastes in nail varnish mean that I do not have a discreet monotone rainbow of pinks and reds, I have colours.  We painted some legs up!  Have you ever painted a blue tit’s toes before?!  I wish we had known sooner but as the first one was named Birdie, we clearly didn’t expect to end up with an entire brood on our hands.

If you’re skimming through the photos that I’m about to share, you may want to consult this handy guide!

Birdie – blue (metallic, oooh)

Feisty – red

Manky – yellow (but Feisty obviously kicked him whilst his varnish was still wet because Manky has a red foot too, just to confuse matters!)

Sneaky – orange

Rocky – green

Yesterday morning we had two fliers.  Then three.  Finally Birdie wanted in so we balanced him on the edge of the tank and got the hang of it straight away.  He hasn’t looked back since then, he’s into everything and is even starting to self-feed.  He took a shine to our cake earlier.  Ssh.  Four birds flying around keeps you on your toes!  There’s nothing quite like two birds flying, at speed, towards your head from opposite directions.  Or walking around with a bird on your head.

Our sitting room has become their aviary, they’ve been out most of today.  Just be careful where you sit because these guys seriously aren’t potty trained.  They don’t wear nappies either.  We’re spending a lot of time taking roll call, chasing, feeding and cleaning.  Great stuff.

Husband in particular walks in, casting his eye about:

“One, two … three … four … … … five!”

Manky is behind the others.  That’s for sure.  We don’t know what the future holds for him but we’ve had him out of the tank with the others and sometimes, when you’re not looking especially, he’s suddenly on a completely different surface!  This evening it’s clear that he has a hop, climb, flap combo which is working for him.  There’s even been a few short glides, we’re very proud of him!  There may be hope.

Rocky prefers to hide in corners.  Birdie has a predilection for perching in odd places.  Sneaky has taken a shine to the electric fan that we’re having to use because all our doors and windows are having to be kept closed at the moment, for obvious reasons.  Feisty is sporting quite a hairdo.

Some photos:

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Aren’t their colours amazing?  (No, I don’t mean the nail varnish).

Related Articles

 

• Famous Five
• A Visit to the Dentist
• And Then There Were Four
• In Other News
• Overrun
• Hand Rearing Small Passerines (external link)
• Blue Tit Factsheet (PDF, external link)
• Blue Tit Facts (external link)

 

A Visit to the Dentist

I don’t like the dentist.  It’s not personal.  It’s not the person after all but their job.  Though why they’d want a job like that I don’t know, hated by everyone, torturing poor innocent people day in, day out.  Maybe the Inquisition isn’t recruiting at the moment.  In a moment of reckless abandon, I might even venture to say that I like my dentist.  She’s competent.  I value competency.

I used to see a dentist at another surgery.  They went private.  Which meant (other than paying an obscene amount of money monthly to be part of this happy club) painting the waiting room dirty mauve, getting rid of all the children’s toys and decent magazines and installing silly little too-narrow perches of seats and fancy lifestyle magazines for those who hunt and have jolly tea parties.  Not me.  He had modern (and not brilliantly done, if I say so myself) black and white canvases of his beatific (apparently, if I say so myself) offspring on the walls of his surgery and smoker’s breath and hands.

Back in the days when we used to work, we used to have to make an 8 am appointment.  He’d wander in at quarter past then saunter around, chatting with the receptionist and making his coffee.  If he saw us by half past then we were doing well.

We’d troop in to see him and my husband who has spectacularly good oral health would be told to make an appointment with the hygienist, me with the genetically poor teeth never saw the hygienist once.  My mother takes my poor oral health as a personal insult and act of deliberate rebellion on my part, she looked after my teeth so carefully when I was little!  She fails to appreciate that my molars were doomed from conception by genes.  It doesn’t seem to matter what I do or don’t do.  I certainly don’t generate fillings as an act of revenge or mud-fling against her maternal skills.

My patience with this idiot dentist was finally snapped when one day he profoundly informed me that it seemed like my teeth had suffered ‘a recent trauma’.  No, they hadn’t been in a car crash.  Neither had I.  I would have noticed.  I drily informed him that as my notes and I had told him at each appointment I had sensitive teeth and gums, that this was probably due to me having brushed my teeth before the dental appointment.

His advice?

He suggested that I skip brushing my teeth for the next few days until they healed.

I kid you not.

And what was I suppose to the next time I brushed my teeth after that?  Skip a few more days then repeat the cycle endlessly?

For a variety of reasons, we now have a new dentist.  On the healthcare system.  We had a brief interlude with another one, one or maybe two appointments who was OK, a million times better than the previous one.  But now we have my dentist.  Or ours technically.

She has spent the last year or two replacing all the shiny, posh white fillings that the old dentist put in.  Because they were already falling out and hurting badly.  And catching up with all the new ones that I’ve been making too.  She put a temporary filling in back in September and that’s lasting better than one the fancy permanent ones by idiot dentist.

I’m also making a conscious effort not to tuck my cough sweets down one side of my mouth.  Ahem.

But visits to the dentist all start the same way.  I am like the dog who goes to the vet with his tail between his legs, ears flattened.  He knows where he’s going and what is going to happen to him.  Only I don’t wee on the flowerpot by the door.  Honestly.

I am a little regressive at the dentist perhaps.  I know that only terror awaits.  And pain.  I can cope with pain but not the fear of pain.

I am accompanied by my husband because it’s easier than calling us one at a time (double appointments because I’m just too scatty to cope with any other system) and because I’m a little wary in appointments about hearing correctly (the ears have improved that score and now I wear contacts, they can’t nick my glasses (which also affects my hearing)).  I go in with the husband because I don’t trust him to remember anything useful and which needs remembering.  He doesn’t trust himself either.

I sit very small in the chair, my boots or sandals sticking up awkwardly, the head rest somewhere above my head, head cocked and eyes wary.

Idiot dentist was a great believer in counting teeth.  He counted every teeth with a chant that bordered on the religious.  You’d have thought I’d notice if I’d lost a tooth somewhere in between the six month appointments.  Apparently not.

This dentist doesn’t count.  Presumably my teeth don’t need roll call after all.  She inspects.

The decision is made that I need another filling.  This happens every appointment.  Sometimes more than one at a time too.

I have to come back in a week for the execution.  It’s so I can have this hanging over my head for at least seven days, a looming threat.  Death row.

I came back, more wary, even smaller, even more regressive.

She makes the fatal mistake of asking if I want an injection.  Now I might not like pain but injections rank worse.  That September appointment I had three fillings needing doing, one of which needed completely drilling out before the filling.

She kept asking me if it was hurting.

I skilfully avoided the question and concentrated on the fascinating poster of puppies high up on the ceiling.  How many are white?  How many have blue labels?  How many begin with a vowel?  How many are terriers?

My husband was looking at me very suspiciously.

He’s probably better at reading my body language than the dentist was.

She somehow believed that patients would own up to the pain.

She’d forgotten that I had two small fillings done six months previously with no injection either.

It was the kind of pain that would have you screaming out loud if you weren’t quite so phobic about the injection.  I curled my toes some more, clenched my fists and pulled discreet strange faces.

The dentist eventually got suspicious.

I’m fine means I don’t want an injection not I’m not in pain.

She clicked eventually.

And shot me with like a half-dozen needles, of increasing size, until I lost all sensation.

I wasn’t happy about that either.

It’s a very strange thing not being able to feel the lower half of one’s face.  One’s tongue wants to do all sorts of crazy things.

What’s even stranger is when your face starts coming back.  You get the oddest tingles in the oddest place.

I had a six month check up about a month ago.  I didn’t need a single filling.

That’s what miracles and a competent dentist do.

We got demoted to annual appointments.  Or should that be promoted?  I didn’t know you could see your dentist less often.  My mother raised me that six months was the Law.  I don’t mind seeing the dentist less often though.

The downside is that temporary filling I mentioned having done back in September?  Well, that was to placate a wisdom tooth until they could get me an appointment at the hospital.

One word: extraction.

That’s tomorrow’s treat.

Oh yay.

PS.  I asked my new dentist about the whole should I brush my teeth if it causes them ‘trauma’ thing (my gums bleed badly), her response?  Brush them, they’ll toughen up.

PPS.  If I’m still alive tomorrow afternoon, I’ll share some more bird photos.  Promise.  But I might not be.  You know, coz.

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Progress and Happiness

 

I am loo roll deep in yet another cold of the century, the second in two months.   I must be incredibly run down.  I’m a magnet for lurgis when I’m walking dead and I spent the day after my bakeathon with a cold infested friend.  Who I’m not quite sure how I feel about right now!  I think it’s meant to be another head cold but my chest is deeply implicated.  I’m overdosing on cough medicine and have used up two entire rolls of toilet paper in two days.  And the pain.  My pain score has been averaging about 7 or 8 these last couple of weeks and now I feel like I’ve been beaten up by an American footballer then run over by a London bus.  It has totally incapacitated me and I have been very good and have been trying to resist telling you all how near death I am and this post isn’t about that so technically I’m still in the clear.

Actually you might have guessed that this post wasn’t about the totally horrendous cold that I’m suffering with by the blog title.  Colds never exactly inspire me to utter those words about them.

It’s in a similar vein perhaps though because I’d like to talk about medicine.

I don’t do medicine.  Not for myself.  What can’t be cured of, must be endured of is my motto.  And as I fail to believe in most medicines, especially the conventional/Western/modern, then I decide to do the enduring.  (You must understand that enduring does not preclude the odd whinge now and then).  Besides which I fret that it might get worse and if I’ve already taken something, what am I going to do then?  I might as well wait until I really, properly need it.  (For the same reason, there is no 10 on my pain skill.  9 is screaming out loud and might have to give in to painkillers.  10 is a nightmare yet to be discovered).  There is also a certain pride in being able to bite your lip and soldier through.  I’m not a fan of hysterics.

As a teenager, I used to pop painkillers all the time.  Most women of my acquaintance seemed to.  The majority of us teenage girls had a pack in our school bags and if you’d forgotten yours then you just asked around.  But I ended up questioning the point of taking drugs for everything especially when they didn’t seem to make much difference.  I found out that these drugs don’t actually work immediately and can take ages to have any effect on the system.  I was worried too about overdosing and the effects that they would have if they built up in my system which evidence also seems to indicate that they do.  I was concerned about increasing tolerance levels and even dependency.  Why do so many people take them so regularly?  Placebo, comfort, security, control?

There’s another reason I don’t take many of the medicines I maybe should, it’s a question of whether I deserve to.  OK, that sounds crazy right?  Probably doesn’t even make sense, if it doesn’t then be thankful.  But think back to the posts that I’ve written about the Voice.  What evidence do I have that I’m even ill?  People tell me that I’m making a fuss or doing it for the attention.  (Voice-free me would tell them that they haven’t got a clue).  I know that millions of other people are struggling with real or serious illnesses, what right does little me have to take something for so minor?

I suppose you could call those reasons ‘psychological’, they are to do with what goes on inside my head.  Sometimes I have to concede that I need medicine which is when I meet a physical barrier.

I take the cough medicine because of my chest predominantly, not always because of any coughing although this time I have done some stomach-muscle-wrenching episodes.  But I can’t always take the medicine when I want.  Why?

I have an enemy.

In three words.

Child-safe lid.

Now, child-safe lids are great in theory but they also happen to be ME-proof.  Totally proof.  What annoys me is that I can actually get inside the bleach bottle easier than I get into my cough medicine.  I don’t get that.

The last cold I had, I spent a whole day (well, I paused for rest several times and had to go and do other things as well) hacking and drilling into the cough medicine lid with a very sharp knife.  Despite that, I still have all my fingers.  And some patience.  And a sense of humour.

I needed cough medicine and I couldn’t have it when I needed.  (If you hear my chest, you’ll know why I’m so dependent).  You can’t really go wandering down the street asking strangers to take the lid off for you.  For one thing, it’s not very convenient.  I was dosing myself at half past five this morning, for example.  Now my cough medicine bottle works more like a flour dredger and has a turban of sticky clingfilm around it and gets increasingly sticky with each dose that I shake out.

It was a work-around, a temporary fix.

I’ve tried quizzing every pharmacist that I’ve been near whether they can issue non-child-safe lids.  Surely they could cater for the demographic of the seriously ill?  (I’m not seriously ill of course just wretchedly useless with lids).  And childless.  No?  Apparently not.

I quizzed the GP about whether I could store the medicine outside of its proprietary container, some medicines, particularly bubble-packed tablets, do degrade because of light, humidity etc.  He said it was fine but we both concluded that a recycled curry sauce jar might not be a good idea.

But sauce jars are too wide necked, ungainly.

And likely to be tainted.

In the meantime I had another light bulb moment to do with medicine.  A few years ago I had seen a friend administer her child’s liquid painkiller with a syringe instead of the classic white plastic medicine spoon, very modern and not entirely practical with such a thick gloop.  (That brings me to another aside, if you have liquid medicines as an adult they never deign to give you medicine spoon, even if it’s prescription.  Very disappointing and awkward, standard teaspoons are always too shallow.  I’ve had to filch them off child-owning friends).

I struggle to pour.  I kind of need two right hands.  Preferably two right hands which are more stable than mine is usually.  I’m well-trained in spilling liquids, I always pour over the sink.  A tell-tale drizzle of pink syrup and a decreasing cough.  Other medicines are runnier and more more slippery  Not so easy.

I decided that my mission was to acquire one of these syringes.  I thought I’d have to buy child painkiller and donate the medicine to some child-owner whilst saving the coveted syringe all for myself.  It turns out that although pharmacies don’t cater for the ill who can’t open lids or the adults with liquid medicines, they can sell you a dosing  syringe.  Mine’s a funky purple.  And cheap.

The next part of the how-to-dose-myself-conveniently plan was to acquire a bottle.  A suitable bottle.  Chilli sauce bottle not being an option.  Not too small or fiddly, not too wide like a jam jar.

A couple of days ago, I hit upon the perfect victim.  We had a bottle of mouthwash malingering by the kitchen sink, rapidly becoming part of the furniture and being ignored.  There was only a small amount left but that was where the husband had finally decided that he didn’t like this flavour mouthwash after all.  It was an ideal shape and size.

I don’t just use cough medicine, or rather, I shouldn’t just, there is something else which should take higher priority.  So I needed the twin.  I remembered seeing a bottle of the same brand mouthwash on a relative’s bathroom shelf so I asked if I could have the bottle when they finished with it.  Yes, I’m cheeky like that.  Turns out that theirs was vintage, in the wrong kind of way, and was never going to be used, so within a day I had scored me both the bottles I needed.

The next task was to knit them some wee jackets.  Of course.  Well, I’m worried about the glass being clear as medicine bottle glass is brown, they might be a little photosensitive or something.  Next up, mouthwash bottle glass seems to be quite a lot thinner than medicine bottle glass so for travelling a little padding might not be a good idea.  And for grip.

I used some yarn that I got free some time, it promised to be DK and I knitted a bootee in it but it turned out twice the size of a bootee knitted with bona fide DK so I was rather suspicious.  I was also suspicious about what sized child such a bootee might fit, a four-year old?  (Someone had just told me that my bootees were ridiculously huge and that they’d fit a two-year old at the youngest).  It’s probably acrylic but it has a cotton-y feel and I loved these colours, although a little more white would have been good.  And surprisingly, very little pooling.  Oh and believe it or not, I just cast up and knitted it on up on my DPNs, just like that.  No collywobbles.

Now for a confession.

There is another medicine that I’m supposed to take.  Daily.  Or even regularly would be good.  It’s liquid because I have such bad side effects with the tablet versions.  I don’t take it because I really don’t deserve to.  I should just think myself well and good.  Or something.  I don’t know.  Sometimes I feel like a need permission, some kind of authorisation or validation, to take it.

In an accessible bottle and with my funky syringe, I can now make myself take it more often.  And hopefully the world might become a better, or at least, a more easily dealt with place.  I might feel a little bit better too.  I don’t know if I deserve that.

Liquid happy pills.

My syringe also comes with a magical rubber stopper which allows you to turn a nearly empty bottle upside down to fill the syringe.  I tried it.  Over the sink.  It worked.  In my hands.  I felt very medical.  It also squirts water a great distance.  Very entertaining when doing the washing up.  And comes with an entire sheet of instructions.  Which I haven’t read yet.  I read the waffle iron instructions once, it says to keep away from children and adults with special needs which doesn’t exactly gel with my sensibilities.  Why is it the smaller the product and the less it does, the larger the instructions?  Computers don’t even manuals anymore.

I took a photo in my newly made photo studio to share with you.  It makes me happy.  It feels like I’ve achieved something, made progress.  Small things.

I took a dose and it was wonderfully foul-tasting.

I’m not too sure about the symbolism of dosing oneself with a syringe either.  Sounds like the kind of pastime that I was meant to avoid.

 

Ups and Downs

I hate it when the beast of fatigue drags me down for there is no resisting that monster, I am out for the count until it chooses to release me again.  Neither does it operate on a civilised timetable either, it can sneak up at any hour, night or day.  In my case, after a long, restless night  it usually pulls me under at about 7h.  Cheers for that.  That’s yet another day messed up.

It’s hard to explain how you spent your day, or perhaps just plain embarrassing to, when you require at least eighteen hours sleep.  Staying in bed equates too easily to laziness, an indulgent lie in until say 9h may occasionally be justified but how can I justify the hours and days that pass in an exhausted haze?  You feel defeated, a failure.  So when you shakily do the maths and find that gives you another six hours, you, for a brief gleeful moment, feel that you have time to get on with your life.  Then you remember that in those remaining six hours, you will still be bed bound and resting, saving your strength up for necessary trips to the bathroom and kitchen.  There’s not a lot else that you actually have the strength or time for.

This was the worst bout that I have had in a very long time, perhaps even since my original two bouts back all that time ago.  There was absolutely no way that I could fight the tiredness, no way that I could push through or just try to ignore it.  I was weak and achy all over, with the pains concentrating either in my hips or my back.  Lying on one side or the other would give me that mean, painful numbness or sharp pins and needles so I had to keep turning, trying to find a new comfortable position whilst negotiating every very painful lump in the mattress or pillow, or just a fold of clothing.  My circulation, if possible, got worst and heat sources just scorched me rather than warmed me through.  When I was rough last August, I was frozen.  Now in December, I kept burning up.  But no temperature.  I checked.  Sometimes my heart felt like it was racing or going too slow.  But again, it never showed on counting.  My poor posterior got worn out anytime I tried to sit up for a period of time.  Then I got hideously bad sweats (I mean, a lady should never sweat anyway, just glow apparently) but there I was shivering cold and rivers pouring down me.  I lost my appetite and that my friends, is a very bad sign.  To walk to the bathroom or kitchen (we live in a flat so fortunately everything is on one level) was like undertaking a marathon, leaving me shaky and desperate to lie down again.  (I promise you that I am really not that unfit).  Ironically, despite sleeping so many hours of my life away, this is when my insomnia is also at its worst.  Exhausted but unable to settle, wasting away energy in tossing and turning.  So not fair.  In fact, it sucks.  Absolutely sucks.

However once I finally started sleeping again at the beginning of January, things looked up remarkably quickly.  The perfect bedtime routine was to go to bed by about 19h then get up again at about 23h, midnight which is unfortunately when I am at my brightest.  Make some macaroni cheese and then do some word puzzles, potter on the computer and then go back to sleep in the small hours.  Slowly there were more hours between waking up and going to bed at 19h.  Oh, and even less naps.  This magical formula worked for me, kicking the worst of the bout into history.  (I hope, I’m still wary).

Did I mention the macaroni cheese?  I like macaroni cheese, pasta is my go to food and I have a wee thing for cheese.  Macaroni cheese is my number one comfort food.  Although admittedly, depending on my mood and the weather, pizza is a competitor.  Well my unhealthy relationship with the stuff descended to new lows, the world’s biggest macaroni cheese obsession in fact.  That coupled with the fact that I was also crazy about chocolate milkshake (and I’m not usually a fan of that) means that there will be certain consequences of this fad diet that will live for me for quite a while longer, regretfully.  But at the time, I decided that it was better that I ate than starved.  There wasn’t really anything else I fancied, I mean, I couldn’t face tomato at all which is really weird.  And not good in a house where, as I said, pasta is the main meal.

But there are always new challenges to face.  The hardest thing about feeling better is the unbridled optimism that comes with it.  I am not by nature an optimist, you may have noticed, but I fall into the honey trap every single time.  Feeling better is of course a relative term and while I love the new-found freedom of a fog-free head and having the energy to make and eat a meal, it’s way too easy to go overboard.  Without the fog, I can rise to whole heap of new challenges and besides which, I’m seriously bored of being stuck in bed and there’s so many things that require urgent attention right now because I have been stuck in bed so long.  So I tend to over do it.  A little.  A lot.

So January started looking up.  (Although bizarrely, the pain has actually got worse).  I’ve done quite a bit, had a lot of help and encouragement from friends that I hadn’t really even realised that I had, been out socially even.  Slowly trying to find a new balance, a new rhythm.

But February?  Well the storms clouds came in with the new month and I have to admit (as I squirm in shame at my so-called laziness) that I have literally spent the week in bed.  Feeling totally and utterly rotten, paralysed almost and not at all able to pull the duvet from off my head.  It has sucked.  And I’ve been totally unable to do anything about it.

At first, I thought I was ill again.  The tired kind of ill.  But that didn’t quite feel right.  Ill, some stomach bug or ‘flu mixed up with the dregs of the worst bout of tiredness in years?  Other than the two vicious stomach attacks this week which involved strange reactions to perfectly allergen-free foods, breathtaking nausea and discovering that, although it’s a rotten unpleasant experience, I’d rather just throw up than find that I don’t have the strength to actually puke anymore, there were no other symptoms of a stomach bug.  ‘Flu didn’t quite cover it either, it’s a little bit hypochondriacal anyway.  So, guess what?  I had to admit to myself just who had I fallen victim to.  Yeah, that other old friend.  Yeah, you know, that one.  I can’t remember experiencing such a paralysing numbness before though, I was just frozen to the spot unable to do anything or even move.  It’s got to be bad when you can’t even motivate yourself to get out of bed when your belly is empty or worst, your bladder is desperate.

So, yep, this week sucked but today I was up and about again, finally.  Well you know, relatively.  I’m still going to require inordinate amounts of rest but at least I’m at a point where I have to remind myself, and force myself, to take a nap, to rest during the day and my hours are a little bit more ‘normal’.

You know what they say anyway, if it’s not one thing then it’s another.  That’s my life.  One thing or another, one thing after another.  But if you don’t laugh then you cry.  I’m too tired to do either actually so I’ll just plod on.  There’s plenty more of February a-waiting.  And yet another pile of washing up with my name on it.