Wednesday 9 November 2011

Oh, hi, what?

*stumbles in*

Shit.

*stumbles out again*

*stumbles back in with big bouquet of 'SORRY FOR BEING CRAP' roses, like every bad boyfriend throughout history*

So, it's been a really really long time since I updated my blog. Part of this has been technical problems -my laptop went in for repair and that turned into a three month long saga about how fucking shit the company I sent it off with are- and part of it has been health problems, and part of it has been that part of me feels like if I don't write it down, it isn't real. I write it down on Facebook but on facebook everything disappears so fast....everything is gone in a few days and you can forget. With blogging, things stick around. They stay.

*

Health wise, things have been shit. In late August I started having seizures. A lot of seizures. Between 2-6 a day. At first we thought I was just fainting. I have been known to faint quite a lot, so we didn't think much of it. But it got more and more frequent and more and more scary and it didn't seem to have any logical cause and I started shitting bricks about the fact that I was just randomly passing out ALL THE TIME. I scouted around a bit and eventually figured out that I wasn't fainting, I was having Atonic Seizures. We figured out a day when my in-laws could take Terror Tot so we could spend the day in A&E trying to get someone to figure out what was wrong with me. After a kerfuffle with a shitty A&E nurse, an hour and a half in another clinic and a seizure on re-entry at A&E, I was eventually admitted 'overnight'. 'Overnight' turned into 'for three days' and for one of those days I didn't see a single doctor or get given a single test. It was horrific, because the ward I was on at one point threatened to ban Terror Tot from visiting on the ward, because she was 'too loud' and could upset the other patients, so the next day I didn't see her at all, and Mr A had to go back to work while I was still in hospital, so for a day I didn't see her and only saw him for 12minutes. It was miserable and lonely and this coupled with having no friends come to visit me (despite a few FB hints (ok, a lot of FB hints)) made for quite an unhappy few days.
Eventually I had an EEG and a consult with the head of Neurology. The Neuro's felt that what I was having weren't epileptic attacks, but non-epileptic seizures. They bounced me to Psych, and together with Psych I decided to go on medication (SSRI's) to control my stress and anxiety and therefore control the seizures. They discharge me, I go home and hug the crap out of my baby.

I get hold of the tasty tasty psych drugs (Citalopram) and start taking them. Immediately, things go Really Quite Wrong Indeed. First of all I feel sick, and spaced out, and very very numb, and that lasts for a bit, and I think I'll be happy when it passes but I'm not, because what comes next is so much worse. Scary scary scary depression. Like, my friends are worried about my safety and I'm staring dreamily at kitchen knives and talking frankly about how if I wanted to die, no one could actually stop me and that my life is pointless, I'm just trudging through it until I get to a natural resting point and then I'll jump off a roof or something. It was horrific and I thought I'd be happy when it passed but I wasn't. because guess what? Yes. It got WORSE.

It started with a gentle but swift *pop* out of the depressive cycle. I wasn't any happy, but I suddenly had the urge to Get Up And Do Things. I started doing crafty stuff, to take my mind off and Make Myself Feel Useful. Then I started doing little DIY projects. Stuff I'd been meaning to do. Hells yeah, I thought, look at me, being all useful and shit! Look at me and my productivity! Medication ROCKS. Then I couldn't sleep properly. I'd sleep really fitfully and wake frequently, and I'd wake up early and not be able to get back to sleep again. I wasn't getting any rest during the day because I was So Busy Being Productive. In fact, I was SO busy being productive that some days I didn't sit down between waking up in the morning at 10 or 11pm, and even when I was sitting down I'd be at my sewing machine, working on something. I began to realise that I felt possessed. I wasn't productive, I was manic. I couldn't stop. I was miserable and exhausted and near tears all the time but the pills just would not let me stop doing stuff.

I went to my GP and asked her to take me off the pills, because I couldn't cope. Then came two weeks of misery while I weaned off them, and then a new prescription (Sertraline). We're currently about a week into the Sertraline and so far there've been no huge changes, but I am climbing out of a pretty big depressive-pit. The last week I've slept most days and I haven't really got out of bed in a while, because bed is safe and comfortable and warm and bed doesn't make me need to do things. If I'm in bed, I can pretend the rest of the world doesn't exist.
I can pretend that crippling manic episodes on low-dose anti-depressants aren't a giant red flag for Bipolar Disorder. I can pretend that Bipolar would explain....a lot. Like, my whole personality and everything I've done since I was 15. I can pretend that the few feelers I've put out with people who know about these things and who I trust to be honest with me didn't return the info that yes, bipolar seems likely.
I can pretend that I might not have another mental health label before I'm 24.

*

I've been doing a lot of craft stuff lately. I started an Etsy shop and it's fun and I like the community. I like having a sense of purpose. I like feeling good about myself. I like doing things with my hands. I'm not bad at this stuff, not by a long shot. I'm not amazing, but I'm better than the average person, and that makes me feel good.

*

Terror Tot is doing really well. She is officially no longer allergic to dairy and we're making up for 2 years without it with loads of everything she's never had before. I'm enjoying this stage of her life. She's so communicative and every new word is a revelation and every new quirk makes my heart skip a beat, and every new skill remind me that this isn't MY baby here, this is a person I just happened to give birth to.
And everytime she grows up a bit more I get a little bit sad that I'll never give birth to another baby. My heart dips and my stomach drops and my chest rises as it fills up with hurt and loss, and I swallow it down and breathe it out and scrub my wrist across my eyes and tell myself I wouldn't really want another baby. Not really.

Tuesday 7 June 2011

Oh, there I am.

We moved house, then I got sick, then I got better, then there just seemed to be an endless stream of really important things I never had the time to do, then we had to start preparing for our trip to South Africa, then we had to actually GO to South Africa, then we had to come back and deal with the aftermath of being gone for a fortnight and then we found out I was pregnant with a planned and much-wanted baby.

Now I'm sitting here going through my 2nd miscarriage in 11 months.

I have been a shit blogger and a shit friend recently, but I have felt *so* overwhelmed by everything. There are all these demands on my time and not enough of me or my time to meet them. I'm having worse partial dislocations and the 'normal' partials are happening more often. My mood is generally much improved but physically I'm beat up. I've been trying to be good to myself and part of that was stepping away from blogging, because I was getting so emotionally invested in what was happening that I was coming away drained. I don't think that's healthy but at the same time, it upsets me that there are people out there I care for who I haven't even 'seen' for months because I'm too weak to cope with reading about their lives. It's pathetic.


Right now we're doing a lot of thinking about the possibility of my hypermobility being connected with my inability to stay pregnant. The more I read up about chemical pregnancies/early miscarriages, the more I think that I've had more of these than I realised. There's definitely been one more, possibly more but a mix of bad memory and incredibly irregular periods makes this difficult to track. If your period isn't due, how do you know it's late? You can't. But I can know if it's suddenly much much heavier than normal, or much more painful, which has happened a few times.

It was my 23rd birthday yesterday, I dragged Mr Arienette to a theme park and we rode rollercoasters. I smiled so much my face ached. Life is ups and downs.

Wednesday 30 March 2011

Disconnected.

Before we started moving house, I'd had lots and lots of partial dislocations (as is normal in people with my condition) but never a full dislocation.

In the last two weeks, I've had 6.

My mood is still up, my life is still good, but my body is struggling with the extra activity, and it's starting to weigh on my mind that my hypermobility may be even more severe than I'd previously thought. And I thought it was pretty damn bad before.

Dislocations *hurt*.

Anyway, laptop is now only opening in safe mode, and keyboard is ridiculously fucked up, so it needs to go to the laptop hospital. Poor laptop :(

Sunday 20 March 2011

Alive with the Glory

I originally wrote this as a comment over on Veronica's latest blog post, but then I changed my mind and decided that really, it needed a more general audience and it's something I've been trying to figure out how to say here anyway.

Last night I was hanging out of the window of my new place, smoking my 'congrats for making it through the day alive' cigarette, and I realised in that moment that I felt alive. Fucking.....ALIVE. Like I could breathe again, not just go through the mechanical, necessary motions of moving air in and out of my lungs and heaving my chest up and down, but properly and fully, I could breathe. I could feel my skin and I could feel the tears in my eyes and I could feel that feeling I hadn't felt since I was 17, that wanttosingwanttodancewanttoshout feeling that bubbles up inside and overflows.

It was beautiful. For the first time since I started smoking again I didn't feel bad about it, or mentally justify it to the baying mob of better-mothers in my head. It was ok, because it was making me feel. It was ok because I wanted to do it and I am allowed to do things I want, even if I'm a mother. I'm allowed to want. I'm allowed to need. I'm allowed to be a person, with flaws and bad habits and things that have nothing to do with my child. I'm allowed to do things I'm not 'supposed' to. I'm allowed to go away for a night and NOT miss my baby. I'm allowed to drink a little more than I should at a special night out with girlfriends. I'm allowed to drop my kid off at granny's house and go home and have loud sex with my husband even when we were supposed to be running errands.

I feel like I've taken off a heavy winter coat and boots and hat and scarf and gloves and I'm glorying in the nakedness of freedom from guilt. I'm a person. PART of that person is a mother, but I'm so very much more than that too.

Today for the first time in years I smiled for no reason. Just because the sunset was beautiful and the air was crisp and I was alive, and it was enough for me.

Friday 4 March 2011

Update very quickly.

My marriage is not over, but my keyboard is FUBAR so I can't write a big long update on what happened because right now I'm having to C&P in ALL my 'h's and that shit is looooong. What I might do is c&p in some posts I already wrote on a private group on Facebook where I've already filled in all the blanks, that way until I have a working h-key you're not all in the dark.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

It's dark in here.

I think my marriage is over. I had my first night away from A.B on Saturday and it was lovely, but I was chatting with my friends, we were complaining about our relationships -as you do- and the things I was saying seemed so small, so insignificant, so stupid. I realised slowly over the next couple of days that all our fighting, all my unhappiness with the relationship, it's not because he's actually a bad person or a bad husband. I'm unhappy with him because I'm unhappy with EVERYTHING. And the worst thing is, I'm taking it out on him, blaming him for my misery as if he's causing it, when really all I do is drag him down and hold him back because he spends all his time looking after me. I'm so sick all the time, he's either at work or he's taking care of A.B and taking care of me. We fight over stupid things because I'm unhappy and never satisfied with life.

The truth is, I didn't want this. I got married because I fell in love but at the time, I wasn't expecting to live very long. I was very sick, and I wanted a few years of stability while I slowly wound down my life. It's easy to be in love when you think you're about to clock out. I wasn't expecting to get pregnant after 6 months of marriage, and when I did, I didn't want a baby. I continued the pregnancy for two reasons. I didn't think it would last (everything every doctor was telling me pointed to a negative outcome) and and I didn't think our relationship could survive any alternatives. As stupid as it sounds, I wasn't expecting to have a baby. No one, at any stage, had really prepared me for the idea that we would end up with a child. From the moment she was born, I went into a waking coma. My life just stalled and nothing I did, nothing that happened could re-start it. I tried over and over to do things that might make me come back to life but nothing worked. Blogging was supposed to help but while it was a good distraction sometimes, it didn't produce any real revelation like I was expecting. In fact the more involved I got with the disabled blogging community, the more depressed I got.

If I leave, they'll both be better off. He's an amazing dad and he'd be a better dad if he wasn't having to care for me too. I know people won't understand... it's practically accepted that fathers sometimes leave their children, but mothers don't. Mothers are supposed to be there always. Mothers are supposed to stay forever. But that's not what's best for her. What's best for her is to be with the best parent, and her father is the best parent. I'll stay around as much as I can to help him and I won't disappear from her life, but I think the only way to give her a happy, healthy childhood is for her to grow up in a home where there isn't constant unhappiness and fighting. I love her too much to ruin her life by staying around to poison everything.

I don't know where I'm going to live or how I'm going to live. I suppose these things have a way of working out. I won't pretend I have any answers at this point, or that I'm not scared, but there's no doubt in my mind that this is the right thing to do. Both of them deserve better.

Thursday 24 February 2011

Pointless Post In Which I Am Lame (and a picture of Baby A.B)


(This is pretty much the face everyone pulls around me, all.the.time.)


So today I discovered (read: saw on the side of The Bloggess' blog) an awesome guy called Josh Weed who is basically the blogger I wish I was, but mormon and with a penis and with three kids (my vagina just couldn't handle that shit.) I clicked on his link at about 9pm and it's now 00:50 and I have been reading almost solidly (except breaks to take a pregnancy test and make some cheese and crackers and eat a lump of danish blue cheese crackerless BECAUSE I'M FUCKING FEARLESS) and I have laughed more times than I can count. I could say a bunch of shit about Josh, like that he's witty, and sensitive, and shows a surprising amount of insight into the life of his wife (known as Wife) and a touching appreciation for what she does for him and her role in their family and in society. I could say that I think if I could ever persuade Mr A to go to counselling, he's the kind of person I'd want to explain my marital problems to. I could say a lot of shit, but instead I'll say this:
He is crazy in a way that I seriously appreciate and twisted and dark in a way that had me cackling.
If that's not a first rate endorsement, I don't know what is.

Anyway, in an example of how fucking convoluted and ridiculous my life is, about a million months ago (November) Josh wrote a post about The NeverEnding Story (if you have never seen TNS you are not old enough to operate the Internet. Please go crawl back into your crib and stop making me feel so fucking old) and it reminded me that for a brief, shining moment in my pregnancy, I was all 'LETS CALL THE BABY ATREYU!' and my husband was totes scared of me because I kept waking him up in the dead of night by slowly twisting my thumbs into his back and screeching "I just can't stand the way you breathe!" so he didn't immediately voice extremely loud objections and question my sanity, which I totally took as a green light. Little baby Atreyu B.J was going to be awesome.
So tonight I was thinking back, and then I started wondering about all the people little Atreyu went to school with, who would think we actually named Atreyu after the band, Atreyu (which they knew of as some weird oldies music their clearly awesome parents listen to) and then I had this insane urge to listen to some Atreyu, so I paused Snakes On a Plane and youtubed me some Atreyu, and it was while listening to 'Lipgloss and Black' that I remembered how fitting this song used to be to my life, and realised with sadness how fitting it still is.



For those of you with less than perfect hearing, or who just don't speak metalcore, I've included some of the lyrics (without the endless repetitions)

If I gave you pretty enough words
Could you paint a picture of us that works
With emphasis on function rather than design
Aren't you tired?
cause I will carry you
On a broken back and blown out knees
I have been where you are for a while

Aren't you tired of being weak?
Such rage that you could scream
All the stars right out of the sky
And destroy the prettiest starry night
Every evening that I die

I am exhumed just a little less human and lot more bitter and cold

After all these images of pain
Have cut right through you
I will kiss every scar and weep
You are not alone
Then I'll show you that place,
in my chest where my heart,
still tries to beat;
It still tries to beat

Aren't you tired of being weak?
Such rage that you could scream
All the stars right out of the sky
And destroy the prettiest starry night
Every evening that I die

Live, Love, Burn, Die

I spent my teen years writing poetry, trying to communicate what people clearly weren't hearing in my much more eloquent habits of casual sex and black-out drinking, and in four years I never wrote something that expressed what I was trying to say like this song does. I wrote some dark shit and it still kind of flummoxes me to this day that no one took me aside and went "Listen, I've read some of your poetry and truth be told, I think you're a little disturbed." I mean...my boyfriends were reading this stuff, and what I was saying by writing it was 'Please, please, I am so fucking damaged that I can't even tell you how damaged I am, please tell me you see it so that some of this pressure building up in here can release.' I still know some of my ex-boyfriends now, and I kind of want to shake them and ask them if they realised at the time just what they were dealing with. Mr A was one of the only boyfriends ever who has never read anything I've written, and I'm sure that's a coincidence, but sometimes I wonder.

More to come soon, on such diverse subjects as holidays, moving house, cleaning, and breastfeeding.
Actually, those aren't that diverse at all. They're all boring and mundane and domestic. Oh Josh, you had me pegged.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Avoidance and not-so-near-death experiences.

So, the Flu is gone, but it left me with what we thought was a fractured rib. It got worse and worse however, and on the night of the 13th, after what I thought was 3 weeks but appears to only have been one*, I was writhing around, in so much agony I couldn't breathe, screaming from every movement, convinced the the rib was breaking, splintering, and penetrating my lungs. I caved, and told Mr A I needed him to take me to the hospital. Four hours and an x-ray later it's discovered that I do not have a broken rib, but instead I apparently live in the 16th century. I have fucking pleurisy. Who even gets pleurisy? Pirates and poets, thats who.

I was released with a box of codeine and instructions to rest. The resting I was happy with but the codeine? Lets be straight here: I wouldn't say I'm an ex drug addict, but I'm an ex drug abuser. I didn't drink because I liked it, or because it was social, or because it felt nice. I didn't take drugs to achieve new experinces or enhance a good time. I did drugs and took alcohol specifically with the intention of getting fucked up. I attempted to obliterate myself with substances. I have abused everything from diet pills to ibuprofen to whisky to cocaine. You can't give me a drug and ask me to be sensible. I'm not. I don't have a filter, I don't have a valve that cuts things off when it gets too much. There is no shallow end of substance use for me. I always jump in at the deep end, and then I sink to the fucking bottom, because there is something wrong in my brain that won't tell me when to stop. Even when I was first given co-dydramol by my GP in response to my (at that point undiagnosed) hypermobility, I immediately started abusing them, however unintentionally. I was taking the maximum dose of co-dydramol alongside the maximum dose of ibuprofen, every single day, and I was still in pain. I weaned myself off them and now I don't even take them daily. Not because there's no pain, but because the fear of addiction and abuse is stronger than the pain. The knowledge of how easy it would be to slip up looms over me. The weight of this all is enormous.
So too was that box of codeine.
I turned it over and over in my hands. I didn't take any the moment she gave it to me, I made myself wait. Why? Why prolong my agony when I had a solution? I don't know. Just to prove I could, perhaps. Just to make sure I was able to. I waited until I got home, and then I waited until I got settled back into bed, and then I waited a little longer, and then I sneezed and then coughed and a scream ripped itself out of my chest and tears stabbed at my eyes and my vision sparkled with little white flakes of pain and I knew it was madness to wait any longer, so I took two tiny pills.

Ten minutes later I was filled with the knowledge that once the pleurisy is gone, the pills will have to be gone too, but I will probably spend the rest of my life hoping that something goes badly wrong with my body so that I am once again prescribed an opiate. Because I have never felt as at peace with my life and myself and the world as I do now. I have never felt as good as I do fifteen minutes after taking my pills.

And isn't it sad that that's a dangerous thing?




*Time has gone all screwy. The result of lying in bed for three weeks with the 'flu rather than drug use, because I was having trouble before the codeine, but still annoying. I was sure I'd been ill about 5weeks but first mention of it elsewhere on the internet is on the 22nd of January. I've been free of the 'flu but nursing the pleurisy for what felt like two weeks at least, but can only have been one. I'm a bit confused, to be honest.

Sunday 23 January 2011

Thursday 20 January 2011

Strangers.

The most bizarre part to me now, was thanking him afterwards. This man had just ripped my world apart in a matter of seconds. He'd destroyed me, and once I'd stopped being eaten alive by pain, I would go on and destroy all of my closest friends.
And I was thanking him. Sincerely, and repetitively, and robustly. I was thanking him for his time, apologising, all the apologising....I felt genuinely sorry that I'd dragged him into this, that my mumbled, hysterical, tearful voicemail had been left on HIS phone, that HE was the one who had had to destroy me, that I'd made that his role in the whole thing. He hadn't asked for it and he didn't deserve it. It was an accident of fate, and in one of the last feelings I was to have for 6 months, I felt bad for him.

In 2008, an ocean away from me, a good friend of mine took her life. The facts surrounding her suicide will never be clear. We will never know the truth of what happened, and that hurts. I can't last any of it to rest while there are so many pieces left out of this puzzle. We, her online support network, had known her for some years, and we were a tight-knit community. As far as we had known, she was in a residential psychiatric unit, so it was not at all strange to us that we hadn't heard from her in a while. When you're trying to bring the crazy under control, that can be a 24/7 experience, and access to the internet can be limited, if it's there at all. The first we heard that something was wrong was from an outsider, who sent the leader of the community a message saying that she was sorry to break the news, but J was dead. We, the moderators of the community, immediately broke into mass panic, and quickly mobilised in an attempt to find out whether this was true. We didn't trust any outside source to break news like this to us.
It was the Friday before a holiday weekend in Canada, and from my small flat in London I frantically phoned every hospital in and around her city, desperately leaving messages, trying to find anyone who could speak to me. When I reached a dead end (ha ha) with phoning morgues, I started on newspapers, figuring someone, somewhere, had to have a connection. I left strained, tearful, jumbled messages on answering machines, begging anyone who could possibly help to please please phone me or contact me.
At 22:15 on May 17th 2008 I received this message from a reporter at a local newspaper who had said he may be able to help me:
I would rather have spoken with you on the telephone about this, but it seems the sad information you have is correct. I have a source who just called me back and confirmed the news about J...... Once I got the information, I was sick with dread wondering if I should tell you at all...but I get the sense that you needed to know, one way or another. I am truly sorry for your loss.
And I thanked him. And my heart washed over with ice water, and I thanked him. And my stomach puddled in a cold heap at my feet, and I thanked him. And I shut myself down at that moment and did not let myself open up again until November 8th, when 2 little lines on a little white stick threw me out of my orbit. And I thanked him.

Three years later, it is easier, and less painful. I've shut J up in a box in my heart and the muscle around the wound there has healed over and sometimes I feel her when it beats. I feel the sharp edges of that box and I feel the ice that gripped my nerves that night, before I drowned myself in alcohol so that I wouldn't have to feel something so immense.

Two years later, I watched J's sister via facebook as she went through a pregnancy with a nephew J would never meet. I watched her give birth to a beautiful son, and I'm watching him grow up. He will never know his beautiful, damaged, once-in-a-very-short-lifetime aunt, although I know she will influence his life immensely.

Sometimes I am angry, sometimes I am overwhelmed. But always, always I am thankful to the man who listened to his messages and heard a girl sobbing on the other end of the phone, and put a dampener on his holiday and put his professional life at risk to try to bring comfort to a group of strangers. He made a sacrifice that day, and we will never forget him for it.

Monday 17 January 2011

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Toddlerhood.

Not-So-Baby A.B has recently decided to wake up between 3 and 4 every day and then stay awake, unless I lie down next to her for the rest of the night. This is infuriating and has the effect of making me so angry that tonight I found myself shouting at her, shouting at Mr A, shouting into my hands. Nothing will get her back to sleep except over an hour of lying perfectly still beside her. Now, under normal circumstances, this would be fine. Where else would I be at 3am except in bed? Except that HER sleeping badly makes ME sleep badly, so I HAVEN'T been in bed, or capable of going to sleep earlier (and even if I was tired, by the time I've done even 20 minutes of the 'make mummy pretend she's a statue' game, I'm so wound up and irate that I have no hope of sleeping) so right now, we're both pretty miserable.

I know you shouldn't wish stages of your childs life away, but I really can't wait til she can talk. It's so frustrating just not knowing what the fuck she WANTS. I'm tearing my hair out because she can't just tell me what's wrong so instead we're both upset and crying and tired beyond words.

It's 5:30am now, she's upstairs crying while her dad tries to get her to sleep, and has been for almost an hour, and I was upstairs trying to get her to sleep for at least 40 minutes before that. It's ridiculous. What's the problem? What's the matter? Why won't she just SLEEP.

I have no wisdom, no wit, no insight into the depths of mental health problems tonight. Tonight everything is fucked and I'm tired and I don't know what's wrong with my child and I just want it to stop.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

To 350D or not to 350D, that is the question.

When I was a teenager, I was a member over at DeviantArt.com. My fellow London members were my only real friends. They were the group I hung out with and we had a circle of people that was just like a 'real life' circle of friends, except instead of meeting at school or whatever, we originally met online.
Within this circle, photographers made up the bulk of the artists. This meant we spent a lot of time talking technicalities. A lot of time. I soon learned to covet certain camera's, and among them was the Canon EOS 350D. I wanted a DSLR so bad. It pulled at my soul and everytime I'd fiddle with one of the boys' camera I'd practically salivate. I never got my DSLR from my parents, because the thought (fairly, to be honest) that I wasn't responsible with my belongings. I would have been with a DSLR, but I don't blame them for not trusting me.
A couple of years ago I was at a family event for my husband's family, and I wandered off with one of my father-in-law's millions of camera's to take pictures of horses and avoid the awkward lull in conversation that developed whenever I came near. I fell in love all over again. I took some absolutely stunning pictures despite not knowing a thing about the camera I was using. It was amazing, and I went home feeling a bit sad I had to leave it where it was. But DSLR's are expensive. I knew I'd never afford one, I just let it go.

Last christmas, I didn't really get any presents. We didn't have any money, and there wasn't anything I wanted. We kept saying we'd put it off til I found something I wanted. My birthday came round and it was much the same thing. Not much money, nothing I wanted. I was supposed to go to a comedy show with Mr A but A.B was refusing to drink anything and we couldn't leave her for long enough and we very unhappily had to cancel. For this Christmas just passed, I was supposed to be getting a backpiece tattoo as a BIG present for all the presents I'd missed out on. Then we realised that because of my moles, I'm going to need to have my back examined for changes fairly regularly and covering up a bunch of marks with a tattoo is not conducive to appropriate and regular checks of mole size. Damnit. So I started thinking of what else I could get. Mr A had vaguely suggested the idea of getting me a new digital camera as a smaller present before christmas, but I'd dismissed the idea. But slowly last night, I came around.

And so I did it. I 350D'd.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Hmm.

Yes. It all seems to have gone wrong there a bit, didn't it?
I'm still alive. I'm alright, although Christmas was stressful. I've just been struggling to cope with some things.
I had a bit of a freak out about some upcoming tests for possible gynae issues. I pretty much convinced myself I had cancer, and I didn't want to talk about it, because I felt stupid, and with so many friends who've lost people or had cancer themselves, I felt ridiculous. How on earth could I sit there and bitch and moan about being scared of MAYBE having cancer when other people actually DO have it?
My first test came back clear, which is good, but means that problems I've been experiencing are still a mystery.

I had my first hydrotherapy appointment and it went well. I have another one next week. I'm not too keen on sharing my therapist with another person in a small pool during sessions, but whatever. Limited resources and all that, it makes sense I guess. And I don't have to like it, I'm not paying for it, so I should be grateful I can have it at all.

I had quite a bad downward turn after my last entry, and was very very down for a couple of weeks. About mid-december suddenly the depressive episode was over and since then I've been clawing my house back from the wilderness that had taken over it. My husband has also been home a lot of the time (only been at work two days since December 10th) so I've been trying to not only get some time to myself, but fix my sleeping habits, get quality time with Mr A and also do a fair amount of housework. Unfortunately the problem is the more cleaning and housework you do, the more you feel you need to keep it up. And the worse it looks when it gets the slightest bit messy. I've yet to train Mr A to 'tidy as he goes' which is a bit infuriating when I go up for a bath and come back after only an hour to a destroyed living room. He also seems to be allergic to the dishwasher.

I don't really know what's going on with my life right now. I feel more directionless than usual, except before I was directionless and stagnant, now I seem to be moving forward but just in no direction, which almost seems worse. It scares me that a whole year went by and I don't have a single thing to show for it. Nothing happened. Nothing changed. Nothing was achieved. And that I have nothing planned for the next year. Nothing will be achieved, nothing will be changed (except a move of house). I feel like I'm just going through the motions and I honestly don't feel like anything will change until we move country in 2012. I feel like I'm halfway through a 3 year pause, and nothing can happen until I get off that plane and unpause. Then I can start my life again.

Honestly, I'm not happy, and haven't been for so long. I'm STILL waiting to hear about councelling, my doctor has tried to chase it up twice to no avail. At this point I'm 3 months away from moving, and once I move house I'll have to go onto a new waiting list in my new area. It's doubtful I'll receive any help in the next 6 months and I know my next GP will try to encourage my onto medication before councelling. I feel like I've fallen into a gap.