Part 18 - October 2013

Park panorama

At the start of October I was mainly ill in bed as my suspected cold apparently turned into some horrid debilitating virus.

I also had the same problems sleeping although some nights seemed better than others.  Again, I tried to think things through to clear my mind rather than lying there getting frustrated at the lack of shut eye.  I wondered if writing my blog was a cause it as it brought things up to the surface but I still felt that I should carry on with it.  Even though it was painful to relive the horridness, I believed I really needed to do it and that it would help me in the long run.  Strangely, it also made me more aware of what was going on from my employer’s side – not that I believe that excuses them because they handled things so badly at the beginning which created the situation in the first place and I will never forgive them for that.  But I was hopeful that it would help me with the healing process as I got further down the line and the experience became less raw.

I tried to get into the habit of doing proper relaxation exercises which helped to calm me down and to sleep a bit better. Nevertheless, by midweek, I was so tired that I couldn’t tell if my virus had got any better.  I decided to take a Temazepam from my depleted supplies.   As a result, I fell asleep a bit quicker and felt a lot more rested the next day but still feeble.

Even though I was bedridden most of the time, I tried to be productive. I looked at the calendars that I had designed back in May and changed some photos for newer, better ones.  I also did a bit of jewellery making but had to stop after a couple of hours because it made my back hurt

By the end of the week, it felt like my germs had gone but I was still very weak and fatigued when out of bed, and I had a very unpleasant, heavy feeling in my head.  I made an effort to get out of bed as a friend was coming round in the afternoon for a cuppa and a chat. It turned out that she knew quit a lot about jewellery making and in return, I told her the secrets of making bath products. 

Apart from a short rest, I managed to stay up for most of the day but then on the Saturday I felt terrible.  I was completely wiped out again with a splitting headache. I reflected that maybe I had overdone it the day before, thinking I was better so I stayed in bed.  I was absolutely fed up with feeling rubbish!

On the Sunday, I tried sitting up in the living room but after being out of bed for one hour, I couldn’t keep my head up so had to go back upstairs.   It was a gorgeous bright day and I tried not to get depressed about being stuck indoors. I opened the window in the bedroom to enjoy the sunshine and gentle breeze. I did manage to sleep a lot on the Sunday night though which was an improvement if short-lived.

The following week’s instalment of the blog took ages and I was completely done in.  I had to look back at some letters and reports to remember some of the details and I could feel my anxiety levels rising but I managed to control it and not let it get to me too much.

Unfortunately though, my sleep pattern reverted to type, and I was waking up every couple of hours or so. My back really hurt in the night and I had strange dreams that I couldn’t remember the next day.  I was totally knackered, achy, and bunged up.  I decided it was probably sinusitis rather than just a virus so I rang the doctors and got upset and angry by the stupid gatekeepers. I was due to make an appointment with my regular GP for the end of October so I thought I would just try and get booked in sooner and get some antibiotics to clear my infection.  But they told me there were no free appointments until 29^th October, and that was at 8.30 a.m. I wondered how on earth I was going to get up for that time.  I was so distressed I actually cried when I put the phone down.

I made an effort to stay out of bed more that week and started on two week’s worth of cleaning which was hard work and I had to ignore my back pain and other aches which I knew were partly due to being in bed too much and not moving enough.  I reflected that at least the pain was moving about which I thought was a good sign. We had a small trauma when a pair of my knickers went up the hoover!  My partner was working at home and helped me to get them out but it took ages.  We eventually managed it by using the blower function to force them to the other end of the pipe then prising them out with a bent coat hanger – quite a palaver but a handy tip. 

I tried to book train tickets to Edinburgh to visit some friends during half term at the start of November, but it was ludicrously expensive and the engineering works meant at least two changes and a bus ride coming back. We decided to cancel that idea and maybe go to Lancaster instead.

I managed to make it to art class that week and did a still life drawing of my little jugs in chalk pastels. My efforts were pretty rubbish but I learnt a bit more about shading techniques.  I had texted my art friend to see if she was returning to the class seeing as the painting class she was going to in Halifax was awful apparently.  It was her birthday earlier in the week but I had cancelled going out for tea with her as I was still too unwell. 

That night, I had a scratchy throat again and as I lay there trying to sleep, all sorts of stuff was going round my head.  It also seemed really bright outside which does happen sometimes and bears no relation to how bright the moon is and remains a mystery.  I tried to think things through a bit and came to the conclusion that my brain was in a real jumble with all sorts of stuff tumbling round in my mind making it very difficult to switch off or just concentrate on one thing despite trying my various relaxation techniques.  Again, I tried some proper meditation and worked through some analogies for the rubbish in my head. The best one was that it was like a messy attic and stuff needed to be sorted into boxes or thrown out.  This helped a lot and I managed to sleep a bit.

In the morning, I had a chat about this with my partner and explained about the jumble in my head which he seemed to understand.  Later on that day, I did some more thinking about my head jumble.  I decided I needed to get out of the house more and I set off for a stroll.  I saw my neighbour from art class down the road.  We talked about our respective art classes, and I arranged to go round for a cuppa the following Monday.

In the afternoon, I tried some mind mapping to sort out my head jumble.  I realised that I just mainly needed to stop worrying – not earth shattering and easier said than done, but it was a useful process to go through.  I also considered speeding up writing my blog so I could ditch the shit and move on quicker, but realised that I couldn’t do more hours per week on it than I was already as it was totally draining mentally and physically.  I needed to keep it contained and balance it with my other activities. 

Towards the end of the week I started to feel ill again with a sore throat and aches and pains everywhere.  I decided to ignore it and carry on but that night I couldn’t get to sleep at all. Every time I started to drop off, my throat pain woke me up.  In the end, I had to get up for some throat spray but it still took ages to actually get to sleep despite totally relaxing my body, but eventually I did sleep in bits.  In the morning, the Throat pain was a bit less bad but I still felt very achy and tired. I really needed to get some basic supplies though and managed to get out to the supermarket but then in the afternoon I had to go back to bed.  I tried to catch up on some sleep but failed.

At the weekend my Mum rang.  I had sent her a homemade card for her birthday as I was not up to visiting. She had nurses and carers coming to see her and seemed to be getting a lot more help and support now which I was glad about.  My art friend called round and I gave her a book for her birthday which I knew would be right up her street, combining two of her interests, namely art and travel (In Search of Gaughan).  What was even better was that I had found it on the market for an incredibly low price even though it was brand new.

Later on, I looked for hotels in Lancaster. There was not much choice but I managed to find one that looked quite nice.  I then did some research into things to do there and found out that there are light shows and fireworks that weekend, which I was quite excited about.  It also explained why the hotels were so booked up.

The weather was grey and mizzley which I didn’t mind so much seeing as I wasn’t up to going out gallivanting.  Nevertheless, I was really fed up that this was now three weekends in a row being stuck indoors due to the stupid recurring virus/infection.

That night, it took a while to get to sleep again due to a scratchy throat and coughing, even with trying proper relaxation which was not as effective as it had been earlier in the week.  I managed to get to sleep eventually, but woke up several times, then lay in bed until quite late the next morning.  Sunday night was even worse!  I had a niggle in my left nostril then I had a sneezing fit, then the sore throat and coughing returned.  I got up to get some cough mixture then tried some relaxation again and eventually did get some sleep but was absolutely shattered the next morning though.  I Felt truly awful and totally unrested, but really didn’t want another week in bed so I made an effort to get up and have a bath.

I was in the bathroom when there was a knock on the door which I ignored, then another one a few minutes later so I went down in my dressing gown.  A woman from across the street asked me to move my car as a skip was being delivered and she had put a note through the door the day before about it.  I hadn’t seen the note and anyway, one day’s notice was totally inadequate and in any case, I didn’t understand why she wanted my parking spot when her house was on the other side of the street.  Why should I have to look at her old crap in a skip for god knows how long? I was too bleary to be articulate so I just told her we owned the land.  This is only half-true but she seemed to accept it and left me alone.  Later, I noticed that the skip was using up three parking spaces (Selfish self-entitled middle class idiots!)

I cheered myself up with a visit to my neighbour from art class and we had a chat about the awful state of the public sector and this dreadful government.  Later on, I did a lot of work on my blog but had to leave it quite unfinished as I was so tired and I had a headache.

My sleeping did improve a bit during the week. After I had finished my blog for that week, I did some thinking about the psychology of power, control, and the passive-aggressive boss.  I still plan to do more on this when I have caught up in ‘real time’ with writing my blog.

I also did some exercise and some painting and found a photo to use as a Christmas card, of church ruins in the snow.  I had done a painting of this a while ago which inspired me to try different colours and filters in Photoshop.

Guitar figure in pastels

In art class we did drawings of a person with clothes on, which made a nice change.  My charcoal drawings were reasonable and my pastel one had the tutor in raptures for some bizarre reason.  He said I had a ‘heck of a style’ and liked the way I combined lines and blocks of colour (I didn’t tell him the lines were there to help me because my technique is still dreadful).  He said proportion didn’t matter as I had ‘captured the spirit’ of the pose.  I asked him if he wanted to buy it and he said he was tempted, but might do me a swap!  He wanted to keep our drawings in the studio for a while so I took photos (as did others including the model who said she loved the colours in mine). 

Accidental photo of a crow in flight

The next day, I went for a walk round town and took photos of the mill for a collage I was planning.  I got a photo of a crow in flight by accident which was pretty cool. I posted it up on Facebook and got 22 ‘likes’ in total which is a record for me!

On the Friday evening we went out to see a local band in a local pub  The pub was the fullest I’d ever seen it (we reckoned the leftie club must have been empty that night, and the lights were not kind, especially to 50 year olds trying to look 18!)  The band were okay and we drank some nice beer and chatted to some people we knew and some we didn’t and tried to stop a very drunken person from stealing our drinks and fags.  We ended up having quite a late night and in the morning I still felt a bit drunk but otherwise not too bad, but my partner had a cold and felt awful. 

On the Sunday we both felt a bit better and went out to stretch our legs and have lunch.  Although we had not had an exciting weekend at least we got out a bit.  It was annoying that my partner had a cold again and I was hoping that I didn’t catch it as this was the first weekend I’d felt up to going out so far during October.

That night, I just couldn’t sleep again and again as I lay there trying to relax, all sorts of random stuff was churning round in my head, even though I tried to focus on positives.   I made a big effort to empty my brain by doing proper mediation.  This didn’t exactly clear my mind entirely but it did help me to get some sleep eventually.

Writing my blog was quite hard that week, as I had some difficult stuff to go over but I made good progress on the Monday after four hours’ work.  The weather was quite bright and sunny so I took the opportunity to clear my head and did some cleaning up outside.  I had quite a good sleep the following night and the next day I did some exercise including a few new high impact ones and used weights which made me quite out of breath but gave me a bit of energy.  I started recording my sleep pattern which was quite interesting.  Although it felt quite a lot better sometimes, when I looked at it, there was no apparent massive improvement so it was obviously about quality rather than quantity, most likely helped by doing relaxation and meditation and I definitely felt that I had a bit more energy.

Midweek, the College where my partner works had announced their latest redundancy plans and he actually talked to me about it, which was a rare occurrence.  He apologised after for being boring but I wish he would talk about it more often.  He says it doesn’t bother him but I think he bottles stuff up and then often feels crap and ill at weekends.  I find it hard to take things in late at night when I am tired, but otherwise, I really don’t mind and manage not to internalise other’s stress.

I managed to get out a bit during the week, visiting a friend and pottering around shops.  I went to the bead shop and asked for some advice as I wanted to re-thread some beads I got on holiday years ago and came away with some great ideas.

As autumn finally set in, I had started to worry about the cost of fuel and as our account was in debit, I was stuck with our current supplier. I tried looking at alternative tariffs but got confused by the different quotes I got.  I also tried talking to my partner about it but his solution was for him to earn more money to which I said it would be better to save some.  As it happened, the energy company then sent me an e-mail explaining their latest price rises (sic) and by following a, link, I eventually did manage to change to a better tariff.  I also succeeded in reducing a couple of other direct debits.

Still life painting of everyday objects

At art class that week, we painted a still life of various everyday objects.  I got some good feedback but I felt that I still lacked technique and was useless at perspective.  I was getting quite pally with another class member and she helped me with a frying pan so it looked less flat. The paint was still wet so we couldn’t take our work home. Instead, I took photos of mine and my new pal’s so I could e-mail them to her.

The next morning we noticed that there was a beautiful sunrise with gorgeous colours in the sky which was very welcome after several days of changeable but mainly grey weather.  The day stayed bright and sunny and I walked to the park and took photos of trees and the canal. 

That evening, I suddenly started to feel ill again with shooting pains across the back of my head, then along the front left side of my head and I felt all fuzzy.  When I went to bed, I took aspirin but this didn’t stop a scratchy throat and niggle in my left nostril developing overnight adding to my previous feelings of unwellness, so I decided to stay in bed the next day. 

That afternoon, there was a distant rumble of thunder, which got closer and closer...then the storm came... with very heavy rain and lightning that  looked very close.  Predictably, this was followed by grim predictions from the doom and gloom merchants which continued into the following Monday.  We laughed at the so-called devastation and disruption caused by what was dubbed the ‘St. Jude’s day storm’.  A few trees came down and no trains were running to and from London, but we escaped unscathed.

I was really annoyed that I was physically ill again at the weekend, the fourth one out of five that I was unable to go out and have fun. By this stage, I was totally convinced that it was sinusitis rather than a recurring virus.

Even though I still felt ill, I had to get up on Monday morning and dig some notes out. I was expecting an initial assessment from IAPT as I had an appointment that was made weeks ago.  When they hadn’t called by 10.50, I rang them and they said the guy who was meant to contact me was in another centre and they would get him to ring me.  I was annoyed and had to wait until gone noon until someone eventually rang me back. They said this guy who was meant to ring me wasn’t in work and they had only just found out.  Unbelievable!  I expressed my feelings on this matter, saying it was not acceptable as I had got out of bed especially today for this telephone appointment.  They apologised and said they would get back to me before Friday to re-set the appointment for the following week.  At the same time, I tried to start filling in my ATOS form. At first, I couldn’t figure out where my symptoms fitted into the questions but I jotted down some notes.

The next day, I still felt knackered and it was very hard to get up and going but I had a doctors appoint at the ridiculously early time of 8.30 a.m.  My regular GP was ill so I saw another doctor who I had not met before but had spoken to on the phone.  She prescribed high dose antibiotics for my confirmed sinusitis and we chatted about the other stuff.   I told her about the crap experience with IAPT and we talked about anti depressants again but she does seem to have a slightly different take on them (she didn’t say so but I reckoned she sees them more as a last resort) and suggested that I carry on with my routine of positive activities like writing, art, exercise, walking etc. and see what happened with IAPT before re-visiting it.

Yellow leaves with chimney

It was lovely and sunny and I realised I sometimes missed being out and about in the mornings but it is so hard to get up! I took my time strolling home to maximise the sunlight and bought some live yogurt as I knew the antibiotics would play havoc with my guts otherwise.  I actually started to feel loads better really quickly and wondered if the high dose lark was working already – amazing if it was! 

But that night was very strange with weird dreams and nasty things going on in my stomach – very burpy and sometimes my mouth filled up as though I was going to be sick but it was just wind and obviously to do with the medication. I did get up and do things in the morning and then went back to bed in the afternoon but I couldn’t sleep (it was getting noisy at about four o’clock as the railway engineers who were working up the line going home at dusk).

The following night was much the same and although my dreams were not quite as weird I woke up even more frequently and had that horrid feeling in my stomach again.  Again, I felt I was going to be sick, but I just belched and my stomach and chest really hurt from the acid being produced.

It was half term and my partner took a couple of days off at the end of the week.  We cancelled our trip to Lancaster though as I was still feeling too crap to drive and there were no trains on that line over the weekend due to the engineering works. Also, the weather forecast was for more gales. 

We went to the market together and bought nice food for the weekend instead and some vegetables to make pickles with, and I also got some yakult as the normal yogurt was not doing the trick of replenishing my friendly bacteria and get rid of the awful stomach cramp and embarrassing wind!   In the afternoon, we started preparing to make pickles and my partner criticised my cutting of the shallots (as he is like a pickle artisan expert now or some shit like that).  And lo! I decreed that henceforth, the last day of October in our house shall be known as Pickling Day.

So, I was ill for a total of three weeks during October, but at least the antibiotics seemed to be getting rid of the sinusitis and I was hopeful that things would improve in November....