helen-louise's journal

Today I experienced the joy which is seeing a doctor who doesn't know me. Apparently my usual GP is on holiday somewhere warm, lucky woman.

So I was explaining to the doctor that I have had chronic fatigue and pain on and off since I was 13 and I'm now 40, and that I was concerned about the pain in my left knee. The last time I was in this kind of pain was March 2003 when I got diagnosed with hyperventilation occulta. It's a chronic fatigue syndrome type of pain rather than an injury sort of pain.

I explained that I was concerned because I am unable to do very much exercise because of my exercise-induced exhaustion, and now because of this pain I can't even do the small amount of exercise that I usually do. It hurts when I sit, it hurts when I lie down, it hurts when I stand, it hurts when I walk, it hurts when I stretch. Nothing that I know of changes the pain. Since some of my other joints are starting to get achey too, I am concerned.

( Trigger warning: unwanted diet advice. )

I wish my husband would stop setting his alarm for 9.30am when he has been up working until 4am & has no intention of leaving for work until 11.30 at the earliest. All it does is wake me up, & enough that I can't readily fall back to sleep. If you wake my belly up, then you wake the rest of me as well. My belly is busy shouting "HUNGRY!" at me & I am trying to placate it with ginger nuts & chocolate milk, but I feel awful from lack of sleep.

Oh yes. And then he has the nerve to snore at me! ARRGH!

I was going to eat this frozen macaroni "cheese" thing for lunch. It's one of the only vegan ready meals that exists which is also close enough to food for me to be able to consider it. But I opened the packet and it had a 1.5 cm thick layer of ice crystals on top. This wasn't promising. Hacked that off, and found the pasta and sauce underneath was all freezer-burned. Tried to cook it anyway but it's completely dried out and inedible.

Obviously, my mum can take it back to the shop and complain, but SOMEONE has fucked up the storage of the frozen food somewhere along the line. I'm suspecting it's the shop where she bought it because I've had dubiously slushy, obviously melted and refrozen ice cream from there before. Bloody "health" food shops that can't manage to keep their freezers at the right temperature :/

So now I'm eating a bag of crisps and an apple and pretending this is lunch. My back and left leg hurt too much for any kind of cooking which involves more than sitting on a BEKVÄM stool while stuff heats in the microwave. Can't even manage pasta or rice today since I can't bend down to get a clean pan out of the cupboard or reach up to get a bag of carbohydrate product out of the other cupboard... Life would be so much easier if I didn't have all these food intolerances - but the Chronic Fatigue Clinic specialist (an immunologist) reckons they're due to the chronic fatigue anyway. Urgh.

Have to go to UCL for a conference tomorrow & Wednesday. Not looking forward to an early morning. Well, I'll get there as soon as my leg lets me.

Oh gods. I've been knocked out with horrendous sleep patterns from hell and non-restorative sleep for over a week now. Couldn't tell if it was chronic fatigue or depression or both, or something else. I've also had a profoundly unhappy belly since Friday night. (Bad enough on Saturday morning that I almost phoned our Saturday evening visitors to tell them not to bother coming, due to the high possibility of TMI - but then it cleared up a bit). Being me, I couldn't be sure if any of this was an illness or if it was some sort of new, "exciting", additional symptom of my existing chronic stuff. (I have been, quite honestly, going through everything I've eaten and checking to make sure nothing's changed in the formulation, and worrying that I might have developed a New Food Intolerance).

However, in the last half-hour I've acquired a fever, sore throat, and swollen glands - which is oddly cheering, since if I have to be ill, I much prefer being ill with an infection that will go away given time, than with vague nebulous symptoms of doom. Unfortunately, it's also desperately bad timing, with BiCon starting on Friday and my train ticket fixed for Thursday lunchtime. Given the type of fare I bought, I dread to think how much it'll cost to change it to go up later.

I'm hoping that whatever this is started early enough that I'll just have a few days of vileness now, and then it'll clear up, and I'll be free from infection come BiCon. But judging by how I feel right now, there's really no guarantee that I'll make it at all.

I'll, er, keep you informed.

Today I went shopping for a birthday card for my Mum, and found the best Congratulations to the New Parents From A Childfree Person card ever. It manages to combine the messages of "Congratulations on successfully achieving a baby" with "(Though I'm not sure why you wanted one. Good luck anyway!)" without offending either group of people's sensibilities. This is quite impressive.

I suffer from extreme greeting card dilemma in general, because I can only send cards with words that I actually mean, and I don't have enough time in my life to make my own. Normally the problem is limited to trying to find appropriate cards for my partners that don't say "To the One I Love", which seems like a ridiculous sentiment even for most people with only one romantic partner. Most human beings love more than one other person, like their best friends or parent/s or children or pets. I'd be lonely if I only loved one other person in the whole world!

But the difficulty gets doubled or tripled when it comes to New Baby, because I can't manage to send cards about 10 ickle cutesy toesies without wanting to vomit. While the standard "Wow! It's a Boy!" blue card or "Awesome, You Achieved A Girl!" pink cards bother my queer feminist brain with thoughts like "Why the hell does the biological sex of a newborn matter anyway?" and "Who knows which of the many genders the child will grow up to be?". So finding a card that is non-nauseating and will amuse both Richard and me and the new parents is a very cool thing. So cool, that I did in fact buy three of them. Then realised I actually know four pregnant women. Oops.

I have also been both experiencing and suffering from Newton's Third Law today. I spent several hours helping my mum load heavy boxes onto a trolley that had no brakes, and she kept moaning about it running away as we put the loads on. I tried to explain why it happened, but to no avail. Then, coming home, I tried to take the step stool down from the trike, and one of my bungie cords flew up and hit me in the nose. I know those things are a) vicious and b) can store a lot of elastic potential energy, but honestly! It hurt like mad and I now have a visible and scary-looking bruise. And it had to be one of the long 1m cables that has never tried to attack me before rather than the shorter 60cm one that bites me all the time (to the point where I expect it and am prepared for it). Bah.