sinus pain

Unhappy hump day

/ RachelMorrisMcGeethemyastheniakid / Leave a comment

Until I joined Instagram I had no clue what Hump Day was, I quickly worked out that Happy Hump day just meant happy Wednesday. Hump day meaning from what I have surmised, that once you get over this hump it will soon be the weekend. It isn’t a happy hump day here, I can’t believe it is only Wednesday as so far I have endured vertigo, a migraine and now my back is buggered spectacularly and I am waiting on a phone call from the doctor where I will have to beg for diazepam so that I can move again this week!

When you have multiple health issues that like to spring up without warning a week can seem like a very long time. I always try to push through symptoms whenever I can because if I didn’t much of my time would  be spent in bed. However when it comes to my back being in spasm I am severely limited, I can’t walk because the action of walking sets the spasm off and I cant move my arms as that also sets the spasm off. I rang the doctors surgery gasping and crying, I am sure the receptionist thought I was being melodramatic! But I really wasn’t the pain takes my breath away and makes me make horrendous noises as my back contorts and twists itself into all sorts weird shapes. I can only describe it as like wearing a remote controlled whalebone corset. You can be fine one minute and the next the sadistic twat with the controller has randomly made a group of muscles spasm and you can’t move. The pain is so immediate and acute that it takes your breath away. The problem is that you never know what movement your back will find unacceptable until it does!

So I am typing this – I gave up with speech to text when it tried to translate my whimpers into text, whilst sipping a gin ( small ) whilst waiting for the doctor to ring ( it’s only small because I don’t want to be shit faced if and when they ring! as that’s not classy at all). Thankfully the doctor has just rung and agreed that I need diazepam. Thank goodness. Although due to Jays schedule he won’t be home until after 10pm.

I forgot to mention that Jay returned to work on Monday after being home for 7 weeks due to the medications he is on for psoriasis and asthma. His mental health took a nose dive and having been in a really awful place many years ago where he ended up being off work for 12 weeks and it took a good 5 years to get him on the correct medications so that he no longer had massive dips in his mood. He didn’t want to end up in that place again so talked to his HR manager about returning to work. Now they have the social distancing measures in place it is much safer than it was before he was put on the 12 week leave. So he returned on Monday which left Dembe and I scrambling to sort ourselves out in to a new routine after a 7 week hiatus.

I knew on Sunday that I was feeling stressed at Jays imminent return to work – he decided on the Friday ( out of the blue and with no discussion although I was aware he wasn’t right mentally ) and returned on the Monday, as I was really struggling to relax and kept getting funny heart beats, which happens when I am stressed. I tried my hardest to just let it go but it didn’t work. I was also suffering with vertigo, intermittently during the day, so that left me feeling pretty exhausted. 

 I was on edge all day Monday, although when he came home on his lunch break and I could see how happy I was, I relaxed. So I was really surprised late Monday evening when I started to get intermittent zigzag lines in the corner of my eye. As there was no headache within an hour I put it down to a visual migraine but at 5am the following morning I woke up with the feeling someone was trying to insert an ice-pick in my eye. It is clear that all the health issues that have popped up so far this week have been a result of stress.

Then last night after having an awful day with a migraine that just wouldn’t shift, it lasted around 16 hours, I woke up 2 hours after going to sleep with awful muscle spasms in my right leg that had me crying out, the left leg was sore but the right leg had me squealing. Also the toes on my right foot were pulling back towards my shin. I hobbled downstairs and pulled a freezer block ( a cooler pack I think they are called in the USA ) and started massaging my leg with it. It helped but didn’t get rid of it completely. As soon as the muscles relaxed they they just went into another spasm. It was so hard to walk. I ended up sleeping with the ice pack placed onto the back of my leg. I have no idea what caused that but I haven’t had that happen in years – probably as long ago as me being a teenager and waking up with it after a night on the tiles and having a few too many sherbet’s. 

My calf has been aching all day and my feet have been doing their weird spasms all day. Then the icing on the cake was my back going into spasm this afternoon. It was so bad I immediately called the doctors. I can’t believe how many health issues I have had this week and its only Wednesday. When I have weeks like this I often wonder what the hell the rest of the week will go. 

I know this probably sounds strange when in reality I do have a lot of stuff going on but I get quite resentful when I can’t do the stuff I want to do because my body has decided to let me down again. I hate the unpredictability of it and I hate that there is always something going on. When people ask me how I am I just lie and say fine because even I get bored with it and I learned years ago that most people really don’t care they say it out of politeness when they ask how you are. I don’t understand the point of asking a question that when you are asked you have to lie because that’s the done thing. At least I have nothing planned this week.

Thank god it is hump day even if it’s not a particularly happy one!

Getting back to normal, if there is such a thing.

/ RachelMorrisMcGeethemyastheniakid / Leave a comment

Around two days after I wrote my last post “Washout” I ended up contacting my doctor and was prescribed antibiotics. I had been running a temperature for around a week and I just wasn’t feeling any better. 

 
Wednesday morning (30th January) I woke up in the middle of the night feeling like someone had smacked me in the face with a shovel. My sinuses hurt, my teeth hurt and I felt violently sick. As I quite often get migraines like this I decided to try to get back to sleep, it didn’t work. As the morning wore on the pain was increasing where as my migraine attacks last 12 hours at the same intensity I had to concede that this wasn’t a migraine, I had sinusitis and probably a chest infection. When I described my symptoms to the gp she agreed and I was given a 7 day course for amoxicillan. No wonder I had been feeling so awful.
 
After 3 days on the antibiotics I was feeling almost human again. However as usual the antibiotics did a number on my innards which required me to take at least 6 imodium a day. The diarrhoea was so bad it left me feeling drained and triggered off very painful spasms causing me then to have bowel adhesion pain. I stuck with them until the end of day 5, after that I just couldn’t do it anymore. 
 
I could cope with the exhaustion levels if my pain levels hadn’t suddenly just ramped up. Out of nowhere I am back to having extremely cold legs which have to be warmed up by a hot water bottle or by sitting on my electric throw. When going out in the cold and believe me it’s not that cold for this time of year, yesterday it was between 6 and 7 degrees Centigrade, I was in agony with my hands despite having my arthritis gloves on and my legs were aching despite having leggings on under my jeans. I had just gone through a really good period, pain wise and had barely been touching my oramorph which I use for breakthrough pain but as of two days ago, I am taking it every 4 hours when awake to try to knock down the pain levels I am currently experiencing.
 
At the moment there seems to be no happy medium temperature wise. I am either hurting due to the cold or stripping off my layers because I am suddenly boiling hot. So hot that I am sweating. An hour later I am back to freezing again and this cycle repeats itself throughout the day. I wish I knew what I could do to combat it. It’s not like the flushes I was getting before taking the red clover, black cohosh and the sage leaf supplements which have done wonders for my hot flushes. This is a temperature regulation issue. And temperature control is part of the autonomic nervous system. I guess it’s just adding in another element of fun.
 
On a happier note Dembe is settling in very well, you can read about his adventures at www.thedembediaries.com I publish every Monday letting everyone know what he has been up to over the previous week. I don’t know where I would be without him if I am honest. It is exhausting though looking after a puppy when you compare looking after adult dogs who are independent and happy to be left sleeping for most of the day.
 
Dembe is very close to me but I wouldn’t expect any different, he and I are alone together all day ( around 11 hours) bar Jay coming home for 30-40 minutes at lunch time. Dembe loves Jay too, you only have to witness the furious tail wagging when Jay comes through the door to know that. But he is a mummy’s boy at heart. He loves nothing better than curling up at the end of the sofa and sleeping, as long as I am at the other end. 

 
 
 
When I get onto my sewing machine or embroidery machine, he sleeps on the bed I made him in the kitchen. Due to feeling so rotten, not a lot of sewing has gone on. However I did manage to finish this birth announcement cushion, which is a gift for a friend to celebrate the arrival of his daughter. By the time this blog post is published the gifts recipient should have it.
 

 
I am really pleased with the cushion as the feet are from one design and the text is from an inbuilt text on my embroidery machine however I had to get the placement and size of the text right so that the cushion looked balanced. 
 
I used a product called Sarille, which is a type of interlining mainly used on curtains. I saw in various groups lots of suggestions for using wadding behind embroidery designs that were stitch dense and being sewn onto lightweight fabric. I had loads of the Sarille lying around from when I used to do my subscription box. It has given the cushion a nice bit of body at the front and it has also ensure there is minimal puckering. 
 
It’s the first bit of sewing I haven’t had to force myself to do since Frankie and Mollie passed away. For a while there I didn’t know if my sewjo would ever come back or if Dembe would sleep enough for me to manage to get anything done. Jobs are taking me longer as I now tend to wait for Jay to be home before sewing anything. Embroidery is different as I can get up and move away ( when the machine / thread is behaving), so I can keep an eye on Dembe. He is very used to me doing bits of embroidery, he  will lie on his bed in the kitchen and go to sleep. Puppies do sleep a lot although when they are manically running around, chasing their own tails it can seem like they never sleep!
 
I have also managed to get two other bits of embroidery done today, birthday presents for March. I do like working ahead so that I don’t feel under pressure. Whilst I am in the mood to be creative I tend to go for it. Its only in the last few days that I have felt the creative juices starting to flow again. That has as much to do with getting over the infections as it does with dealing with the grief losing the dogs caused. 
 
Its taken 4 weeks for me to feel anywhere near normal and it is still very raw. I am managing to go days without crying where as in the beginning I was lucky if I could go an hour without breaking down. 
 
I am finding it very difficult at the moment to motivate myself to write this blog, mainly because the dogs, our Weimaraners featured in it from the very beginning. They are what kept me sane and kept me going, when it would have been incredibly easy just to give up and not fight anymore. It is taking some getting used to being without them. It’s a new normal and it’s going to take a while to get used to it.