Love

Confidence

/ RachelMorrisMcGeethemyastheniakid / Leave a comment

 I’m a bit calmer than I was last week and I have managed to carve out some time for myself to enjoy my creative pursuits. Which always puts me in a better frame of mind because it makes me feel like I have actually achieved something. I have struggled since being ill-health retired to feel that I make a valuable contribution to society. People always ask “what do you do for work?” or “D why Io you work?” and it is a real conversation stopper when you have to say “no I have been ill-health retired since 2008”. My disability is pretty much invisible or not well understood by others, so even when I rock up in my mobility scooter or wheelchair people don’t understand why I would need to use these.

I have in the past had family members that don’t get the fact that I am in pain every day and that is all I have ever known. I don’t tend to say much about it because well quite frankly talking about it bores me, so if it bores me what does it do for the other people? I am quite private which seems weird when I write a blog every week. There are very few people I am 100% honest with when I talk about how I am feeling at any given time. I learned from an early age that complaining about pain meant you weren’t believed or were accused of being a hypochondriac and that was by people who should have known better as their job was to nurture and protect me. Plus as I grew up I made the mistake of being honest with people when I was in pain and it was used against me and I was told I was draining to be around. I know now that the woman I was dealing with, who was also my boss was a sociopath and completely incapable of  empathy towards me and even her own family. At the time though in my 20’s her attitude was very damaging and stopped me taking care of myself when I was quite seriously ill for fear of being judged by her. When working in a close environment as I was and at her mercy, I was completely paralysed with fear. These days I don’t put up with that kind of treatment but it has taken me a long time to get to this point.

Leaving work was hugely damaging for my mental health, even though the previous two years working had been extremely damaging also, when I was with a team that refused to acknowledge my physical limitations and I was treated like a burden. My card had been marked, my face no longer fitted and the senior team decided that I was going to be worked out. I desperately hung on making myself sicker and weaker until I collapsed and there was nothing left in the tank. I was admitted to hospital and slept for 48 hours solid, only waking for the bathroom and something to eat. I was burnt out by it all, physically and mentally destroyed, it took me a very long time to claw my way back and realise that despite not working I was contributing to society in my own way.

This is why sewing, machine embroidery, crochet have all become so important to me. They have been an outlet for my creativity that had been stifled for so long after being led to believe I was academic and not creative. I had no confidence at all when it came to being creative. I taught myself how to sew on my sewing machine, my embroidery machine and I then two years later taught myself to crochet. Due to being pretty much housebound and obviously numerous lock downs with Covid 19, Youtube, magazines and books have been my teachers. I do find I am a visual learner however many of these videos assume a level of experience I don’t possess. So when it came to sewing I threw away the rule book, warp and weft meant absolutely nothing to me and nor did cutting fabric on the bias. Mostly I have got away with throwing away the rule book. I did the same with leaning how to use an embroidery machine, I embroidered designs on fabric that the book and many fellow embroiderers would have said wasn’t going to cope with a dense design. I taught myself ways of getting the fabric to behave the way I wanted and have shared what I have learned with newbies. I make mistakes, of course I do. The number of times I have managed to catch a fabric underneath the embroidery hoop and rendered what I have just spent an hour on useless. I have many towels with half designs on where I failed to secure it properly in the hoop and the design has drifted from the outline. I like perfection when I embroider and sew and it is hard for me to accept anything less. Even though I know perfection doesn’t exist.

My creative outlet hasn’t just filled a void in the respect that it has given me something to do, it also challenges me and demands that I find solutions to problems. It uses my brain in a way that I haven’t done since I stopped working, which is both exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. So it was weird this year when suddenly I became anxious about using my embroidery machine and my ability to sew. It happened out of the blue, suddenly and unexpectedly I was too frightened to sew. Something I have adored since I started back in 2017. It meant projects were started and left semi completed for months at a time. My sewing area suddenly fell silent and gathered dust. I wanted to sew I really did but I couldn’t focus long enough to do it or feel confident enough to. 

This year has been a tumultuous year with Jay’s father passing away, me making a drastic change so that I walked away from those who were causing me harm and stifling my personal growth. There are also countless other things going on and I think the fear of sewing / embroidery was just a symptom of the mental anguish I was in. Eventually it got to the point where I had to use my machines as I needed to make a gift for a friend and I also needed to replace a wall hanging that I had managed to dye pink and nothing could be done to rescue it. In the end I just had to put my big girl pants on and take the plunge. I pushed myself well and truly outside my comfort zone, tackling projects I had always put off due to my lack of skill. I proved to myself I could do it and needed to stop listening to the negative voices in my head that had held me back my whole life.

I am rather thrilled with what I have created, it is still a work in progress and there are still days I have to force myself to get the courage to use my machines. Like the book says ” I feel the fear and do it anyway”.

All the fabric apart from the balck background fabric is Liberty. The patterns I got from http://www.womabtquilts.com – spinning compass points ( the central design) and the Flying Geese ( the triangles) are from http://www.forestquilting.com. Both patterns were free and just needed to be printed off. It is a technique called foundation paper piecing a technique which I have done only a around 3 times before attempting this piece and now I am completely converted to it. The reverse of my wall hanging looked like this,

I had great fun removing the papers although it did make a bit of a mess! 

Dembe was very curious

As I said it is still a work in progress and if I am well enough over the next few days I will be attempting to finish it.

My anxiety / confidence will always be an issue, I know now that sometimes you do have to fake it until you make it, pushing yourself to do the stuff you don’t feel comfortable with as by running away from it makes it a much larger issue.

Stress, migraines and other sh*t!

/ RachelMorrisMcGeethemyastheniakid / Leave a comment

I have had a good few days over the last week with no headaches turning into migraines until this morning. Every night though I still wake up and have to change my pillows several time to make my neck and back of my head comfortable. More often than not I end up sleeping without any pillows. Something I haven’t done since I was 18-19 when I had neck issues then. The problem is with being that flat I then quite often wake up with back pain between my shoulder blades. If I prop myself up I end up with back pain in my lower back. If I could just find the one sleeping position that allowed me to sleep through the night without any pain waking me up that would be fantastic.

I can’t really complain though after the years of insomnia I suffered from around 2008 until 2016 when I was given Melatonin. Back in the bad old days I would only sleep between 2 -4 hours a night for two nights then on the 3rd night get no sleep at all. On the 4th night I would sleep 12 hours and then feel absolutely terrible, almost like I was drunk without the fun part. I did absolutely everything I could to get to sleep, lavender sprays, lavender sachets in my pillows, not using the TV or phone in my room, all without any success. This cycle of so little sleep had a very bad effect on my mental health and my pain levels. Everything felt heightened, my pain could be off the scale frequently and my emotions were all over the place.

This 4 day sleep cycle would just repeat over and over. I would occasionally get six hours sleep which would be a treat. The most frustrating times were when I would drop off to sleep and then two hours later wake up and that would be it for the night. I existed on cigarettes and mugs of tea. Usually one of the dogs would keep me company and they would swap over so that they all did a few hours each. Even now if I get up in the night I am accompanied by Dembe. He will either sleep right beside me, like he is doing now as I write this blog post or he will sleep on the sofa opposite to the one I am on, so he can watch my every move.

Dembe the Labrador is curled up on the sofa, the MG Kids leg is in frame along with her Chromebook, which is open on her lap.

I cleared this morning’ migraine quite quickly with a dose of Sumatriptan. However due to the stormy weather ( we have a weather alert for heavy rain and thunderstorms until this evening ) the top of my head feel’s like it is in a vice and being squeezed so hard my eyes feel like they are going to pop from the sockets. For as long as I can remember I have had headaches when the weather is stormy. I feel a bit cheated though as friends over an hour away have had massive thunder storms. Mr Myasthenia Kid’s mum rang us to check we were ok as where she lives they have had torrential rain and copious amounts of lightening. We have had a few showers and currently the sun is shining. It is very humid so I haven’t bothered sorting out my hair. It will stay straight for 30 seconds and then frizz. There is no point wasting any energy on it.

This will sound completely bonkers but I am quite a private person, despite the blog and talking about all manner of things. There are things I keep private because they involve other people or because I just don’t want the sympathy vote. Sometimes I am still processing stuff in my head and just don’t have the energy to deal with the questions that writing about an issue will cause. Things are really stressful here at the moment, we never seem to get a minute to catch our breath. But we keep going like everyone else does because the world doesn’t stop just because you are having a shit time.

There are several issues going on but the one that is worrying me most at the moment is Dembe ( and this was probably the source of the migraine this morning). On and off for a few months poor Dems has had an intermittent limp. Not an obvious one, one that unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn’t know it was happening. We had him at the vet’s last month to be checked out and the vet couldn’t observe it in him, isn’t that always the way. He was put on some medication a it was hoped that perhaps it was a soft tissue injury that needed some rest and some anti inflammatory medication would help. Within a few days he was doing so much better and no more limping. As a precaution we cut his walks with the dog walkers right down to the bare minimum, ensured he didn’t do anything too physical. Sadly on last Thursday the limp came back, I still had pain medication so I gave that to him. The limp settled and then on Monday was back again.

I rang the vets on Monday evening and got Dembe booked in for an appointment the following day. Mr Myasthenia Kid took him to the appointment as they only allow one of you into the building at the moment due to Covid. This time the vet could see the limp and she gave Dembe a full check over. Since this limp started there has been no swelling, no heat coming off any of the joints in his leg and for the majority of the time his limp is very subtle. You actually have to watch his head as he is walking towards you, every few paces his head bobs down, that’s how subtle it is. It is so intermittent that we and his dog walkers have been unable to catch it on video. So the next step is x-rays of both his front legs. The vet has checked his back legs and his hips are sound. Hip Dysplasia is a massive issue within the Labrador breed and we ensured both his mum and dad had low hip and elbow scores. We also stuck to the rules about not allowing stairs until he was old enough and also we stuck to the exercise rule of 5 minutes exercise per month old. However sadly Labrador’s are also prone to elbow Dysplasia and no matter all the precautions you take with your pups sometimes shit happens and this could be one of those times. I am not too concerned as he is insured, so they will pick up the tab. It is the fact that he maybe in pain, that he has to go to the vets and stay there when he has only ever been left for 30 minutes with someone else in his life since he was 8 weeks old ( other than his dog walks).

Those of you who have followed my blogs will know about our first dog Travis who passed away shortly before his 3rd birthday. As a teenager we also lost a family dog when she went into be spayed as she was allergic to the anaesthetic a situation that was just tragic. For some reason with Dembe I have always wrapped him in cotton wool and my fear about him having to be sedated for the x-rays really has me on edge. Plus the fact that he is coming up for his third birthday has me freaked out. I know he isn’t sick like Travis was but I am just paranoid about it. If you want to read more about the dogs we have had please use these links https://themyastheniakid.com/2014/10/30/the-dogs-in-my-life-part-one/ and https://themyastheniakid.com/2015/08/06/the-dogs-in-my-life-part-two/ . I need to write part three to cover Willow, Frankie and Mollies passing within 55 weeks of each other but even though it is several years on it is still just too raw.

I was much more chilled with the other dogs, than I am with Dembe. I have gone back to being like a brand new dog owner and going to the vet about everything! I did feel when we brought Dembe home I had completely lost my confidence and I was always terrified I was going to hurt him ( accidentally obviously).

So until the X-rays come back from the orthopedic specialist we will be none the wiser as to whether he has Elbow Dysplasia or a soft tissue injury or anything in between. If it is Elbow Dysplasia depending on how bad the joint is the treatment could be conservative, treating it when it flares up, reducing his weight a little etc or it could mean an elbow replacement. The thought of which terrifies me as the recovery period is 12 weeks of crate rest which he will go bonkers, quickly followed by myself and probably Jay. So for the moment all professional dog walks have been cancelled. He is allowed 25 minutes off the lead a day and then small lead walks as he point blank refuses to go to the toilet in the garden. He has had his pain medication increased and hopefully that is helping him. The vet constantly reassured my husband that she felt whatever the issue was it has been caught early so the damage shouldn’t be too great.

Dembe is fine in himself, loving, affectionate, eating and drinking fine. He keeps wanting to zoomies in the house so I am having to think up games we can play that doesn’t involve too much food and too much movement! He is pretty chilled most of the time and is quite happy to snooze. I just thank our lucky stars that he is no longer a puppy as he would be manic with the need to burn off energy.

So the migraine this morning was not unexpected as that seems to be my default setting when stressed and at least they have reduced in number since my whinge post.