I am totally behind with everything this week, nothing to do with my health and everything to do with the TV! For a history lover and one who also is still learning about WW2, there is so much to watch at the minute, how am I supposed to choose between two things I totally love, reality and the past. I know even Adam can’t understand why I watch so many programs which seem to be about the same thing, well it’s easy, yes they many all be about, say DDay, as they are today, but everyone will have stories or people who weren’t in the others, so everyone has something new to add to my bank of knowledge.

I do know without a doubt that I am also pushing myself again, beyond what I should be doing, I have also been struggling a bit with tiredness over the last few day, I know also that it is totally my own fault. Being distracted and falling behind with what I want done daily online, means that I am hitting points every day that I am putting myself under stress just to catch up and get back on track. I found myself actually going round in circles and starting panic yesterday that I wasn’t going to be able to finish everything before Adam came home, that is a total recipe for disaster. I don’t need telling, yes I do know, stress is a totally nightmare and something to be avoided at all costs, but at times like now when I feel I am being drawn by so many things that I enjoy, it does become unavoidable. I suppose that being stressed by enjoyment is something not many people suffer from, that is one of the things that is a fact of life, you will always be stressed by something. Once the biggie, work, the major stress causer in everyone’s life has gone, somehow you discover new things to replace it, almost as though we can’t live without it, that we actually go out of our way to invent it.

I try every now and then to sort of assess my life as it is at that moment, to look for the things that stress me and to see if there are any changes I can make to reduce any of the stresses that are affecting me. It used to be easy, I used to be able to make lists and lists of stress points, but now, well there really is little left that I can put on that list that I could change or stop doing, as there is so little left that I do. My life is now at that point that if I remove anything else, I will be doing the one thing I have promised myself that I won’t do until that is no choice left, just sitting watching TV all day long. I never thought that my life would exist of almost nothing, but I would be happy to carry on with it just as it is. I know without a doubt that if I had been plucked out of my life say 10 years ago and dropped into today, I wouldn’t have been able to just stop everything and be happy only online, or asleep. There is no way I would have been able to cope with being so inactive and so silent for an entire day, far less every day. Yet the gradual downward slope that has brought me to today has somehow made it settle in my mind as though nothing has changed, my life has continued and I am still here.

I have heard it said “that in time anyone can get used to anything”, I would say without a doubt that it is far truer than it ever sounded. Humans do adapt, we do settle into our role in life and we get on with it, never even able to really see the changes until the change is complete. We adjust to it and accept it, just as we do the passing days and years. I remember when I was about 12 or 13 that I spent all most an entire day, just lying in the long grass by the river Don, looking up into the tree tops. I lay there watching as birds appeared, landed for a while and disappeared again, watching the leaves move in the light breeze and the glimpses of clouds and sky as they passed far above it. I was trying for some reason to put myself in the place of each thing I saw, trying hard to imagine just how a tree felt, what it would think if it did, and the same of the birds, the leave, the grass around me and even the clouds. I questioned and wondered if they too looked at me and thought what would it be like to be human, but they all seemed content as they were. I was so desperate to grow up, to be an Adult, just so I could get away from my life as it was, but it was all so far away that I felt I would never get there, I wanted to be anything else other than a teenage girl. At that point in time, I thought I was living in hell and that anything, even being a tree might be better. I think it would be fair to say that it was the first time I realised that what was happening at that moment wasn’t important, it was the entirety of life, from start to end that really mattered. I remember it so clearly because it was that day that I decided to not fight back any longer to let life happen and as long as I lived through it, well I would have won.

I never changed that thought, that conclusion and the fact I am here at all is probably thanks to the 13-year-old me who lay in some grass and wondered about life. I have said before that I drifted through life, I found myself somewhere and I made the most of it until it ended and I would drift again until the next phase arrived and I went along with that too. I have even done the same with my health, I have constantly accepted each change, adapted to it, drifted on until the next change arrives. That ability to accept, that I spent my life training myself to do, has brought me this far and it has made all those changes easier. I have come across so many people in my life who refused to accept anything, who were always angry at something or other, who wanted to fight the very wind just because it up-setted their hair. People who the very word “accept” was and alien concept and a word they refused to ever use, but what I have also seen is that none of them seem to enjoy their lives, they were too busy fighting everything and everyone. I honestly think that if any of them were to develop a chronic condition, that they would be the ones who would struggle, who would stress themselves out and would be unable to say, this is my life and I love it.

There will always be times when I will put myself in a position where I am stressed, but even an accepter get stressed when life pulls them temporarily in two directions at once. Normal service will be resumed soon, the TV stations will stop giving me a list of things that I feel I will never catch up with and life will be quiet again, I will soon be sat here again, contented by life and by living it.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 06/06/12 – Wheelchair? Or just a crutch 

Less than an hour ago I had a phone call from ‘Westmark’, they are part of the ‘Glasgow Southern General Hospital’, the call was to tell me that I had an appointment at ‘Westmark’ on Monday morning for a review of my wheelchair. My first thought was interesting, have they stopped sending letters or reading their notes? I haven’t been for a review since I got my chair so why now? As is normal the guy on the phone acted as though I firstly should have known and second he was just checking…..