I woke this morning with the really odd and somewhat disgusting trail of semi-solid gel drips in a line from the ‘thing’ in my mouth that had formed a scab, to the back of my mouth where the other ‘thing’ is. When the scab fell off I thought that the hole it left would just heal over slowly building the layers until it was flush with the rest of my hard palate. It seemed to be doing just that, yesterday morning though I began to wonder as when I touched the tip of my tongue to it, it felt sort of spongy, as thought it was filled with fluid, it was and it burst when I was eating lunch again, the hole was exactly the same as it was a couple of days ago. I had taken a look at it just before lunch and I could actually see that it wasn’t right, so when I found the hole, it all made sense. Because I sleep the whole night on my back, I guess it had been weeping rather than scab forming but the liquid was turning slowly solid and that was what I found. The hole itself is once again feeling as though it is filling and healing, but that was what happened when the scab left, so I’m not holding my breath. It’s now over two weeks that they have been there, if they are cankers, which I can’t see how they can be, as I have never had them before and all the articles say you have to have had them by your mid-twenties, which I hadn’t, to have them later in life. They are also not meant to appear on your hard palate, the first place I found one, but if they are, they take three weeks to heal, so I will see what happens over the next week and if still here a week from today, well I will call the doctor on the following Monday.
My body really does seem to have an art of doing all the things it shouldn’t, I have lost track of the number of things that I read that say something or other shouldn’t be happening either because of my age, or because I haven’t had some other illness that are meant to be the trigger. To be honest, part of me now reads everything with a huge dose of scepticism, including and especially when it comes to all the medical sites and books. I will just correct that slightly, I don’t have a huge stack of medical books, I used to have two when the kids were little, simply because not living anywhere near our families, I didn’t have the granny to take them to, just to check if it was a rash to worry about or not. I was at that time also in the beginnings of my MS, when the doctors failed me over and over, I did turn to the books, now I don’t remember what I found in them, but I do remember scaring myself to death several times, convinced that I was going to keel over any second and die. These days I only use a couple of medical sites online, going off piste when they fail to come up with the detail I am looking for, but to anyone who want to use them, correction as I know without a doubt that if you are reading this, you use them, make sure when you do, to do so with care as 99% of what you read, will have zero to do with whatever is happening to you that made you go there in the first place.
I have had to for my entire life put my age on the shelf, everything from puberty onwards seemed to happen when it shouldn’t. I was 8 by the way when my mother had to take to buy my first bra and everything else seemed to follow closely behind, my body has done and gone through everything else at full speed. These days although I am just 53, I feel so much older and at times I don’t know if it is because of my mad body or my mad illness. Chronic illness makes you old before your time, like it or not, all those things you thought wouldn’t happen until you were old, really old sudden start happening when you are too young to even consider them possible. There is a grieving process that belongs with finding out that you are ill and that your health means that things will never be the same again. I only realised recently that one of the things you are also grieving for are all the years you will loose, not of the end of you life, but out of the middle of it. I was 40 when I received my diagnosis, Adam and I had been married for a couple of years and we were in the middle of decorating and remodelling our home and we were so happy that life looked as though it could be nothing but roses all the way into the future. I in the next 2 or 3 years, aged physically by over 30 years, I was in a wheelchair when I was just 44, with no energy, no physical life to me and suddenly in just a handful of years equivalent physically to those well past retirement. Take the word illness out of the equation and I am equal to someone in their late 70’s or even 80’s. I lost my health and I tried so hard to live as the person I should have been ageing in a normal fashion, without understanding fully that losing your health means losing a huge chunk of your life, it is a time machine that jumps you forward and forward, stealing everything that should have been in between. I’m not sure why I never looked at it that way before, but I didn’t, I only saw and thought about the health issues, I had it in my head that I would continue as I was just in more and more pain and less and less mobility and mental agility. I saw it as losing years of the end of my life, not as losing years in the middle of it, when in truth that is what happens. I am 53 right now, but I don’t know what it is like to be someone in their 50’s, regardless what it says on my birth certificate, I only know what it is like to be in my 70’s or possibly slightly older.
Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 30/08/12 – Learning into the Future
Two Rooms Plus Utilities 