I have had a growing sense of annoyance over the past few weeks with myself over stupid little things that I just couldn’t quite make sense of. At first I was putting it down to this stupid memory of mine, I kept doing silly things like bring pots of yoghurt through here without a spoon to eat it with, then having to make an unnecessary trip back across the hallway to fetch a spoon. It wasn’t until yesterday that I suddenly put my finger on what I now think is going on and it was actually as most of these things, the words came out of my mouth and a bright light was turned on. I had said to Adam that I was going to be in a few minutes, something I normally remind him of just in case he wants to get something out from the bedroom before I barricade myself into the world of sleep He stood up and announced that he was going for a shower so I set about closing down my PC, when suddenly my brain picked up on what he had said so I stood up and headed to the bathroom as I needed the loo before I went to bed. He was already in the bathroom so I shouted to see if he was actually in the shower or not, a rather soapy head appeared around the door, I had said if he was in the shower that I would wait, but that didn’t stop him checking. When he was clear of soap and actually ready to speak to me properly, I made my apology for interrupting him and found myself explaining what I had been puzzling over, that for some reason my mind isn’t “processing the sequencing of life”. There it was, the reason, I am failing to hold onto or even acknowledge that everything has steps to it, skip one and the rest fall apart.

Usually, when Adam says he is going for his shower what he is really saying is, do I need to go to the loo before he moves into the bathroom for the next twenty minutes and I knew that was what he was asking, but I failed to hold onto the bit about before he was in his shower, nor did the fact that the bathroom door was already shut manage to jog it. The second I said the “sequencing” loads of other annoying little events started to run around in my mind and each of them also suddenly had the same bright light attached itself to each of them. The most obvious and the most irritating as I have done it over and over again in the past few weeks centres around the dishwasher. I have lost count how many items that I have put in there, just to have to take them out again as the fact that the dishwasher was already filled with clean dishes, the process of the clean dishes requiring to be removed before more dirty ones being added, seems to mean nothing to me at all. It seems as though something in my head has slipped and the natural sequencing of events and how things have to happen to just actually work, I have never found the face cream that is put on before you actually cleanse your face, I believe it usually follows. Life is becoming more and more of a muddle that means I spend time and effort having to undo and redo even the simplest of tasks. I have been telling myself that it was either a lack of concentration or memory gaps that kept slapping themselves in my way, then laughed as I fell into every gap that they could engineer. There have been so many times in the course of this illness that it has felt like some kind of huge conspiracy that has been designed just to make my life difficult, this just appears to be yet another of them.

Adam noticed last night that I was quiet, despite having told him all this earlier, I couldn’t help being preoccupied with it. It is always like that, you find something that suddenly makes sense out of others that were lying around waiting to be assigned and suddenly all you can think about is that one subject. The problem with thinking is it has a habit of running away with you, you start out thinking about the situation that has just been exposed, then suddenly you are unrolling it ahead of you into the future and coming up with the oddest and often frightening possibilities, 99.9% of which have absolutely no chance of ever coming to fruition. Once your brain has started on that route, it really is hard to stop it, my silence was a combination of being in pain and a brain that has far too much imagination still alive and able to play nasty tricks on me. I knew fine well that he was really asking about my pain as he was offering to assist in any way, but life has shown me that I alone have just a slight chance of dealing with it, anyone else has absolutely no chance. Things are no easier, over the last week although I have tried not to write about my pain every day, that doesn’t mean that it has improved, it hasn’t. Nothing seems to change in that respect it is constant and it is something that I am gradually adjusting to, adjusting does have its bad side, as getting used to more pain can’t have a good outcome in any way that I can think of. It has though made me sure that I need to look back in my posts since December and write up something for the hospital doctors to read about the issues I have been having with my guts and the knock on effects. I am adjusting just as I have always done along the entire journey from health to today, the problem of adjusting is that when someone asks you how you are, well you answer fine as fine on the new scale is exactly what it is, the old scale is soon forgotten. In many ways, it is one of the major dangers of illness that our descriptions to those that matter sound far too similar to the ones they heard before, not because we are the same but our ability to adjust to our worsened state means we describe it in exactly the same way.

Doctors use a scale on which they measure our pain, a year ago I would have said my pain was probably around an 8, now I would say that my pain is around an 8, but there is no similarity in any way. On my new scale, I would have to reduce the previous pain number down to a 6, as I didn’t realise a year ago that my body could actually come up with so much pain without my first having had some kind of an accident or major trauma. Without it written down and without being able to hand them something that truly shows the extent of the pain and the positions it appears and most importantly the impact it has on me and my life, I will come out of there no further on than I am right at this second and all I would do, is to keep adjusting and putting up with what in reality is at times almost unbearable.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 23/03/13 – The end of the day (prt. 1) > http://bit.ly/15DCsks

There are things that unless you can actually connect your brains, that are so hard to put into words and try as you might to explain or describe, remain stubbornly impossible to understand. The sharing of sensations, both physical and mental are a constant stumbling point for me, I can’t be 100% sure that what and the way I have written something has conveyed……….