All I have done since I woke up is to cough. Yesterday evening even Adam broached the subject and asked if I thought it was getting worse again, in other words, he thinks it is. I had to be honest and tell him that I thought that it might be but I wasn’t sure if it was bad enough to require a call to the Doctor or if it was just to be expected. What I do know is that it is now centered on my left lung as the back and lower edge of that lung complains about every breath I take, but compare it to two weeks ago and I am as fit as a fiddle. I woke last night just before midnight coughing madly and Adam appeared once again with a measure of cough mixture that did the trick. Sleeping solidly from then until the alarm sounded was wonderful. I honestly don’t think I have had a full nights sleep since this whole thing began, which doesn’t make the rest of my life any easier. Today seems to be just like yesterday. At first I was coughing and finding nothing but the desire to cough again and again. Eventually, there was a small amount of the thick nasty gunk, then the water returned and it has been nothing but thin watery liquid ever since. Once again I can’t hear any crackle or wheeze, I just feel it in an intake of air and there it is suddenly drowning me before going quiet for another few minutes.

I have once again been doing something that in the last few years I have become an expert at, I have been putting things off. I now find myself with a list of things that I have no other choice but to do today. Top of that list is to have a shower. When I went for my nap yesterday, I fully intended to have my shower when I woke. The problem was that when I did wake, all I could smell was bleach. Adam had been going mad with it in the bathroom and even in the hallway I could feel the fumes cutting into my lungs, my shower wasn’t going to happen. I have shuffled it forwards four times now and, to be honest, I feel disgusting and the fact that the shopping will be here this afternoon, is the icing on the cake, I can’t let anyone see me looking like this. I also have to make two phone calls, first to the doctors as I have to be sure that the new calcium tablets are on the list of repeat medications. Then I have to phone the chemist to add them on to their list of drugs to order for me. I also need to have a word with them about my Amitriptyline. I have been taking it for years and although the brands change all the time, it has always tasted just like they all do. When my meds arrived last there was a different brand and I thought nothing of it until I had to take it. The only way I can describe it is to say that it tastes like soap. I am usually really good at taking anything, no matter how horrid the flavour, but this one has me stumped. It has got to the point that I now actually dread having to swallow the stuff. I find myself every night sitting on my perching stool in the kitchen just looking at the little cup with this stuff glaring back at me and wanting to do anything, other than have to swallow it. I have never asked a chemist to not send a certain brand of a drug before, so I don’t even know if they will be happy to change it back or not, but I have to try.

I can’t be sure what started it, or even when, but I have for some reason recently been plagued by heartburn. I don’t mean the normal stuff that we all know, no this is turbocharged. To me, heartburn was never more than a discomfort in the area of my sternum and a burning sensation in the back of my throat. I don’t remember it lasting more than maybe half an hour and then nothing for months. This is like someone has kicked me in the chest and the pain starts in line with my stomach and goes right around to my sides. I can feel it right up to my armpits and the only reason I know it’s heartburn is as within a minute or so, the normal heartburn symptoms appear and I have to drink something so that it doesn’t burn its way through my throat. I have lost count how many bouts I have had, but strangely I have found that even a few mouthfuls of coke have the desired effect on my throat, the rest of me takes time. I have never had heartburn that wakes me up in the middle of the night before, or appears even before I have had a chance to eat something in the morning. To me, this is really odd and the only thing that makes any sense is that when my diaphragm spasms are now tight enough to actually crush my stomach and forcing the bile upwards. I have for years now been on tablets that are there to protect my stomach from all the drugs that I take. I actually can’t remember having heartburn at all in all that time, then this started. I got Adam to buy me some suckable tablets that I have taken in the past, in the past they were wonderful, now they don’t seem to be doing much at all beyond what I can do just by drinking something.

I have been working on what my new routine should look like. The biggest change is that I have built into it rest points, times when I simply stop doing whatever I am and go and do something else. For example, I used to have my breakfast while I sat here working through my online stuff. Now, I stop. I am taking my tablet, eating breakfast as a focused on meal rather than something that is happening in the background and once finished, I sit and go through what I want to add into my schedule for recording on the TV. I have allowed for short breaks like that throughout the morning. My work schedule is now constructed in such a way, that once I have finished my blog, and the tweets about it, the rest can be done whenever I want throughout the rest of the day. I am hoping that by just breaking the ridged structure down and stopping from time to time, that I will not wear myself out quite so quickly or quite so totally. Having spent a couple of weeks being forced out of my old routine may just have been the best thing that could have happened. Even what I put out on Twitter has changed, not in content, but in quantity. I no longer have this tight list that I stuck to daily, now if I don’t feel like doing this or that, well I don’t.

All that might sound really trivial and as though it is something anyone would do when they don’t have the health of a flee, but to me it is really hard just now. I have it so well ingrained into me that life has to be a productive venture or it isn’t worth anything, that being able to stop and do nothing of worth, is hard. I know without a doubt that I have been pushing myself too hard, but it is incredibly difficult to fight against everything you have ever lived by. Just stopping for a few minutes is hard enough, bearing in mind that I don’t remember ever taking a lunch break in any job I have ever done, yes ciggy breaks, but eating, well that could be done when the work was finished. When you are having to literally reprogram your soul, it’s hard. This new freedom to do what I want is odd, as I can’t find things at the moment other than games to fill the time. Years ago I would have sat and done some kind of handicraft, but with my poor eyesight and crap dexterity, well embroidery, knitting and all the rest of them, just isn’t possible. I might have eventually accepted that I am not up to being superwomen any longer, but accepting that I can even be a shadow of her, well it is both hard and it hurts.

For me, it doesn’t matter what my health throws at me physically, how much pain, discomfort, fatigue and all the other things it finds to play with, it is the mental attitude changes that I find the hardest. It is beginning to feel as though those changes are having to be made more often than in the past. I knew this time would come, the point when want and ability were two totally different things and that want would be the one to suffer. Even though I knew it would happen, it doesn’t make it any easier to actually accept.

Read my blog from 2 years ago today – 29/06/13 – Thoughts

Yesterday and so far this morning have been filled with pain in my legs, it is one of those shift about and twist days, but with little real relief. I sometimes wonder how I have managed to gain wait as although I would class myself clearly as immobile I rarely ever actually manage to sit still for long. I know that I frequently joke about switching them for…..