Success! Well, let’s say an improvement. Last night, I split up taking all my different inhalers by an hour and instead of my heart going into hyper mode, it stayed reasonably normal. My resting rate actually remained between 97 and 100, something that I am not going to worry myself about. Especially after hearing from a couple of very helpful people who convinced me that it wasn’t to be worried about. I am not convinced that I actually need to allow a whole hour between the meds either, but I do think keeping them apart by a buffer zone is a good idea. I think that lungs are actually sensitive organs and it’s really too much to expect them to deal with all of them at the same time when they aren’t used to them. I do intend to start bringing them slowly together until I find if I can or can’t cope. I really don’t want the entirety of my day to be spent thinking about the next drug to take and when to do it. There is also a danger of course that without Adam here, that I will simply forget, as I have done millions of times in the past.

I had just lain down on the bed yesterday afternoon when the phone rang. For some reason that I can’t explain, I hadn’t put my earplugs in before lying down. Normally it is the first thing I do on sitting on the side of the bed, but yesterday, I just lay down not even in my normal position, I had my feet flat on the mattress and my legs crossed, a position I was never going to go to sleep in. No one calls during the day, other than Adam and Jake. I had heard from Jake twice this week already and Adam had spoken to me just after 1 pm, so I was surprised it was ringing at all. To my greater surprise, it was my daughter, Teressa. She should have been at work so that alone meant I was ready for bad news of some sort, I was both right and wrong at the same time. She and a couple of colleagues had been going over to an outsourcing unit that does some work for Saga and they were going to check on progress with their work when they crashed on the motorway. Teressa doesn’t drive and was lucky to be in the back of the car wearing her seat belt. She had been totally unhurt other than taking a bang on the head. I was surprised that she wasn’t in the hospital, but she had been checked over by the paramedics and they told her to go home and not go to sleep for the next six hours. It was her driver who had been at fault, he had been going to fast and was impatient and had tried to undertake the car ahead. The other driver clearly didn’t see them illegally maneuvering behind them and they picked the same moment to change to the middle lane. They hit that car along with the central barrier and two other cars before landing up in a ditch. The car was a total right off and no one knows where the missing wheel is. All three of them walked away unscathed.

Once home and having convinced, almost, her husband that she was fine she wanted to speak to her Mum. It’s odd how we all want to talk to our parents when things go wrong. No matter how much my Mum destroyed my life, she is still my Mum and I used to phone her whenever I needed that comfort that no other person could. Teressa may be in her thirties now, but she’s still my midget and it’s so nice to know that she still feels the bond that I do. You would think that after us spending most of her lifetime on different continents, that having her here in the UK would make life so different, but she is still too far away to give a cuddle to when it’s needed. Oddly, knowing that she is just in London is one of the things that made my being housebound harder. When she was on the other side of the world, unless she came to the UK there was no way we could just drop in for lunch. So OK, I wouldn’t probably have ever travelled all the way to London just for lunch, but you get the idea. She is close now, not so far away that contact is impossible and I still can’t get to her, no matter how much she might need me. I had to even watch her getting married by webcam, despite the fact that they were less than 30 miles from here.

I have grown so used to being housebound. To all the things that can’t be done and all the things that I have to miss out on. I can say with total honesty that there isn’t a single person out there who I have no contact with any longer, that I miss. Even those people who I thought were going to be my friends for the rest of my life, yet vanished because I became ill. Even when you are housebound, you have to accept that the world moves on and to most of them I am sure that I am nothing more than fleeting memory every now and then, as they are to me. Not being able to just pack a bag, jump on a train and go to London to visit my daughter, to see her home, the area that she lives in and the places she spends her time and happiness, hurts. It is one of the problems of modern life, families are scattered all over the world. As we age or become ill, we can’t expect them to return and move just to be near us, they have their own lives and they have to live them. Even the modern amazing systems we can use to stay in contact, can’t make up for that actual time spent together. I don’t care what anyone says, not the telephone or even skype comes close to actually sitting with a real live human face to face. I am lucky, I have Adam, so I have the love, the company and care that we all need, but for those who don’t have a loving partner who has stood by them, it must be a million times harder.

There has over the years that I have been housebound, repeated concern shown for the fact that in a normal week I don’t see anyone other than Adam. The amount of able bodied people who can’t accept that I don’t need anyone else, that I am truly happy in the life that I have has amazed me. I fully admit that if it hadn’t been for my blog and all the people I have come across online, it might be very different. I truly believe that as long as you are busy and happy doing the things that keep you busy, that even when housebound, you only need that one special person. That doesn’t mean I don’t miss things or some people, I just admitted that I do, but you have to accept the limitations life has brought you and live within it. I do understand the concerns of other, of course, I do. If I had been asked 20 years ago could I be happy being housebound, the answer would have been a total no. None of us knows what we are capable of until we are there and even the things we were once scared of, can actually turn out to be the total opposite.

Please read my blog from two years ago – 12/09/2013 – Where is the detail and description

Yesterday and today so far have been filled with discomfort that just won’t go away, I have to say I am getting rather fed up with not being able to just sit without this solid hands with band right around my body. If you place you little finger on your lower rib, keeping your fingers…….