Don’t ever forget

Posted on March 31, 2016 by livinginalimitedword

It’s official, I hate lists! What is the point, of all the endless lists, that I am finding not only on medical sites and in chronic illness blogs these days? Lists tell us nothing. If you want proof, well just take a look at the list of symptoms that apparently make up your condition, is that how you feel? Is that your truth, your experience? If that’s not enough, then have a look and see how many other conditions share those symptoms. Do it for just half an hour and see how many other conditions there are, that you might have been diagnosed with, if you didn’t have the detail. Have I made my point? On its own, a list is a blank collection of words, words that don’t actually inform in any way, without a fuller description and details, which after all, are the important bits. To a certain extent, I do forgive the medics, they, after all, are supposed to be logical thinking machines, so lists are forgivable. We the bloggers of this world, mainly, aren’t doctors, we’re everyday people, living, breathing creatures with emotions and feelings and so many, many wonderful details. Making all these continual lists about our health, is, like asking your partner to marry you, via a powerpoint presentation containing all the financial checks and balances of your future lives together. No one would do that, so please, ditch the lists.

Outside of giving birth to my children and falling in love with Adam, I can’t think of anything in my life that has been more emotional than my health. If you think about it, the question we are all asked the most throughout our lives is, “How are you?”. They’re asking “How do you feel”, and all feelings are emotions. You cannot separate your health from your emotions. Feeling sick, or feeling pain, isn’t just a sensation, it is highly emotional. I was emotional about my health before I even knew what it was. There was anger at my doctors for not listening, exasperation that I couldn’t get them to give me an answer and desperation, as I didn’t know who else to turn to, and so I could go on. Which might also be part of the reason, I have no desire to emulate their style. There is nothing about chronic illness that isn’t going to tear every emotion there is out of you, and that is in just the first week post diagnosis. Learning to deal with those emotions, is probably just as hard, as it is to learn to deal with the condition itself. In some ways, it is the perfect storm. Our bodies are being ripped to pieces, often by themselves, and our brains are exploding with grief, pain, disbelief, anger and all while we try to put on a stiff upper lip. Life goes on, we still have to work, to do all the things we were doing the day before, but now we have this cacophony of feelings all demanding to be dealt with, but we don’t have the time or the knowledge, of how to even start.

So many people seem to think that all that stops eventually, well it doesn’t. It changes, it ebbs and flows, but it never goes away. Fifteen years post diagnosis and I am still as emotional about the whole things as I was back then, yet, I’m not as many are, depressed. There are many reasons, why I believe I have been so lucky to not fall into that mire. The biggest, well that’s the fact that I went through depression many years ago. They’ed call it PTSD these days, but mine showed up as self-destructive depression. Six weeks in the hospital and three years of therapy got me through it, and taught me just how to deal with life. I now know that I was also dealing with the beginning of my PRMS, but no one knew that back then. Having been through depression, having lived it, breathed it and nearly died because of it, I understand that beast. Being emotional, having a damned good cry, getting a bit low at times, that isn’t depression, that’s life, in fact, that’s a good life. If you can do all those things and feel relief, then you’re not depressed.

Chronic illness isn’t all about the bad, there is a lot of good within it, you just have to look, but you will find it. Every time the course of our lives is changed, the things we do, what we learn, the people we meet and the places we go, are changed. If you have been ill for even just a year, without a doubt you will have met people you wouldn’t have met before. Those people will have changed you, some inspired you, some educated and some maybe just made you smile, but none would you have met if you hadn’t become ill. The biggest good for me without a doubt was my introduction to Twitter and to blogging. I wouldn’t have gone near either, if it hadn’t been I became housebound. It may have been a dramatic way to land up here, but our health is dramatic and vibrant and actually pretty amazing. Who knew that our bodies could do such things? No, I haven’t gone as far as celebrating the fact I became ill, but, I have found an incredible peace with my life, and I still believe we all can.

Embrace your emotions, all of them, as if there is anything that shows we are human, it is them, few animals show quite the range we do, so why try to turn your life into a list? If you must, make your list, but don’t post it anywhere, just use it as a framework, but please stop trying to be medical computers, remember how it feels to live and put those feelings into everything. Life is about passion and if chronic illness teaches us just one thing, it’s that there isn’t a second of our lives, that we don’t feel something.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 31/03/2014 – A safe environment for who?

This is going to feel like Sunday all day long, Adam is sat on the settee and I have the TV on programs that we would watch together on a Sunday, but it’s Monday. I am doomed for the rest of this week to be on the wrong day, just because Adam has taken a much needed day off work. His day with his family seems to have gone well, but as always he has little to say about it as well, what is there to say about a day spent sitting in someone else’s home talking & talking, I know what they are like when they get together. I have to say that conversation is something I now find difficult, it is as though my brain exists, just at the point someone want to talk to me. It happened yesterday…..

We all have to find it

Posted on March 30, 2016 by livinginalimitedword

Some days it’s hard to just wake up. My eyes open long enough to see the time and my body lets me know that it had a reason to wake me, but once my bladder is empty, well, sleep is the only thing on my mind. It’s eleven hours since I got into bed and all I want to do is to go right back there and return into oblivion. Sleep has been my sanctuary now for many years, almost as long as I have been ill. Even when I didn’t know the slightest thing about MS or Fibro, I knew I was ill, because sleep was my refuge from pain and a world I just couldn’t handle. When I was well, I hardly slept at all. I often tease myself, that this is the price I have to pay, this is the burnout for a life lead at full speed for too long. It’s less painful to think that way, than it is, to face the truth daily.

Every morning now is a battle, a struggle that can take me right through to the afternoon to complete. Being awake is a hard job. It’s easier just to ignore all feeling and to exist in a half world, to run on auto while my brain returns to where it wants to be. It’s amazing how well I now operate without a brain. Who thought that waking up could be such a process, yet I fear letting myself lie down again and allowing sleep to take me. I fear it in so many different ways, some that I am sure others understand, but some, well, some I don’t fully understand myself.

Clearly, if I went back to sleep, then none of this would get done, and there are so many who now rely on my daily words, to ease their days. I can’t let them all down, because I know how that feels and I don’t want others to feel that way, because of me. Then there are those who would panic, draw the wrong conclusion and start sending frantic tweets, questioning what has happened, just because I’m missing for a few more hours of sleep. I have used that one as an excuse now for the last couple of years, but it’s not really an excuse at all, it’s a tool that keeps pushing at me, one that makes me keep going, and one that I’m so glad that I have.

No matter how tired I feel, lying down again wouldn’t work for long, by that point in the morning, my medications are all but worn off. By that time, I have a line of little plastic cups waiting for me, each with their own little cocktail of medication, each just waiting to be swallowed. Without them, I might sleep again for a few minutes, then pain would break through and I would be up again. Take them first, taking them and heading back to bed, just wouldn’t work. To take them, I first need to eat, and once the tablets are done, then come the inhalers, and following that, I have to clean my teeth. Would you then be able to return to sleep? I think not, well neither could I, but it doesn’t mean that I’m awake, no I’m far from that, I’m just here.

I once thought that it was the meds that were making me feel that way, but my meds have hardly changed for years. Those that have changed, well the never line up with this growing need to sleep. How do you sleep eleven hours, then instantly want to sleep more? How do you spend your entire life, hovering just above that wonderous state of sleep? That’s how it often feels, like I am just that tiny step away from sleep, close my eyes, and I’d be gone. I know right now, as I do it multiple times every day, if I shut my eyes, I can feel my body drifting into nowhere. Without request or instigation on my part, the cells of my body swiftly slip into a relaxed disposition and I start to drift towards sleep.

So why don’t I just give in, after all, I don’t have a job or children to care for? My husband is at work all day, so would it really matter if I just gave in and slept? I could, I could give all this up, or just take a break, let everyone know I’m going to be offline for a couple of days and just sleep. Or I could just work things out, so it looks as though I am here, and sleep when my body says to, rather than when I eventually let it. But what then? Well, then, I would be out of routine, I would be like so many people with chronic illness who live in the twilight world. Sleep in the day, up all night, or possibly, sleeping through the majority of both, and I would feel as though I had totally given up on everything, not only that, but I know that is the route to depression, and that’s why I fight it.

If there is one thing that I believe is the core of surviving this life, it is self-pride, lose that, and you have lost everything. I am a creature who thrives on routine, productive routine and without it, I know that I would rapidly become nothing. I can’t stop the pain, the lesions, or the fatigue, but as long as I know that I still have a value, then I have a life. Physically, I am now incapable of doing or producing anything. I can’t even clean my home or cook a meal, but this, my writing, this I can do. If I give in to sleep, well I would whatever way you look at it, I would lose everything.

Slowly over the years, sleep has nibbled it’s way into every day. I feel it pushing and pushing, harder and harder, towards taking even more. I have this picture of a future where the world is twilight zone, where I wake to eat and shit, to say “Good morning” and “Goodnight”, then just more sleep. Between there and now, I have no idea of the timeline and that is my biggest fear, when will it happen? Will it be sudden or a continual slow build up? So I do the only thing I can, I fight. I force myself to be awake every day, regardless, of the pull my body has on me, I’m awake and I’m productive. It’s my way of winning the battle, my way of staying alive. We all have to have one thing that is our driving force, something that is within us, that we can’t let go of, that we need more than anything to do, and to do it every single day, without excuse. It doesn’t matter whether you are ill or healthy, if you don’t have it, you might as well curl up in your bed now, and just stay there, otherwise, what’s the point?

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 30/03/2014 – Being Mother

The end of March and for a Sunday, unusually I am on my own. Adam has just left to meet his sister then head out to together to spend Mothering Sunday with their Mum. It is an annual event and one of just a few days each year that Adam does spend time with his family. We have always had such different views about our birth families, in fact, we couldn’t be further apart on our ways of thinking about them if we actually sat down and tried to be. I find his closeness and need to be in constant contact somewhat alien to me, but I know that is because of my almost none contact situation I am in with my family. Growing up to be isolated as I was in my mid-teens left me permanently disconnected from them, for two years I didn’t even speak…..

One last time

Posted on March 29, 2016 by livinginalimitedword

At the minute, I feel as though all I am doing is complaining about one thing or another. Which honestly isn’t the normal me. It’s just at the minute my body has switched into hyper drive and takes great pleasure in confronting me daily with some issue or another. I honestly don’t know when I last had a day, where I can say my life has been normal. It has been a slow ratcheting up process and I know where it all started, as the base problem is with me every single day. The pain and discomfort in my abdomen was and still is the start point of every day. I haven’t been free of it now for over three years, but it was livable before, now it consumes my whole day. I am constantly shifting trying to find a way of shifting the pain areas or relieving the discomfort. The third batch of tablets that my GP prescribed have reduced the spasms dramatically, but the spasms are only part of the problem. It is the constant pressure and feeling as though one area or another is about to burst, that really gets to me. Once again last night, just before midnight I woke ready to throw up, but through a process of relaxation and breathing, I managed not to. I don’t know what it is about that point of the night, but every time I have thrown up, or been close to it, has always been just before midnight, eight hours after I last ate. Luckily this morning, I went to the loo, so it has reduced the pressure slightly, as always, what I passed was normal and it’s transit painless.

It goes without saying, that when you have problems like that with your intestine, you are going to have issues with your bladder. It’s either pressure that keeps you running, or blocks all real flow. The antispasmodic drugs mean I am having, even more, problems emptying it. I know I should just give in and use a catheter but as long as I can manage I will. I’m not getting any messages that it needs emptying and when I do, well it dribbles, flow, stop, dribble a bit more, stop then gush and so on. I am wasting more time in the bathroom these days than I care to think about, even more, in the energy draining trips required to get me there and back.

It would be bad enough if it were just my lower abdomen, but as always when one thing is upset, it upsets others. From my written history, it’s easy to know that it always upsets my breathing as well. The constant pressure from my stomach causes both diaphragm and intercostal spasms. My PRMS already causes me enough daily issues with the entire mechanism of breathing, without added extras. I had until a couple of weeks ago been really quite happy with my lungs. They weren’t perfect and I know they never will be, but I was content. Now I have sporadic pains appearing throughout my lung cavities, as muscles within them respond to the constant compression, all of which means that my oxygen levels are all over the place. At times, there is no doubt, that that is what is behind the lightheaded almost drunk sensation, but not at others. It is a feeling beyond a need to sleep, it is almost a desperation that is too hard to fight, but I do, especially in the evenings, as those hours are my highlight, the time I won’t let my health get in the way of.

As all of us know who have MS, if there is something going on in our bodies, whatever the source, it triggers our screwed up nerves. Thanks to the pain, the pressure, the difficulty breathing and anything else you can think of, my entire body is permanently alive with warped sensations. Every nerve seems to be alive and transmitting back whatever it chooses to at that second. Most of the time, it is nothing more than a gentle buzzing sensation, which shifts around my body, area to area. Frequently, it will simply consume me, holding me in a bubble of frenzied activity, then die away again, returning to simply passing the message to its neighbour, before resting a while and waiting to once more join in. That doesn’t sound like much, but when it’s constant, when the only peace that you can find from it, is when it is replaced by another bizarre sensation, or you attention is grabbed by something happening somewhere else in your body, it drains you. It also appears to me, to be behind another annoying symptom, the tremors. Frequently I have found that when the buzzing sensation becomes intense the muscle responds by twitching and jumping. They become hesitant in their actions and miss fire extravagantly, possibly amusing to others, but annoying to anyone who has to live with it.

I’ve been through all of this time after time, after time. All of these symptoms I know well individually, but when it turns into this clamour of activities, well it always comes down to my intestine. I know that if I could just get it to settle down, to return to its norm of odd spells of pains and discomfort, then that the rest will settle down too, but nothing is working. I quite simply don’t know what to do. How can an intestine that isn’t constipated, or actually even if it was, cause so much trouble? I’m waiting for what will be my third round of seeing a consultant. So far, not one has fixed it, one helped a lot by removing my constipation, but this pain has gone on for far too long. I don’t know what the answer is, but there has to be one, but until I see the consultant again, I promise not to complain and moan about what my stomach is doing to me. Well, not unless that damed pressure actually explodes.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 29/03/2014 – Time together

For the second night in a row, I went to bed early and I slept like a log, normality for me as It only takes my head to touch the pillow and I know nothing until the alarm sounds. I count myself as so lucky that sleep is my peaceful escape from everything, yet I can’t help equally to curse it for taking so much of my life from me, so many hours wasted and gone, without the slightest memory of even one. I know I must dream, but for me it has always been the case that I just don’t remember them unless something really odd happens. My hours of sleep are like someone just switching me off, then eventually on again many hours later. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell myself that my body needs that sleep, going from a person who used to sleep……

A day to delete

Posted on March 28, 2016 by livinginalimitedword

I don’t know what it is about Sundays, but without fail, they are always days when I seem to land up chasing the clock. I don’t think it was made any better yesterday by the fact that the clock went forwards last night, for daylight saving time. No, I didn’t sleep an extra hour by forgetting to change the alarm clock, although yes, we did forget, somehow I woke at a time that meant I was just 15 minutes late. When I woke, I actually thought that I was starting my day early and that, I think, is where my trouble began. As I have said before, time is now a concept that I find hard to work with. Seeing the time saying 7:45 am, and that the bathroom clock agreed with it, I believed that to be the correct time, confusion started once I reached the living room and turned on my PC, it told me that it was 8:58 am. That was something my brain just couldn’t handle and I went into a total spin. As I said, Sundays are odd for me normally, but at that point I was already in the midst of a mental bedlam. I was desperately checking everything, all the clocks agreed with my alarm, but my PC and the TV said differently. Once my brain flips, logic has nothing to do with reality, and anyway reality is in some other dimension. I knew the time was due to be changed, but I just couldn’t get to grips with what was happening.

Once bedlam appears, it is incredibly hard to escape it. Even two hours later, I was still double checking everything, the result being that I just kept working myself into a frenzy and time, the real time was ticking away from me. Before I knew it, I was an hour behind on my daily routine and struggling with everything that I was trying to complete. I knew it really didn’t matter and that in the bigger scale of life, it was totally irrelevant, but telling my brain that, just wasn’t happening. The tiniest things can set off a train of reaction just like this, yesterday it was time, the one before was caused by opening a drawer in the kitchen to find the spoons were in the wrong order. Anything that is not as it should be, or is unfathomable at that second, can totally destroy my entire day. Once triggered, even if I correct the problem, it isn’t enough, I will without a doubt, double check that it is still correct the next time I am passing that way. On the surface, I know that some will think that it is a form of OCD, but it’s not. As long as I think that everything is where it should be, then my world is fine. I don’t go looking for things that are wrong, but if I find them, well then, they have to be fixed.

It took until after lunchtime for me to settle to the time issue. I was actually having lunch when I worked it out the root of my unsettled state. It wasn’t so much that the time had changed, as the fact that the clocks hadn’t been. I knew that in every single room of the flat, there was something wrong and as they are mainly wall clocks, I couldn’t fix them. As soon as Adam did, I settled again and normality returned. I had still lost over an hour, but hey, it was Sunday, I always land up running behind on a Sunday, so nothing new there then.

I can’t help wondering if there is some kind of lesion activity going on at the moment. There are just so many things happening altogether, which yes I’ve had issues with on and off, but they all feel more on than off right now. I am very aware of feeling distressed over virtually nothing, my concentration levels are low and my frustration rate is high over everything, my tremors have been going mad and the list just goes on. Just read the last three weeks posts, and I’m sure they are all there. Annoyingly, it is now also managing to get in the way of one of the things I enjoy the most, this, writing.

I used to write a post in under an hour, now, it can take more than double that, this one, so far has taken nearly three. I can’t hold my train of thought and I have to keep rereading, correcting and at times, deleting large sections and starting again. Add in fingers that somehow find keys that weren’t intended, a new ability to make up nonexistent words and the whole thing is taking longer and longer. I’m sure many have noticed that most of my posts have been shorter than they used to be. I would literally do nothing else if I were to achieve my once standard 7000 character. The normality that I desperately need is now being pulled apart, by the very brain that requires it. The normal flow of life is frequently severely disrupted. And for those reasons, I am going to have to stop writing today, before I do something totally nutty, like deleting the whole thing.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 28/03/2014 – The future

I woke this morning with the alarm sounding rather than pain anywhere, I’m not saying that the pain has gone, but, at least, it is at the level I normally live with rather than ripping me into shreds. I am sure that it is just what you would call normal, but I worry that days like yesterday are a window into my future, I know that the doctors would give me stronger painkillers, but that somehow doesn’t make it seem any brighter, just knowing that my body would ever have to be producing that level of pain somehow doesn’t seem to lie easy on me. I know it’s pointless worrying, or even thinking about something that I won’t be aware of, but it’s my body and me that will be living in the knowledge of reality. It is so often the fear of the future that gets to you, even when you know that there will be ways round thing, ways of making life bearable…..

A path to happiness

Posted on March 27, 2016 by livinginalimitedword

No one wants to be housebound, but it is a place that anyone can find themselves at any time. You don’t have to be chronically ill, to face a future of your world being restricted in this manner, all it might take is an accident, or a stroke, or simply old age, for you too to be here. Yet it is the last thing that any of us really takes as a serious possibility. Even I didn’t really see it as something that could seriously happen to me. Yes, I knew that there was a possibility, but if I had taken that chance seriously, we would have moved home as soon as we could once I had my diagnosis.

Like many couples once we were married, well buying a home rather than renting made sense, and like most couples, we bought what we thought was our starter home. Money was tight and basic was a luxurious description of what our home looked like. With a lot of hard work, and living on a tight budget, we transformed it as fast of we could. We had just had the kitchen fitted and were still decorating it when the news arrived, I had Fibromyalgia. Six months later, a second slap around the face, brought my PRMS. We couldn’t afford to move and with the fear of having to give up work, well we made the only choice possible, make this the best home we could. At that point, we still had the hope of moving in time, but within a year, that hope was destroyed by the recession and negative equity bit. That is how quickly and simply you become stuck with a house, millions out there just like us, were caught in the same position, unlike them, I became housebound overnight by a flare. At the time, I couldn’t use my wheelchair and I couldn’t walk more than 15 feet. I was stuck inside what was now our much loved second floor home, with four steep flights of sandstone stairs descended between me and the outside world.

I managed to hold on to my job for three years, but then, well then I was made redundant. In a way, it was a blessing as I managed to pay off a chunk of our mortgage, which reduced our monthly payment to a level we could cover without my wage. Money wasn’t going to make the slightest difference by then, even a ground floor home wouldn’t give me freedom as fatigue had reduced my activity to almost nothing. Where ever I was, I was still going to be housebound. I am telling you all this, because if it could happen to me, it could happen to you. No matter how well you plan, how well you are at this moment, your whole life can be flipped without any action from you in any way.

This is my 9th year of being housebound, my 9th year of not seeing the world in the way you and your friends and families do. Where I am, is to a great extent is a place where time no longer exists. Nothing, other than the electrical goods that have reached their preprogrammed obsolescence date, has changed within these walls in any significant way, as I was the DIY’er and the instigator of change, not even the walls have been painted. Every day I have woken in the last 9 years, my world has been identical. The one action that we took that I am so glad that we did, was when we decided to make our home the best that we could. I may have seen the same walls every day for 9 years, but I made sure that they are walls that I love.

I can’t work out if it is me, or some odd thing that goes along with my health, but I am the total opposite of my home, as a person I have totally changed. If you had asked me 15 years ago, when I was diagnosed, if I could survive being housebound, I would have given an emphatic no. I was like anyone else, I enjoyed going out, loved walking so much so, that I’d never even wanted a car, or learned to drive one. I enjoyed socialising, but I admit that I had recently matured past the party animal mode, married life was too good. More than a weekend without leaving our home wasn’t something I would have even considered. Housebound would have sounded like hell, yet here I am happy. My life now, compared to my life then, is like chalk and cheese, but inside, I don’t feel as though I have changed, even though to survive I must have.

All you have to do is read back through my four years of writing, and you will see that I have tried many time to work out, how this all works. Not once have I been happy with my answers to all the questions that still spin around in my head. I think part of the reason I have failed before, is I have only looked at it on two levels, me as a person and my health. Not once have I taken into account the outside factors, the everyday pressures of life that we all live with and the role that they played. Without a doubt, the stress of buying our home, which to me was something I had never done before, were huge. I was newly married, a new homeowner and newly diagnosed with two life-changing conditions, all in the space of two and half years. In the following six months, I was promoted at work, to a much more intense and responsible role, and we lost our fight with the insurance company over a policy that should have paid our mortgage because I had MS. Then came the recession, locking us into not being able to even move. It really isn’t any surprise that my health went into free fall when you take all that into account. Two years later, I was housebound.

I know without a doubt, that in the first two years of being housebound that my health improved dramatically. I learned to eat again, got rid of the gastric nasal tube and gained three very needed stone in weight. Life was getting better so I had no reason to believe I would be here forever. During that time, I learned to live day to day, to not look too far into the future and to be happy with life as it was, because I believed it to be temporary. I now believe that it was those first two years, played a huge role in my ability to be happy in a housebound world. If I had known it was forever, I doubt I would be as happy as I am today. Throughout that time, I believed that I was getting stronger and that I was working towards returning to normality. That mindset meant that I had a goal to work towards and all I had to do, was be content until that point. Somehow I knew the worst thing I could have done was to circle a date on the calendar as being my freedom date. I didn’t want to be like a kid counting down to Christmas, especially, as my Christmas might be canceled. My goal was to get fit, not a date. Life became one day at a time, never looking past tomorrow but always living for today. For my own sanity, my days had to hold a routine to them, a structure that kept me on track and always with the goals of, work for my brain, food for my strength and sleep for my energy.

When my health plummeted again, yes there was a danger all of that could have been undone, but I maintained all of it, I also adding in a process of trying to find the good in every day and enjoying it. Add this together with my post from a couple of weeks ago, “Breaking the Fear” and at last, I think I have made sense of it. Like so many things in life, it the perfect storm, all the element came together and here I am. When you live day to day, time oddly stops, something that has been probably helped by the fact my home hasn’t. If I didn’t have it written down, I wouldn’t believe for a second that it is now my 9th year. My concept of time, routine, daily normality have all been changed forever. From the minute I wake at 8:30, I am focused only on what I do online, that takes me through to 6pm, then to those three hours daily where Adam and I are together, followed by bedtime at 9pm. There is my life. It doesn’t sound like much, but to me, it is now everything. Despite once never believing that it was possible, I’m happy. If there is a secret to a happy housebound life, then oddly I think I can now bring it down to one word, simplicity.

The changes that hit our lives aren’t always in our control, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t adjust to them. It’s easy to say, why don’t you do this or do that, but the truth for most of us, we can’t do anything to change where we are. Yes, at one point, improved finance might have changed it all, but that time came and went, there’s no point looking back with what if’s, we all have to live for today, some of us more than others.

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 27/03/2014 – Spasms and more

I woke this morning at just before 5am, my legs were screaming at me in a way they haven’t done for a long time at night, in fact, I don’t think I have felt it like that since before I was prescribed morphine. It wasn’t just the spasms that were shouting for my attention but I also had pain coming from the work that the chiropodist did yesterday, both my big toes are red and angry where she clipped and scrapped away all the dead skin, with them so raw the pressure of the duvet was just too much for them. I sat up and reached straight away for my booster tablet and glass of coke, I knew that there was nothing I could do other than take the meds and try to massage them until they calmed. Breaking the spasm isn’t the end of pain, it continues to hurt for a considerable…..