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……