Category Archives: Mental Health

Who needs rest?

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It started with, “I’m worried about tomorrow”, not a great opener, but it led to my pouring out my torn and shredded heart. It was 8 pm, time for my meds and I had just joined Adam in the kitchen. We hadn’t spoken in detail since the Social worker, Karen, (yes, I at last. have her name) had left on Friday. It had become a closed book, other than the odd words over how I had gotten the time wrong and so on. I was doing my usual, putting on a brave face and telling myself that I could manage this. After all, it’s just someone here to help me in the shower. The fact that it’s now just 4:30 am on Wednesday morning, should tell you that I am coping at all.

As is often the way, with the first word out, the rest just kept coming and coming. There was a stilted conversation while I tried to use my nebulizer, but as soon as it was done, then the truth started to flow. I have never given anyone even the slightest speck of control, since, I walked away from my first marriage. Something Adam was aware of from day one when it took over his life as well as mine. Like it or not, he was going to have a job, eat proper meals and be part of my world. I didn’t mean any harm by it, and he somehow knew that even before I told him about my lifetime of abuse, from childhood to meeting him. But when the floodgates were open, there was no closing them.

Today isn’t just about getting help, it is about asking for it, about the beginning of giving away that last independence that I have, and that is so huge, it is suffocating me. I apologised for not letting him help me, I went through all the reasons, all the things that I have justified in my head about why I couldn’t do so, even though I knew all of it is stupid, I still can’t do it. I told him in ways I don’t think I have ever told him before of the pain that I feel, not physically, but mentally because of this stupid illness that is killing me, as there is nothing that I or anyone can do about it. Between him handing me more and more tissues, I admitted just how scared I am about losing even the slightest bit of control I have left. As I blubbed and he held me, I suddenly realised that the look on his face was reading in not the way I expected, there was something there, that made me stop for a moment. “I’m not giving up, I am not going to let this beat me”. He took a deep breath, “I’m glad that you said that, as I was beginning to think this was the start of the long goodbye”. He could read my pain, but had lost my determination to go on.

For me, this handing over control is like stepping back, into a time that I fought so hard to escape. He tried so hard to tell me that I am still in control, that they are here to help me, not control me, but it doesn’t feel that way. We both realise now that we chose the wrong day, again because I am led by what other say. Either Adam should have been off for this first visit, or we should have arranged it for the Sunday. Having him here, even in a different room might just have made it that bit easier. He is the only person who I trust to take care of me, to guide me and to think for me. As my brain gets more and more muddled, I need his to keep me on the right track, to fill in the bits that I miss, or don’t understand. I know that I ask a lot of him, but he keeps telling me that he wouldn’t have it any other way. He fell in love with me and chose to take the vows that he is more than happy to live with, in sickness and in health. We have just been unlucky that it isn’t the latter.

In the grander scheme it is a tiny thing, but last night I asked him how many more mornings I had to take the Steroids. His answer was just one more, so I double checked with him that he meant that yesterday morning was the last, or was there another. Either I miss read his words, or him mine, but either way, the results was wrong, I have another dose this morning. As I said small, but those sort of confused screw my head big time. Just like the mistakes during the Friday assessment, if the detail is wrong, I will fret unknowingly, somewhere in the back of my mind, desperately trying to make sense out of something that doesn’t add up, but I don’t know why. We spoke for nearly an hour, going over feeling and the help that I need from him to survive what is, after all, a totally new phase of life for me. He now understands that I need him to be accurate, to not miss what I don’t see. To guide me even more than he has done up to date, plus to double check that I really do understand, that I’m not just brushing it aside or not hearing his, or others words.

Right now, and not just because of the time, I should be resting, I am in the midst of a flare, dealing with a body that is making all of this harder than it would have been just a month ago. I should be resting, letting my body have the best possible chance of healing, but instead, I am stressed to a level I haven’t felt in years. I can’t do the slightest thing about it, other than to go with the flow, to do what I have to and to survive it all, as I have done up to date. I know one thing for a fact, today isn’t the day, that I started that “long goodbye”, one day I will, but I am still a long way from it, especially, if I can get my head around accepting the help that I so desperately need, and Adam can’t give me, not because of him, but because of me, which kind of makes the whole thing harder, as it is myself, that is letting me down.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 09/06/2014 – Muscles, what muscles

All too often things happen that you don’t even notice until suddenly something happens and you realise the truth of what has slowly been happening all along. I was lying down yesterday with my feet drawn up so that my knees were off the bed and in the air, I don’t know why I suddenly put myself in that position as I haven’t lain in bed like that for years. But there I was with my both feet flat on……

Moving on

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Change isn’t always the easiest thing to accept, especially when that change means your entire world has been ripped away from you. You would think that by this point in my life, having been so ill, for so long, and having lived what to many appears to be a more than bizarre life, that change would now be easy. It’s not. Oh, I know, that I seem to have dealt with it all in my stride, but appearances are often deceptive and in my case, I’d say that it’s a wonderful deception. Not that I am trying to deceive anyone, it’s just the way that it’s happened. At first, like everyone else, I put on a face, I thought I was doing it to put other people at ease with what was happening and so that I could just get on with life. I had a job, a responsible job and if my staff thought that I was crumbling in my office, well life was going to be hard. I had brought that all into a meeting just days after I was diagnosed and told them what was wrong with me. I thought it important to do so, as I didn’t want gossip flying around, or the possible thought that I was drunk in the office when I wove my way up the call center. I suspect that bravado is what gets all of us through those first weeks and months, but, there is one person that doesn’t work on, ourselves.

I wish that I could sit here and type out a piece on how to get through that time, the things to do, the things to say and just as importantly, the things not to. I can’t. That is an incredibly personal process, not something that is universal in any way. What I can tell you is, it is without a doubt the biggest mental shift that you will ever have to make. A short while before, regardless of how you felt healthwise, mentally you saw yourself still a fit person. You still saw your life trailing out into the distant future and it held all the dreams that the average person has. Depending on your age, those things vary, but for most whatever our dreams are, they are the dreams of a physically and mentally able-bodied person. The idea of climbing Everest might not have been in your head, but if you decided to, you could. You could do anything and everything that life put in front of you, there was nothing to stop you. Then that diagnosis arrives and life stops. Stamped right there in the middle of your forehead is the word, “disabled”. It doesn’t matter what you suspected, or thought might be wrong, you walked into your doctor’s office able-bodied and left “disabled”. This is without a doubt the biggest change that anyone alive has ever had to deal with, short of becoming paraplegic and you have to make it.

Bang, it feels as though everything you dreamed of, has been wrenched out of your grasp and has been replaced by that stamp on your forehead. Not only have your dreams been snatched away, but so has any chance of a normal life. Work, family, home, nothing is ever going to be the same. So how do you deal with it? How do you put things back together? How do you do anything ever again? It isn’t just about change, as change means replacing one thing with another. At that point, there isn’t anything to replace it with, you’ve lost everything and how do you possibly replace all of that. Personally, I would recommend not even trying. No, that isn’t the same as giving up, it just means that you stop and you get used to the facts, you allow yourself time to absorb the truth of what has happened and you grieve. That’s where bravado comes in, that face to the world, the you it knows, is what I believe gets us through. I see no problem what so ever with putting on an act, as long as you have one person, the special someone who you are free to be the new you in front of until you’re happy to show the world who you now are. If you really don’t have a close enough friend to confide in, then behind closed doors, you must cry, you must scream and you must let all the pain caused out. Don’t ever let it grow into an uncontrollable monster, as that is the fast-track to depression.

Even now, change can be hard. Even though the changes are smaller and often progressive, every change has to be recognised and accepted before you can move on. If you fight change, well it becomes like one of those multiple car crashes, where car piles into car into car, but in this case, you are in every single one of those cars. It doesn’t matter how big or how small the change is, you have to deal with it and accept it before, the next car comes along. Just like that first huge change, there is generally no hurry, taking at your pace, means a better and smoother transition. I know that many will think it is something you get used to, that you don’t even really react or notice much, but you do, you notice even the tiniest. It’s your body, your life and there are no two things that are more important than those. For example, I know that discovering that your pinky finger has gone permanently numb, doesn’t sound like much, but I can tell you that by the end of the first day, you will have discovered maybe twenty actions or things that you never knew it was involved in, but it was. Every one of those things will require adaptation, thought, time and surprisingly a lot of emotions, other than just frustration. It will cause extra fatigue, exhaustion, and stress, things we really don’t need. The knock on effects can, in fact, be enough to send your health on a downward spiral, so you have to take time, give yourself the space you need to rebuild a new way of living, yet again. Nothing is ever “just change”, it will have and does have an enormous impact.

Chronic illness is never just one symptom, it is a myriad of pain, emotion, disability and mental impact. Change is going to be part of your life, like it or not and the sooner you open yourself to that fact, the easier your life will be. As I said, there is no magic bullet, but once you have successfully gone through the process that works for you once, it does get easier. The fact that our lives are unpredictable at the best, well oddly, it’s good to know one thing is a fact, even if that fact, turns out to be change.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 17/04/2014 – Who do you trust?

Sometimes once I have sent out the notifications of a new post being available here, I sit and watch the globe at the top of my page and I wonder what it is that has drawn readers from all over the world to come to my page and read the ramblings of a middle-aged woman in Glasgow. I am always amazed to see the flags of countries I have never heard off, just as I am on Twitter when I can’t even make sense of the profiles, but here are people who’s first language is clearly not English, still finding something in what I say so compelling that they are happy to spend times reading and translating my word and in the case of Twitter retweeting it, often translating it for those in their friends circle. I sit there watching flags appear and disappear, different……

Growing young

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I have never had wind like this ever before in my life. It even woke me up last night, well it was the only thing happening when I woke, and I am more than sure that it’s the first time I have been woken by violent flatulence ever. I can’t even think what is behind it, as I haven’t eaten anything out of the ordinary. Right now, well it doesn’t matter. Adam is at work, so I am totally on my own, free to let rip whenever my body chooses, which is frequent, continual and loud. It doesn’t matter how long I have been married, or that it is one of the most natural things our bodies does, it’s still embarrassing, even edging on the taboo and I always try hard to hide it. We modern day humans really are the oddest creatures that ever lived. When it comes to anything lavatorial, or a little bit yucky, we pretend that we as an individual, have nothing what so ever to do with it. We happily quite publically shovel food into ourselves, but when it comes to it exiting us, in either direction, suddenly, it’s something only others do, not us.

If you have been reading for a couple of years, you will know that there is nothing that I can’t and don’t write about. That, after all, is one of the points of my blog, to put down every single detail of what my health is doing to me, and that’s not always pretty. I know that Adam always reads my posts, and I am pleased that he does, but I still feel this huge embarrassment if he is actually involved in, or present when things go wrong. Even though I have written about it, talking about it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve been forced into that situation when we attend the hospital, but somehow, I have developed this fourth dimension situation. If a doctor is in the room, I can talk, if they’re not, I can’t. I know that it makes little sense, but I quite honestly can’t get past it, no matter how I try. I don’t know how, but it is something that I am going to have to get past, as otherwise, the future is going to be really difficult for us both.

Adam has only been attending my hospital appointment with me since I have been housebound. He used to offer to come with me, but I always said no. I said no, only because I feared what would be spoken about, what embarrassing details I would be forced into admitting with him in the room. Then Suddenly, I couldn’t manage without him, I needed him with me, everything about those appointments was too much to handle alone. At first, he would sit there silent, there as my support but never interfering. Slowly he found his voice, chipping in with the things I forgot, but it didn’t take long for him to start asking questions all of his own. That was the day I was diagnosed with my COPD, there was a lot to take in and his brain was much needed, as always, mine was somewhat missing. We spoke freely that day, as they were conversations about life and death, not about all that lay before.

When people think of conditions like MS, Parkinson’s, Arthritis, in fact, almost any chronic condition, they don’t think about incontinence and possible vomiting. I know they aren’t always directly connected to every condition as symptoms, but if there is any impairment to mobility, they can become very much part of them. It doesn’t matter if it is an accident due to just not making it to the loo in time, or if it is due to muscle dysfunction, the result is the same. As I know already, the embarrassment is exactly the same as well. I never foresaw a time when my wonderful husband was going to be mopping up my pee off the floor, having to wash clothing and bedding that had a distinct aroma, but he has. As my health diminishes, this is going to happen more and more and there is nothing either of us, can do about it, but still, I can’t talk freely about any of it with him. Of course, Adam knows that I have a problem talking, he has tried to turn it into off the cuff conversation, but I always wriggle free and changed the subject.

Without a doubt, it all goes back to our potty training days. We were schooled into knowing what is right and what is wrong, in my case, I was also schooled into not talking about it. Just as I was taught not to pass wind from either direction without leaving the room first and being clear of other people. Parents have a lot to answer for. Losing control mentally or physically isn’t something they didn’t prepare us for. There are no rules when it comes to being ill, and that makes it even tougher to deal with. That’s one of the cruelties of health, we grow up thinking we know how to be an adult, only to have our health destroy us and turn us back into children. Just like children, when things go wrong, we look for the person who can make it right, just to find they’re not there. In many ways, the day you are diagnosed, is a bit like being born again, you know nothing, but your life has suddenly been switched into reverse. Before you know it, you’re no longer that capable adult, you are a child, edging on being a baby.

For me, I know the day will come when I’ll be wearing a nappy and there will be a potty in the bedroom. I know that, yet I still can’t talk about it. I just need to look in a mirror and I can see I am no longer the perfect me, that I once saw in there, and Adam fell in love with, and married. He doesn’t need a mirror, he sees me daily, but still, I want to keep up the pretense, that I’m as perfect as I once was. It may be a pretense, but it’s part of my sanity, it’s part of my way of getting through what is so far from fabrication. At each stage my health has taken me to, I have found a way of managing it, of polishing it and making it, at least, look pretty in my imaginary perfection. But I’m here, and I can’t find the balm that will make this subject attractive. Part of me says we can muddle through, make the best of it, but I also know that isn’t the true answer. After all, I write it all down, he can read it, can’t he? Well, that might have worked to this point, but I realised something the other day that had somehow escaped me, talking, is about respect, not talking, is nothing but disrespect.

I have avoided so much because of misplaced embarrassment and because talking, makes it even more real. I have always respected Adam and I apologise for getting this so wrong. He is the love of my life and now, out of choice, he is my carer and because of both, I have to learn to talk as freely as I write about everything.In this relationship, embarrassment is a misplaced emotion but so strong, that it’s hard to remove. So give me just a little more time and forgive me when I scurry away with my head down.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 01/04/2014 – Ageing is a fact

If life were simple I guess that I wouldn’t be writing any of this, there is one thing for sure and that is there are surprises around every corner just waiting to make you sit up and think. I woke up last night around 4 am, I had that really painful spasm around my chest again, breathing had become more a process of gasping and I could feel almost my entire body was filled with pins and needles, with my pulse thumping in my ear and my right side. As I lay there bringing my breathing under control and waiting for my body to level off in it’s pain, I suddenly remembered that the exact same thing had also happened the night before. When I woke up yesterday…..

Don’t ever forget

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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…..

Just fear or the truth

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I seem to be shaking less, but I also slept less last night as well. No, I know that any coloration between the two, doesn’t add up, but they are facts. I actually caused myself to not sleep well last night. It was totally my own fault as I put in one of my earplugs wrongly. The result, well a painful ear, one so painful that it woke me after six hours. Stupidly, I tried to reposition it and just go back to sleep. I woke two hours later when I ditched it and took a chance, one that paid off, I slept right to the alarm. It just shows that no matter what is wrong with us, we really can be the root of our own pain. When I woke the first time, I was in pain from my stomach as well, maybe not quite enough to wake me, but I could have with ease settled the blame there and not on my ear. I could probably sit here and list dozens of occasions when I have done just that, blamed my health for something that had nothing to do with it what so ever. The longer that we are ill, the easier it gets, just as it gets easier to be afraid of it. Logic says that doesn’t make sense, but there is now a fear, I didn’t feel at the start, and it’s a very real one.

Despite all the safety precautions that I have put in place, I have to admit, that I have never been as afraid of taking a tumble as I am now. Years ago, I paid no attention to my dwindling ability to stay upright. I still ran, I danced and careered up and down stairs without a thought. I had this attituded of if I fall so what. The recklessness of youth, well, not really, I was after all in my late thirties before I gave it a seconds thought. Youth had little to do with it, it was far more a case of belief, belief that I had had reinforced by my doctors that there was anything wrong with me. It has only been recently that I have been able to look back and plot clear changes, ones that have far more to do with my mind than my health.

Pre-diagnosis, I did everything that anyone else my age did, and if I’m honest, a lot of things that most people my age, had given up long ago and I did it all, totally fearlessly. In fact, the more the doctors told me I was fine, the more I pushed myself. Not to try and prove them wrong, it was more to show myself, that I was wrong. Someone who is ill, in my mind, couldn’t do half the things I did, so I had to be well. Then I got my Dx. I didn’t stop anything straight away, although I had the feeling that Adam often wished that I would, but we had a new home to decorate and I was going to do it. I had gone to the doctor as I had been very aware of an increase in all the things I had been fighting against. Pain, fatigue, spasms, I know now, that it was just the progression of what had been with me for 20 years. It was nothing more than progression, not a flare or anything dramatic. Something had triggered an acceleration of my health, but I still had no fear of it. Even when I knew what my future held, I had no fear what so ever, well not at first.

I had no fear until I hit the point that I thought I would very soon lose my job because of it. I didn’t fear the fact that I appeared by then to be a jibbering wreck. That my tremors were at their peak, my speech at its worse, my mobility was shot and my memory a total wreck. I wasn’t scared of my health, just losing my job. I had no fear of the chemotherapy, or it’s possible side effects, which I had none of. Fear still wasn’t part of my life. The flares that I had scared me a little, especially when I found myself in the hospital unable to breathe or talk, but that passed, just as all flare did. They left their mark, but they passed. I had gone through what should have been a traumatic five years for anyone, but I still didn’t fear my health. Maybe, a little oddly, the first time I felt fear, was the morning I woke up with no movement or strength in my left arm. It took a dead arm, for me to feel out of control, as that is what fear really is, not being in control of your body. Before that, my body may not have worked well, but it did at least work, now it wasn’t even doing that.

Until then, I believed that my knowledge and my being in control meant I felt no fear. Even when my arm returned, I had for the first time a fear of what it could do next. Everything kept progressing, at first, I told myself lies, I told myself the progression was due to the fact that I had lost that control. I had this new knowledge, that control could vanish at any second and in many ways, I had never truly got it back. Despite the fact that nothing like that has happened again, my fear of it has just kept growing. I would have expected that over the past eight years, as I learned more and more about my health, as we all do, that that knowledge and experience, would have slowly removed the fear. It hasn’t. I suspect that being told that my PRMS could stop me breathing any time it chooses, didn’t help, but that was three years ago, and I’m still here, but so is that fear. So why hasn’t it gone?

Fear is actually a healthy thing to have. It shows a respect for my own vulnerability, and I suspect, that’s why I didn’t understand it and didn’t like it. I have never been a person who gave into fear, in fact, I twisted it and used it as a strength through many years of abuse, bravado was my bedfellow and best friend. It’s somethings that once you have learned to do, is very hard to let go of, over time, you actually believe your own fakery. So oddly for me, I think being able to feel fear again, and to be able to admit that I do, is actually something really good. I don’t think I have ever before admitted that something scares me, really scares me, not like falling over, or finding yourself in the middle of a road with a car you didn’t see coming towards you. This is a deep long lasting fear, one that appeared out of a true understanding of my life, one I was free to feel because I felt safe enough, to be able to. It has taken me another nine years from first feeling it, to admitting that I do. It also felt right that I put all this in here, as I know without a doubt, I am not the only one who is scared by their health. I’m reasonably sure that those who have read for a while, must have thought that I was immune to it, well I’m not.

Our bodies are doing things to us that yes, maybe we don’t want everyone to see, so bravado has its place, but so do our fears. I don’t fear dying, I just don’t want to do it. Just as I don’t want to wake in pain, whether it’s my fault or just my body once again showing me who is really in charge. If you didn’t feel fear, well just like me, I’d say that you are kidding yourself, taking bravado one step too far, just as I have done for years. Survival strategies are just that, strategies, true survival is feeling all the things that are there and admitting it, to ourselves first, but it’s also good to admit it to those we love as well. It has only been in the last few years that I have started to feel the entire rollercoaster of emotions that goes along with my health, and boy, has it been one hell of a ride. As mad as it sounds, I have hidden the majority of them from Adam, if there is one person who I shouldn’t hide them from, it’s him. As I said, it’s hard sometimes to let go of things, but if it hadn’t been for his love and support, I don’t think I would have felt safe enough to even let myself feel. By writing this, it means that he now knows, but I think if I asked him, he would say that he already knew. Somehow, he always does.

 

Please read my blog from 2 years ago today – 21/03/2014 – Just floating in time

I am having one of those days were just trying to get things done, isn’t that easy. My mind is off on one of it’s let just go with the flow, not be bothered by what has to be done or even admit, anything has to be done. I always find days like this difficult because I have two arguments always going on in my head, the one that says you have to keep going or you will find yourself so far behind that you will stress out later, and the other one that just says “Whatever!”. Floaty days have their good sides, as just sitting drifting has a habit of taking me back in o those happy times, those days when the whole feeling of “Whatever” was lived to the full. Strangely there a two days…….