Start 2 - Electric Boogaloo

 All right. Let's try picking this back up again. Something of a journal of how I am feeling, maybe to highlight any patterns ? Due to the consistency of reporting required, I'll probably fail to keep this up to date in short order. But we will see.

First, where am I currently.

So the aches and pains that have shifted around for years and at times been crippling have by and large gone away. How ? A dose of NSAIDs every night just before bed for months. This seems to have done a couple of things - 1 improved the quality of my sleep and 2 given my body time to heal / reduce inflammation. I have now reached the point where I can go *without* taking NSAIDs every night and expect some level of reasonable sleep and few aches. But it is something I have to keep on top of. And if I need a proper nights rest, I need to take a couple of pills right before I sleep. Seems to do the trick. What this says about underlying things - who can say.

I spoke to a neural expert early summer about my phsyical symptoms and aches and it being a possible symptom of MS. He dismissed this and said it was likely Functional Neurological Disorder, which is a fancy name for, well, we kinda dont know but your brain gives you pain. His recommendation was that I rest. After finally testing for sure that NSAIDs seem to deal very well with the aches and pains, and the fact he listened to me for 5 minutes, over a phone, without any other study I am left with the tentative conclusion that the diagnosis is shit, and the NHS either cant be truly bothered or dont really have a good way to find out whats up with me.

General illness. On and off I feel ill. An almost indefinable, queasy, weak, sweaty, need to sit down, preferably lie down *right now*. It comes and goes. It seems to persist for at most a day - a day and a half. And at its shortest can be for a few hours. Typically a short dose of sleep helps. Timing is .. not clear. Often in the middle of the day and or stretching into evening. Tricky to pin down. It is sometimes exacerbated by exercise, making me feel truly awful and start to teeter on a "critical failure" where I just need to sit my ass down before I fall down, and sometimes exercise seems to make me feel better, at least afterwards.

And fatigue. I went through a period of a few months of mind bending fatigue where I would get impossibly tired by 6.30pm. If I ignored it it wasn't like ordinary sleepy fatigue, I would get physically ill, nauseous, faint. I would count the minutes on somedays up until 7pm before going to bed. Whilst that level of fatigue has gone, fatigue still dogs me when doing anything physical. I get wiped out.

 Still got the hole in my ass. It has.. settled.. into a bit slower of a routine. And does seem to entirely heal up now for some days before once again opening. No word from the NHS. On speaking to the GP recently about my mental meds he mentioned it and that I should chase the hospital as it had been a long time. Lockdown 2 has just come into effect however. So. Meh. 

 High Urea / Probably gout. Has by and large mostly gone I think. I am still taking meds for it. I found something crucial out about my diet / whatever that has probably not helped this - I used to take a fairly steady diet of aspirin on and off, not least of which to counter migraines. It turns out aspirin is a massive cause of Urea spikes, to the extent that there is a soft medical recommendation of going on anti gout meds if you need a steady diet of aspirin. Who knew ? To be fair it *is* listed as a possible thing to avoid if you have gout on the NHS site, but, after reading about it, it's kinda worse than that, it can just cause gout on its own little ownsome. As a result I have cut down on using aspirin - only using it really for emergency migraine attacks, where a dose of 3 x 500mg + sleep can do good things to head off the worst of an attack. 

I am somewhat peeved in my old age that I need to be this level of educated and well researched to understand the health issues cropping up. General healthcare that I receive seems to be pretty blind and or poor at managing my healthcare - I have to rely on myself to know.

Asthma slowly got worse over summer. Decided to talk to the docs to finally get something done about it. This was something I should have got looked at this time last year, but with everything going on, and getting other health issues sorted, I pushed it aside. I am back on steroid meds for my asthma, has helped a huge amount.

Mental health has been. Different. Changed meds in.. Feb ? Side effects are... well, the old side effects have gone ? IE, I am not just randomly sleepy in the day ( well actually thats not true, but its not the same treacle sleepy ), and I dont have any orgasm issues. Which is huge. And common. SSRIs often seriously fuck with your ability to... fuck. Or at least get anywhere when fucking / jerking off. As an aside they are also sometimes prescribed for those with premature ejaculation. I can see why. If you don't suffer from this though, they can be a massive frustrating pain in the ass. So other than that, side effects I cannot determine if I have new ones as I have a bunch of issues going on with me and have not tested coming off the meds to see if they go away. I probably should do that, butttt at this point I am unwilling to stop the mental meds as they have *kinda* kept me pretty level. I have dipped down into serious mental downturns a few times, but then popped back out in fairly short order - a day or two. This is unprecedented in the 15 or so years I've been suffering badly. I can only assume the new meds are doing their thing. But. Unlike the old meds I am not immune to going down badly on these. I suspect the dose is not high enough - and having had the most serious downturn of all lately, whos depths reached critical, stuck like this for 6 months kinda territory - I have had my meds dose increased. We shall see if that increases stability. Or if other symptoms get worse. Right now is absolutely the wrong time to be experimenting with mental med doses of on and off to try and determine side effects.

Sleep has slowly improved. But. Still seems to be sporadic. And sometimes not great quality. I am left tired still, and can easily sleep large chunks of a weekend and still feel tired. However. I am doing much better than I was, where I was - in hindsight - reaching critical levels of sleep deprivation, waking up with two black eyes and feeling absolutely terrible. I suspect the asthma wasnt doing me any favours, and I seem to have a minor systemic inflammation thing going on ? Not sure. I am also unsure if the tiredness now is 100% down to bad sleep quality or whether the mental meds are complicated affairs and making me feel sleepy or sleep badly. Hard to know.

Today is Sunday. I felt *largely* ok today, however, I did sleep for 3 hours in the middle of the day - 1.30pm to 4.30pm. Anxiety has paid a few surprise spike visits, suddenly found myself very worried about random things ( are the dogs ok, omg, I only have 10 years of work life left, I am going to be destitute in my old age ). I have managed to.. manage them and quieten the anxiety. It is quite fascinating though how jumpy my brain can be. I suspect I am expending quite a bit of background control to keep a lid on it - its not exactly conscious, but if I let it loose, it suddenly becomes an issue. Fab.

Depression level is copable just about. I am not happy. I am not looking forward to anything. I dont want to do anything. I have a pull to bunker up. But I am not a lost cause of nutcasery who is just rocking back and forth in a ball beating my head against the wall and contemplating suicide. In short. For me. An OK level. Ish. I am within ballpark of the Line That Once Crossed Will Fuck You Up. Close enough to smell it. But I am on the right side of that line for now. And just about in control.

Having now thought about it, I *thought* I was doing better than that. Clearly I am not. Perhaps this shouldnt be a huge surprise, as only two weeks ago I had very much Crossed That Line, and had to take drastic steps to cut it short. It's also become clear - again - what a massive stress fest work can be. Dysfunctional time lines, switching of projects, endless clashes of deadlines and wishful thinking of just jamming bits of work in and demoralising and frustrating issues mean its a bit of a nightmare. Of course, this is not news - we've had plenty of staff burn outs or semi burn outs that have caused people to run away. The dev side of our business is a stressy shit show that is subject to jumping at the last phonecall. It has crossed my mind there are easier ways to earn money.

Uh huh, well, thats the current lie of the land. I will try to update this every day. I am thinking I probably need to use some good tags in future posts to highlight relevant bits so I can better slurp the data to see patterns ? I am not sure. I am not sure if this will be helpful. Eh well. We shall see.

Post Edit -

In Early December things came to a head and I became ill. A bad month on Ramipril shortly after utterly devastated my already struggling body and I became critically ill. This resulted in numerous hospital visits in the back of ambulances with heart attack scares and stroke symptoms. Misery of being very unwell continued through January, February and onwards - where the blog picks up at the start of March and my mental health had by that time collapsed under the onslaught of being so unwell I thought I was dying and a complacent negligent NHS that couldn't be bothered to deal with me.

The Ramipril caused massive cardio issues with me, a lot like the symptoms of a Ramipril overdose, and exacerbated my already ill system pushing me into a very low state all round. Christmas and my birthday in Feb passed in a blur of feverish suffering, and the damage done both physically and mentally was significant. Suicide featured large as time went on.