Bork Slowly Borking

 Boing, boing, boing. Both my physical health and mental health have been pinging up and down pretty badly. At points ok. At other points very not ok. All within a 24 hour time frame. I'm definitely losing my marbles. There are times when my thoughts just skitter out madly in a mild form of the manic spiral clusterfucks I have briefly had in the past. It's pure crazy. No sense. Frightening. Irrational. So very sad. Paranoid. All blipping around. Very hard to get across. And then I surface. And potter about. Unhappily. Fuckily. But I am not nuts. My physical health is super not helping my mentals. Each bad blip gives me a real mental challenge to keep on top of. Most of the time it just pulls my mental state way down. I feel like I am in a near permanent state of circling the drain. But there are some small positive signs. Feeling a tiny bit brighter in places. Doing a few things. I do need to get out and go swimming again. And I am resolved to doing some low impact exercises to...

Long covid ( and CFS ) suspected to be neurological autoimmune in origin. Cortico steroids a suggested litmus test to see if it helps short term which would indicate and autoimmune issue. Complicated by pockets of virus sticking around for long term and causing long term issues. Neurological issues said to be causing exhaustion, PEM, heart palpitations, brain fog et al.   https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/long-covid-now-looks-like-a-neurological-disease-helping-doctors-to-focus-treatments/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB

 Today has been a mixed bag. And so odd. And so very, post 2020 Bork. Post covid Bork. My ear has continued to screech. It's been really bad lately. Not sure if that means anything. But anywho. I'm still very off. Since the migraine. Off. Dizzy head. Serious flare ups in all my other usual shit. Wax and wane. I dunno. Today I roused myself to finally make the stew I have been plotting for sometime. I did a good job of the meat and pre frying and chopping. And I didn't immediately flake out. Nor reduce to a pile of wobbling arms and legs. Hmm. Ok. So I felt a little better. But the time I slammed it in the oven however, I was done. Exhausted. But that was ok. I was done. And it wasn't a wipe out. The pull of exhaustion settled into my bones and the hours flew past. Despite not feeling amazing, I roused myself to go cut up a piece of mesh shelving that had been sitting in my living room for a week. A few simple cuts. Easy. 10 minutes of work. "Easy". This is pre...

 I spend a chunk of my time these days daydreaming. Not doing. But daydreaming about doing. Because, it's often all I can manage. And daydreaming about it makes me feel a bit better. I am well aware of the gap between dreaming and reality, but I am very ok with this. It's just like telling myself nice stories. And. If on the offchance I get a burst of energy, I might actually carry through. Last night I made a plan for today. Get up. Do some groceries. Make a chicken stew. Put some potatoes on. Easy. Good. Today, that feels like a steep hill to climb. My system teeters on whether to collapse or to trickle on. No energy. A mild headache wanders around the front of my head. My ear screeches. Vague nausea depresses everything . Makes me feel ill. Queasy. Off. Dizziness comes and goes if I move too fast. My body feels like it has been run over and drained of all its blood. A deflated beachball. Pffffllllbt. I came up with a new approach last night. I am going to try and focus on th...

 Yesterday was migraine hangover day. I stuffed myself with low level painkillers and took it easy. Had a walk around the park with Athena. Had some lunch. I've had worse. But I felt ill. Again. That oh so extremely familiar always there ill. Now ramped up. Always centered around the left hand side of my torso. Like a low level radiating aura of illness which waxes and wanes in intensity. At times in the past few years, it feels like I am carrying around a lump of plutonium that is sucking the life out of me on the left hand side. When it's behaving itself, I can feel, bearably ill. When it's not, it wipes me out. The migraine has wiped me out. One small silver lining from all of this. This week has given me a real good "radar ping" on what ails me and how if affects me. It's really apparent that I get wiped out, that it's all weirdly left side originating, and that the difference between bad, and bearable is enormous. There's something really fucky wi...

 Holy fuck. An awful day. Today I got another migraine. A nasty one. One of the nastiest ones. I'd call it a top 3 migraine. Not the very worst. But up there. It came on slow. Masqueraded as a headache. I did the right thing. Stopped when I realised. Took 3 aspirin. Tried to sleep. It got worse, and worse and worse. I couldn't sleep with it. It would pull me out in 5 seconds. I slow breathed. I calmed. I let the waves of pain wash over me. Didn't work. It got worse. My shit response tickled first. Whilst I was still in the shallows of it being absolutely awful. The pain sweats kicked in. Dumping all my heat. Pooling sweat in my eyes, my collar bone, any recess, a pool of sweat, everything damp. Nausea kicked in. And then. Yeah. Throwing up. Repeat. Throwing up. Repeat. Except there was no relief this time. No relief in the throwing up bits. I just lost it at some point. Just. A ball of suffering, nothing else. Time slowed. I collapsed to the bathroom floor. Back to bed. Thr...

Being healthy, say the scientists, is quite a bit about other people. In short. Relationships ( good ones ) matter an enormous amount ( this *also* includes your relationship with say, your government, your work place, your health provider as well as how much shit you put up with from your significant other ). TL;DR, the better support network of people you have around you, the less your stress gets to fuck with you, the better your health prognosis overall. The difference between good and bad at this is they reckon about the same as smoking or not smoking. So pretty significant. You can read what the Harvard people running the 84 year and continuing study have to say about it all here - https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/feb/06/how-to-have-a-happy-life-according-to-the-worlds-leading-expert?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB So the irony here is, if you're someone that maybe does a daily excercise routine. Eats right. But then neglects their personal relationships. A...

 Another article about CFS. This one following the dramatic decline of an elite athlete. One quote in the piece sticks out for me : " For a long time, when Earle was resting, he would think about how to explain what living with ME/CFS felt like. “You can’t have big, grand dreams,” he says. “When things are really bad, you’re just lying there in the dark. You become a ghost, you fade out, you don’t exist in the world. But you’re still there for all of it.” " I feel it. Also this bit rang true : “I haven’t had a day where I feel good. There hasn’t even been an hour where I’m like, I feel great,” Earle told me when I spoke to him after his second surgery. “Even right now, having recovered quite a bit, I’m lying here and my head hurts. I’ve got an eye mask on, because light can still bother me sometimes. The mental exertion of socializing is quite taxing for me still.” Yeah. The limping along continually wounded to one extent or the other. It sounds like this dude has so...

 Athena has struggled off and on today. I had to scoot her up the stairs at one point. She was most happy to have been scooted. She doesn't complain when she can't do shit and just adapts. But. If you figure it out and do it for her, she's happier. She seems to get super stiff when she's been asleep for a while. Not sure if it's the position or what, but she locks up hard and takes a while to shake it off. Old age. Ares was similar in the last 18 months of his life. He too started to struggle to get onto sofas, beds, etc. He never lost the ability to go upstairs though. Sad topic all round. Shitty time. Shitty old age. Life can be so very cruel, and often by the end of it, gets the opportunity to be so. Otherwise. Today, on a whim, I had a new TV delivered. I haven't bought a TV in a decade. Once a long ago when the big flat screen TVs were first out in the UK, I went through a phase of buying a new one everytime a good sale came along. A TV for every other room...

 Brutal migraine today. Headache came on quickly, and, I simply opted to go to sleep with it. It didn't, at that point, feel like a migraine, or a warning for a migraine. Couldn't sleep with it, and it slowly travelled across my head to my typical migraine spot. An inch above my right eye. Hmmm. I got up and took the Migraine Aspirin Response Dose. 3x500mg. Went back to bed. Within a few minutes, the migraine was kicking my ass. Nasty. I broke into a migraine sweat. Shivering cold, but with a burning outside, ultra flush. You can feel your cheeks burning with it. Sweating absolute bullets, t-shirt soaked. Ah yes. The wiring goes bonkers. My nausea response tickled. Thought about going nuclear. Didn't. But repeated a few times. My shits response tickled, but didnt go anywhere. This time. There was also a new thing. My hands kept going numb. Pins and needles. And. A weird sensation in my chest and dizziness. The migraine was combining with some heart palpitation nonsense. Oh ...

 Work was such a shitgasm on Tuesday that I forgot we had our vet appointment, and so, I've missed taking Athena to the vets to get a follow up and her started on her anti arthritics. This has not made me feel good. At all. Epic fucking failure. The good news is that it's not a super critical vet visit. The bad news is that the vets have become rammed, and our next appointment is 1st March. Only myself to blame. I had a reminder the day before, yep, all set. But the work was such a ballache, that I entirely forgot about it. That would be the whole herp a derp, trying to manage the creche. Not only is it frustrating, annoying, stressy. It has an even more real impact on me because it makes me forget shit because I am concentrating so hard on wiping asses. If you wanted some great visibility on Why That Shit Isn't Healthy, look no further. And at the end of it, it basically comes down to because people don't want to change being a mess, a disaster, being allowed to be an ...

 Wax on. Wax off. Dark post today. Avoid reading it. Move on. The strong tug of withdrawal smothers me. The urge to quit contact, retreat, ditch social media, curl into a ball and just stop the perpetual screech of the modern world intensifies. And not far behind that my thoughts just circle the end of all things. Tired. Unwell. Sick of struggling. I just want to tap out. I'm not having fun. 50 years feels like more than enough of a gritting your teeth for that long achievement. Work yesterday was busy and frustrating. The familiar loop of people derping about, then crying about it when they smash their own thumb. It's a thing I have gone over at length before. But I realised in summary, it's basically people who are more stupid than me that in one way or another, employ me to continually correct their bullshit and fix their boo boo's when they inevitably and forseeably fuck up. I am tired of being leashed to idiots that I need to clean up after. I think at this point I...

 Flickering like a dodgy lightbulb at the moment. Ok for chunks of time, followed by crashes out of nowhere. Spent the last couple of days mostly playing games, which, at the moment, is a better state. But that being said. Crashing in between games. After. Mmmm. I don't know. This came across my feed today at random. A very long piece on ME/CFS - which I am diagnosed with, and also a very critical look at doctors attitudes and the failures of the NHS around difficult to diagnose problems. https://www.codastory.com/waronscience/chronic-fatigue-syndrome-long-covid-unexplained-symptoms/?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB That it reads for the most part, bang on the nose for me is equal parts satisfying and alarming. I'm on that path. And the end result in that article was death. With not a little help from a neglectful, arrogant, shitty NHS. Ho hum.

 After saying Athena was doing a bit better and I was doing a bit better, we both then were very quickly not doing so better. Athena had a bit of a struggle day yesterday. Again, she's fine. But the back legs went out on her a couple times. A couple of stumbles onto ass, general weakness. Eh. Not such a good day. But she's still happy and game, and they are - touch wood so far - just blips. But notable. Myself, I don't know. I think I had a super CFS day. Really. Fucking. Hardcore. Exhaustion. Coinciding with my ass being.. an ass. Related ? Mmmm. Yesterday in the morning I had a normal person thought. I'd make some bread. Put on a stew. Take Athena for a walk. And Hazel could shampoo her. Sounds reasonable. Sounds good. So I weighed out some bread stuff and threw it in the breadmaker. Uhh ok. I feel tired. Rested. Dragged myself to make the stew - prepped the vegetables. After 10 minutes my legs were shaking. My arms were shaking. My heart was racing. Another 10 minute...

 Felt like shit yesterday. Everything ached, everything was pain. Been there, done that, got the t shirt. Not sure what it is that goes on, but something triggers a massive increase in aches and pains all over. Like, all over. And everything you touch hurts. Lying down hurts. Whatever touches the bed, hurts. This was the thing I had for months - years - on end at one point and just put down to getting old. I would groan when standing up. Hobble down a single step. Just me getting old. Except it wasn't. It's something else. Surprise ! It vanished for many months, and now only occasionally makes a small reappearance. It's most definitely not aging. I think it's possibly related to diet and hydration. If I am dehydrated it can flare up. Not super sure what to make of it. For the most part it's under control. But when it does flare up, it's shit. I have a tentative loose theory that it's "spiky blood". Very unscientific. To be more scientific, I think...

 Work, a walk, some shopping. Wiped. I was in bed by just gone 8pm. Slept for 11 hours. Still not enough. The hole in my ass acted up yesterday, I always wonder if it's another source of exhaustion, it certainly seems to have coincided with me feeling a lot more exhausted since it has come back. Still not gone to the docs with it. I just have no faith in them anymore. I should go. I cannot bring myself to go somewhere that I do not trust and have no faith in - based on exhaustive experience. You can kinda understand how that works right ? Hazel wanted to tag along if I was going shopping. So we took a walk - where she was notably lacking in patience, a little subdued and grumpy. Hazel's moods can run a very wide gamut, and at their edges they fall into serious mental health problems, borderline personality issues and yada. She's been doing pretty well of late, but, it never goes away, and you have to be very careful when it starts to wander into problem territory. An impati...

 A little better again.  Actually managed to make something for dinner yesterday. Pretty shit. But it was something. Standing up and doing shit like that - when I am in a bad state - is amazingly hard. No stamina. No energy. Palpitations. It's crazy. The old - all the warning lights start blinking on and off - routine since I was fucked over 2 years ago. Eh well. Roll with the punches. I suppose. So, a lot of my life is lived like a defensive general always trying to keep one step ahead of the enemy. It's stupidy exhausting, demotivating and yada. No fun. And. Sometimes, well, most of the time, it's just not worth it. All that paddling. Just to keep at a so so level of shit. But I do it anyway. Locked in a constant battle of wits against a foe I can never beat. Meh. There are times however when I can absolutely lean into being a complete dickhead and I will stick my finger in the wound, just to see how much it hurts. Go on. Stick your head in the blender. Because. Yeah. Tod...