Sep 26

 Not a great weekend as it turned out.

The exhaustion and sleep monster has crept up on me again, and, the killer blow, I got a migraine on Sunday that wiped me out for nearly 24 hours.

The migraine was kind of my fault. In that I didn't take care of it. It started slow, very slow and I was being social so I ignored it. I would just, ride through it. It's a headache. It will go. Despite it being in my classic migraine spot and me absolutely knowing better.

I would pay for it later I imagined, it would be ok. Don't ditch your social gaming. People will be disappointed.

So I did that.

Until it got bad. And I realised I had to stop. Right then. Right now.

And by that time it was farrrr too late to take care of.

I took aspirin and went to bed immediately.

Too late.

It sunk its teeth into my right frontal lobe hardcore. I felt the sweat suddenly prickle all over my body, the involuntary pain sweats. Oh boy. Empty your head. Slow your breathing. Try to catch sleep. Force your body into a rest state. I struggled with it for an hour sometimes winning, sometimes losing, a horrible drawn out agony before I lost entirely, my vomit response tickled, and suddenly I was up and heaving whether I wanted to or not.

Cue hugging the toilet and collapsing on the bathroom floor.

Always a bad migraine day when you find yourself sprawled on the bathroom floor gasping for breath and in a general state of vomit, piss and shit. Wonderful. Which is an understatement. At those points everything dwindles down to a ragged next breath and pain. There is nothing else. Not worrying about you being covered in vomit. Not worrying about the pee on your legs. Or that you're slumped in dust and damp towels. It's all gone. All there is, is that nail of pain hammered through your head, a whimpering breath, and a body going haywire with sweats and cold and shivering and heat.

Fortunately. I was treated to only one round of heaving and collapsing shenanigans. So. I guess. In the hall of fame list of evil migraines, this was mid level. Bad. But not epic.

Sometime later I crawled up off the bathroom floor, went back to bed, and actually slept and escaped the pain.

I woke up 3 hours later and flicked on the light. I had the strongest recoil from light I've ever had, reflexive, awful, I closed my eyes hissing. I know this is what migraines do. Make you sensitive to light. And this time it was really bad. My head snarled but was out of proper evil migraine territory. Ate something. Went back to sleep.

And felt absolutely shit for the entire next day. For starters I couldn't wake up. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. And when I did. I felt utterly awful. Like I had been runover by a truck.

I took Athena out for a walk with gritted teeth - maybe the fresh air and walk would do me good.

No.

I had something to eat - maybe some food would help, I had eaten only a handful of food in 48 hours. No. The food made no difference.

Maybe some more painkillers !

No. Made no difference.

I sat for 4 hours trying to nurse myself into being able to feel human.

In the end after nearly 24 hours, I started to feel better. But so much time had been eaten by feeling ill and or sleeping.

Eh well.

The day after the migraine I felt like... I kind of had a low level flu like set of symptoms. Very low level. Like the oncoming feeling of a flu. Where you feel grotty. And a little slow and a little treacley and something is off. I pondered if this is the inflammation malarkey kicking in. Making me feel just generally ill. Who knows.

Work today. I feel a little brighter but still pretty goddamn shit.

My day has already been plagued with questions, and, Andy trying to sell stuff to clients coming out with outright lies about why they should do that. Which puts me in a very awkward position. Help me write this document he said. He presented me with a very hastily written single page Word document, half of which was dubious and some of which was utter bullshit. Yeah. No. I am not putting my name to that. It's a lie.

I get he wants to sell stuff and blah. But equally. As one of my main hats is IT consultant, I personally feel I have a professional responsibility to actually, you know, give good advice. I know not everyone is like this - they will sell you their own grandma if it makes them money. But I am not like that. I am not a snakeoil salesman and never will be. I will tell you straight what is what.

So I pushed back on Andy. He wasn't happy. But. That's the way it has to be. If he puts me in a position where I have to lie, or, support his lies, I am not going to be able to do so. And it's going to be another point of contention where I have to go my seperate ways.

I am hoping this is just a blip and not a sign of things to come. Andy defaulting more to his dodgy cowboy salesman thing. I am definitely not following him down into anxiety ridden lies.

Ho hum.

Ultimately even if I do keep my name away from bullshit, I will likely go down with that ship as the whole enterprise could pick up a bad reputation and I will be tarred with that same brush. I did directly warn Andy that if he got caught out in a lie his reputation would be destroyed and people would never trust anything he has to say again. He gets it. But. As ever. Whether he follows through with it is highly debatable. The decisions he makes on the spot are more often than not driven by anxiety and prone to being terrible.