Bork Slowly Borking

 Sleep is all over the show. It seems one side effect of all this is that I've lost the absolute compulsive need to sleep all hours of the day. For the moment at least, it has flipped. Now I am sleeping wayyyyy less. Tired. But not exhausted. Not sure my body knows what to make of it. Look ! We can keep going ! Let's keep going til we burn out ! Wheee ! Ah ha. Ha. Headache has persisted. Like. Not shifted. For a moment. A perpetual headache since Monday. Right across the top of my head. Cough and it thumps like a hammer. Do anything and it thumps and makes you wince. In the scale of things it's a "non event" compared to what I usually have. But it does mean that I am definitely not at my best. I mean. When am I ? But it makes doing anything critical a little... yeah.. no. It's a reminder if nothing else to take it easy. Which to be fair the hospital kept telling me. Don't do this. Don't do that. No heavy lifting. No straining. DO YOU NEED A SICK NOTE. ...

 Yeah I know, the blog dates are wacky. I am awake and not awake at weird times, and, the dates are not aligning with my wakeful moments too well. I feel rough today. But. Not the never ending state of constant malaise rough. I feel. More Normal rough. Less ughhhhhhh exhausted, wheezing, death rattling rough. And more. Jeez I am tired. And have a thumping headache. But am otherwise kind of ok. I get it's probably hard to tease out how different that is. The two are like chalk and cheese. This is a very very different rough to what I usually am. One is a fundamental exhaustion everything is wrong circling the drain thing. The other is just a typical normal person rough start to a Wednesday. Don't get me wrong here. I am farrrr from ok. And there are definitely lingering edges of deeper wrongness and bullshittery. But I am a damn sight better than where I was. Touching distance of normal people being ill. Curious. Or not. I am still incredulous the surgery made that much differ...

 Didn't work Today ( yesterday ). Ended up not sleeping, stayed awake, so, all told, was up for something like 45 hours straight. Which, of course, the middle of which was a surgery. Why am I like this. Always doing it the hard way. Anywho. Today I have felt much better. I had a pleasant day. No pain. Nada. I didn't feel groggy. Or exhausted. Or ill. Just. Alright. I can't remember the last time I felt alright. How curious. I told my friend I thought it might be the compression socks I was wearing still. Helping out my shitty circulation. He pointed out I had just had surgery. And that, maybe, just maybe, getting something somewhat fixed in surgery had made me feel a whole lot better. But sure. Blame the socks instead. Put it like that and he has a point. I just don't think the surgery would have had that effect. Maybe I wrong. But also this isn't my first surgery rodeo. I dunno. Today was pleasant. Which was nice. I did get a headache in the evening. But that was ...

 I woke up in the recovery room. Well shit. I am still here. I have to admit to being disappointed. Not this shit again. I don't like this goddamn game. But here we are. I got to the hospital early. The taxi was a good 15 minutes early which meant I was a good 35 minutes early. I was the first one in. And here's the ironic chops for you. I was the penultimate one out. For maximum weighting around goodness. It took them 5 hours before I was even close to surgery. And by the time I got out. A whopping 8 hours+ had passed. On the slightly better side however, I was only left waiting in the shittastic waiting room for 35 minutes. The other multitude of hours spent was in the ward, which, at least you get a lot of space. Room to spread out a bit. And a nurse or three that keep an eye on you and look after you better than sitting out front. I nearly bailed on the surgery. The taxi ride in made me turn green. Awful. I was desperate for the ride to end so I could get out and breathe ai...

 Feel rough today. What's new ? I am dragging myself to the hospital feeling like death warmed up. Have a picture of me in the cab, the picture of health. Hilariously shortly after this felt nauseous, broke into a sweat and felt faint Holy shit. Onwards and upwards.

 Sleeeeeeep. The very dubious prospect that it is at the moment. A little better today. All round. Very. Little. But still. It feels like I've stepped a tiny bit enough away from quite circling the drain. I am still mainlining a crazy schedule of my asthma meds and waking up with punched eyes. But it feels a shade better. I'm probably banging half a dozen blue shots of asthma pump a day. And a few less of the brown "maintenance everyday" one. Both have an effect. The blue one especially ( which, it's supposed to ). Maybe it will continue to get slowly better. Perhaps fixing my ass will help the overall situation. Think positive right. In any case. Meh. I absolutely think I need to go back to the GPs and I dont know, lets tackle the whole black eyes iffy sleep malarkey that crops up. Perhaps a place to start would be a sleep apnea study thing. And maybe rule that in or out. I suspect I probably do have it, but, to date, I haven't really figured that It's A ...

 Worse today, if that's even possible. Now even if I sleep for a couple of hours, my eyes black up, my chest hurts, and I feel awful. My hands go dead. Doesn't matter which way I sleep anymore. Mm. Perhaps I am just being miserable. But it feels like I'm circling the drain. Feels like my time is almost up. I'm having to take a lot of asthma meds just to keep shit at bay. Somehow, I don't think the surgery is going to be the issue. Never count out the chance of indefinite lingering, ho ho. At this rate, I think I'm going to go to sleep at some point, and not wake up. Which. Is not terrible. I need to think about Athena. I think I might set something up with my brother where I ping him everyday perhaps. I dunno. What else can I do ? Anywho. Maybe shit will turn round. You never know. I'm not depressed. Not being a gloom bunny. Just. Know how much my body is struggling at the moment. I think tomorrow I may write a "final words" bit. Again. Ha. Always ...

 So today I had my pre-op check. I had my doubts I would be cleared. Which turned out to be founded. As they collated tests and asked me questions I could see the face. Turn frowny. Then turn very frowny. Then pause. And think. They did a double take over my EKG again. You can tell. Because they say just going to check. They check it. Then they say. Hmm. I want someone else to look at this. Ah ha ha. Ok. After the tests and the questions - the result. I don't think we can clear you, the chief surgical nurse said. There is a concern here that you wont wake up again. I shrugged and gave a wan smile. You joke she said ( I don't ), but it's important. If it's ok with you, we're going to cancel it. And get you further checked out. Sure I said. I imagined more interminable delays. And I figured, if they cancelled now, I doubt I would ever get it done. Because this was as good as I get. I pondered saying I just wanted it done. But I didn't bother. I definitely wasn...

 Today was mostly a wash out. I slept. And felt like shit. And slept again. So didn't get out. Didn't get to see Hazel. Blah. I had an evening date arranged with a friend for 7pm, one of the people I got in touch with last week. Dragged myself out of bed for 4.30pm, felt like death warmed up. Took Athena out. Felt bad. Had to just sit down and rest when I got back. And time marched inexorably on. Dragged myself into the shower, and barely, just barely, pulled myself together, got in the car, and pootled on over to my friends house in time for 7. Honestly. An absolutely heroic and terrible battle. Just to get in a fucking car. For 7pm. Had a lovely dinner. Played a cool game. Felt mostly alright. Went home after a really nice evening. My friend always makes the best dinners. Former chef. Always hits it out of the park. This evening was slow cooked beef tacos with home made salsa. Awesome. He was genuinely happy to see me, and ended up lamenting that he wasn't as positive, we...

Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. My sleep is not slightly improving. My lungs are not improving. Worse today. Much worse. Sleeping for more than an hour brings it on aggressively, accompanied by a ribbon of pain around my chest. Like someone has thrown a set of belts around you and has cinched them too tight. Perhaps it's just something of a - long - chest cold. Fucking with my embattled immune system ( more cold sores, yay ). Perhaps. If it is, it doesn't feel like any kind of chest cold I've ever had before. Not even slightly. Hmm. Who knows. The vagaries of post chronically ill me. Where everything I previously knew about How Shit Works With My Body, and all my experiences to date have been thrown out the window and replaced with a dumpster fire of unpredictable awfulness. Put in a solid amount of work this week - helped by the fact that my sleep is sporadic and I am burning the candle at both ends trying to maintain breathing. Work as such, gobbles up my time, and then asks fo...

 My sleep is very very slowly improving. By the tiniest amount. Maybe ? Don't get me wrong. It's very shit. And pretty alarming. But. I am trying my best. I have found splitting sleep into two parts is helping - sleep for 3 or 4 hours, get up and do stuff. Repeat. The less time prone and inactive lessens the dive and the problems. That being said. It seems to have reached a particularly horrendous threshold. Perhaps it's a chat I had with a friend today. Perhaps not. But. I think. I may actually need to go to the docs and Try Again and stick my head in the blender and get them to check this little bit out. Because it's pretty unsustainable. My friend in some respects is the opposite to me. For one thing. She's a girl. Eww. Girls. Albeit I do tend to have , eh, "better", relationships with women than men. Where "better" is a ridiculous subjective trying to compare apples to pears. Women in my experience tend to be a whole heap better with actually...

 Holy shitballs, rough day. Slept "fitfully" for a very long time. Fitfully as in, not up every 10 minutes. But every few hours. Felt like garbage. Managed to hilariously pull myself together enough to make a call to sort an MOT out. That was the extent of my excellence. And then, get it together for our weekly session of Baldurs Gate in the evening. But I had to take a nap before hand. I felt increasingly ill. Played BG3, started feeling ill half way through. It was fun. But by the end of it I felt so shit. A migraine slunk in. Unusual timing. As soon as we stopped playing I went off, took aspirin, back to bed. Even though at this point, I had been up for only or so hours. And slept... .. and went so far down. Chest hurt. Stomach hurt. Migraine rolled across my head. I could feel myself being pushed so low. So many pains and issues all stacked up on one another, even whilst I was in the best place I could be - going to sleep in a dark quiet room.  Really. Super. No bueno. Bu...

 Yeah, sleep is a serious problem right now. This is something that's got worse in the last several weeks, and ramped up in the last couple. Sleeping now brings on a low end cough, and a weird sensation of liquid shifting in my lungs when I roll over. Sleeping on the right is worse than the left, both lead to sucked in eyeballs, black eyes, and a "skittering" feeling in my chest. Get bursts of dizzy and all sorts. All in all it's very bad juju and at times I wake up feeling like I'm being suffocated with bits of me having lost circulation. Uh huh. Very no bueno. Perhaps it's just a phase. Perhaps it's the worsening of General Shit. Feels like I'm edging towards a finally critical piece of me hardware failing. But who knows. Lingering always an option, as ever.  Later in the day walk with Athena today. In the dark. Like old times. She was keen to get out. She came and asked me if we could go out. Boop. Boop. Wrassle. Let's goooo. Except her let'...

 So I've heard back from a lot of people over the past 12 hours or so. Catching up. It has been nice. Most of them I haven't spoke to in over a year. If and when I am up for it and around, I have a few invitations for cups of tea and the like. So. There's that. Went for a walk today with Hazel. I wasn't feeling it, but, she asked, so, off we went. She wants to meet up a lot in the next week because... she's away for two months. Off to her dads for a month, and then off to the US to see her boyfriend for a month. Quite the extended amount of time away from home. Of all the things, she said she was anxious about not seeing Athena for 2 months. Uh huh. 2 months is a long time in Athena world. Different for me of course. But I couldn't spend that amount of time away from Athena. Fuck that. Walk was nice, getting cold. Athena didn't seem to mind and spent sometime in the literally freezing river. All good. She likes going for a walk as a group best of all I think...

 I don't know whether I've finally started losing my brain crunching abilities or this problem is making my mind melt in very specific ways. This should be absolutely trivial trivial. Not even worth thinking about. And yet. Here is a very simple conceptual task. Report when an expiry date is hit. Report when an expiry date is 1 month or less away from being hit. Report when an expiry date is 2 months or less away from being hit. Easy. We might break it down like this ( bearing in mind that dates in the past are smaller than dates in the future ). Check the date against today, if its less than today, its expired. Check the date less a month against today ( ie, 1 month sooner ). If its less than today its expiring soon. Check the date less 2 months against today. If its less than today, its expiring later. A bit less wordy and a bit more psuedo codey it would look like this : If ExpiryDate<Today Then EXPIRED Else If ExpiryDate-1 Month<Today Then Expiring Soon Else If Expiry...

 Think I might have discovered something. Sleeping on my right side straight up. Makes me struggle. Breathing struggle. Gives me a woozy head. Super black eyes. Almost like something is not working right. Squished. Struggling. Whatever. I think I've noticed a correlation. The longer I sleep like that, the worse I get. And I mean, really worse. It's also offset somewhat by how much caffeine I've had. The more. The better. I wonder. If this isn't a heart / fitness malarkey thing. Shitty heart struggling. Who knows. More data required. I will make a conscious effort to try sleeping on my leftside a lot more. And somewhat facedown. And see if it makes a difference. Today. It seems is reach out day. For no good reason whatsoever, I have reached out to renew contacts with people I have largely ignored for a year or more. Not because they are bad people. Just because I have isolated myself. It's not you. It's me. But today I have pinged out. Hey. How you doing. I want ...

 Hospital phoned today. Got a date for my surgery, 27th November. And the pre checkup on the 24th November. So. That's good. Hazel said she can't be around for that date - off to her dads to babysit their dog whilst they are away - albeit her step brother will be in the house too. Ordinarily not a big deal. With a big support network where I live, I could ask around. But. I've let all of that decay. Hermitted up. Not talking to people. So. I don't actually have anyone else to ask. Well. There are some people, but, I don't think it would be fair to be honest. So I think I might tell the hospital I've got no one to come pick me up. This would probably mean I would have to stay a night. However, that's not really doable either with Athena on her ownsome. So. I think I am going to finagle it somehow. Not sure how. Convince them to let me go unsupervised. There is also of course the risk that they turn up something in the pre checkup that means I can't have ...