Bork Slowly Borking

Super tired. Not been able to sleep properly. And the punchy eyes and yada blah have stacked up. Making me feel pretty ill at times. Hazel duly arrived on Friday. Picked her up. She's staying with me a while til she feels up to going back home. In the meantime she's helping a little around the house and with Athena. So. That's good. We had a chat about how it went in the US. She talked. I listened. In the end she acknowledged the whole thing might be a bust. But. Seeing how it goes. I said, brutally, on paper, if this was a set of tests someone had handed me.. I know she says.. you wouldn't pass them. Yeah. Pretty bad. But eh. People make mistakes. Learn. Change. Who knows. As it turns out the boyfriend is thousands in debt. Has a committed behavioural problem with spending huge amounts of money on onlyfans and fastfood. And despite being 32 is maturity wise, probably somewhere in the low 20's. At most. Depending which generation you are comparing to. He's just ...

 Work. Dropped some stuff at the dump. Vet. New game launched. But. I've been scraping along the bottom the whole day. And yes. Well aware I have taken the piss today. And been busy. Struggled to pull myself into gear to play a new game this evening with a friend. It was cool. But as the evening wore on, I felt ill, bad enough it started pulling me out of the game. I am tired. And my asthma is flaring. Or. I am coming down with something. Or maybe it's the chronic tiredness making me feel like that. Or. I dunno. Taking the piss today maybe the final straw. Think my body may be going to kick my ass severely at this point. Ho hum. Athena vet visit was no change. Maybe some area around the eye had cleared up a little. But by and large, no change. And still an ugly scar over the front of the eye. As time goes on we're a little worried about a bulge at the side of the eye now. A possible sign of a tumour. Which. To quote the vet, if it is that, the eye is buggered. Gone. Uh huh...

 ... and a worse day. My brief blip yesterday of feeling a bit better is done. Today was hard. Much of my plans for what I wanted to get done today disappeared. In the end all I could do was half a day of work. And that was literally it. Sleep was very problematic. I woke up at 6am with my eyes dropping out of my head. Punched. Awful. Exhausted. I got up. Tried washing my face. Changing t shirt. Anything I could do for a reset. Then went back to bed. At 8am I woke up from the depths. Sluggish. Groggy. Feeling terrible. If the day was going to be like this, I was going to need to skip work again. I went back to sleep. Just after 10am I repeated the process. Felt terrible. But committed to staying up. And doing something. And noodled my way through work. By midday I was awake and with it, if not exactly well. A headache thrummed over my right eye. Migraine territory. But I ignored it. ( oh no ). I had a chat with Andy, blew off some steam had a catch up. It was good.  Byt mid af...

 Slightly better today, although it still looks like I've been in a fist fight. Yesterday we had high winds and I threw open the windows to let the place air out. I seem to do better in the fresh air. Cold or not. So maybe that helped some. The window banged shut a few times during the wind, and marvellously I discovered that the window in question was slowly pushing itself out of the wall to eventually just flop on the ground, complete with crumbling mortar and plaster. Wonderful. Honestly. This house has so many structural bits wrong with it. We wont get into the enormous crack in the loft, the sagging rooves or the slow bending joist over the kitchen. I try not to think about it. It is anxiety inducing. I pushed the window back in with a crunch. It seems ok enough. The window fitters all those years ago clearly did an excellent job with it. On that particular window they were more interested in the lead weights they had found in the existing window frame, and perhaps less intere...

 Reaching a low level health point. Exhausted. Tired. Punchy eyes. Difficulty breathing. Brain zaps. It's getting hard to move in any given day. I have to build up my strength, make an effort, then collapse back again. I am no longer getting any benefit from sleep. Sleep. Wake up. Same. Sometimes I will have 10 minutes of a gap on waking up before I get hit hard by exhaustion. I stood dazed in the kitchen a few days ago just feeling terrible . I had fed the mutts. And wobbled slow side to side. I couldn't put a finger on it. What's going on ? I have no clue. Other than I feel like I am about to hit the floor, no energy, everything slowing down, it feels like everything wants to stop. I can find no relief from this. I've run out of ideas and energy. Just hitting asthma meds. Trying to stay hydrated. Trying to look after Athenas eye. And sleeping. I made a supreme effort today and took the muttleys out for a walk - we haven't been out for a good few days, I just haven...

 Something I often get told, by those that are paying attention to those things, is that my boundaries suck. In so much as. I always help. I always put others first. I fuck myself up. To a fault. And my lack of boundaries in being able sometimes to say no, or, this is too much, my incapability to sometimes put myself first, is a detriment to me. And I don't argue with that. It's a fair.. ish... point. It is one of my many flaws. I am that way because of my history, because of how I was raised, and the environment I grew up in. But that's not the point. I am aware it's an issue. I sometimes try to work on it, but, bone deep, it can be very hard for me to not help. Impossible even. In the scale of flaws to have, it's one of those insidious ones that actually can benefit society and is seen in a certain light as a Good Thing. As it has a generally positive influence to others. But. Here's the rub. Just like a manically overworking overachieving person seems like a...

 Today started much as yesterday. Groaning awful pain and shocking tiredness, punchy stinging eyes, and a prolonged death gargle. Honestly, I think my neighbours probably think I'm dying - I groan an awful lot in this state. It is not, I assure you, something I am doing on purpose. It just happens. As a matter of fact vocalisation for how shit I am feeling. Such was the case that again I really couldn't make a go of it this morning, and skipped work. At midday, with a few pinging messages floating their way through to my sub conscience, I hauled myself awake, and got on with some work. I busted out a few things. Which was pretty good. Even though I only spent half a day working. Today was also Vet day. Again. Checking on Athena's state. To me, her eye condition has not improved one bit. Same thing. Sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse, but a mass of opaque scar tissues sits over her eye, blinding her. Today I had resolved to move things along. Get a referral....

 Ok, something a bit lighter. And very rambling. As a Gen X type dude from the UK, I span a culinary age that went from a lawless wasteland of horrors, to a sophisticated international smorgasbord of wonders. For a while there as a kid, things like garlic were treated with at best suspicion and at worst outright disgust. Things like tacos and sushi were entirely unknown, and even things a bit more closer to home like goulash or pierogi were practically unheard of. My mom, bless her heart, would always for instance make a curry exactly the same way everytime. And that everytime was always with a healthy dose of sultanas added in. For many years I thought I wasn't a big fan of curry. I disliked the sweet sultanas spoiling the whole thing ( to my palette ). It would be many years later before I found out that there were many curries, and none of them were anything like my mom made, and that I loved curries. This turned out to be a running theme for me. Dishes I thought I hated as a ...

 I have hit something of a soft wall. The energy I was managing to desperately siphon from somewhere has finally sputtered out and I have begun to collapse into my perma-ill state. Keeping up with Athenas meds is difficult. Blurring. The strict time schedule has fudged and now I keep up her her drops whenever I am near, with a couple of hard wake up alarm calls during the early hours of the morning to keep those on track. I am worn down with everything. The stupid constant go since Christmas has finally started biting my ass hard. My breathing has suddenly and dramatically worsened again. Crackly lungs, having to consciously gasp when trying to sleep. Dosing myself up with multi doses of asthma meds every day. Bone deep exhaustion beyond the tiredness, the heaviness of limbs, the slow firing of an exhausted brain taking hours to warm up. The massive flare up of pains all over. Sharp. Knifing. Breath stealing. Pains. That make you groan out loud and creak around like an invalid. The...

 Athena's eye is much the same. On talking to my vet friend about it, she reckons a referral to an optholmalogist is overdue for some more drastic treatment and a little bit of surgery. Eh. Meh. I listened to what she said, she probably has a point. Next week I will bring up with my vet and see what he says. If there is a problem with the old vet at my usual place it is that he does sometimes drag his heels about getting the bigger more serious things sorted. He was not going to send Ares to get a scan until one of the more junior vets pushed for it - and lo and behold the scan turned something up. So perhaps he's just dragging his heels a little bit again. I dunno. Feels a little like deckchair arranging on the titanic anyway. I think even if her eye heals, it will still be in for trouble. Ho well. Can only try. Next week I will mention it for sure. Yesterday I checked in on my stressed friend, and no surprise, they had filled their day again with stressy bullshit to do. Chas...

 Back and forth to the vets. I have lost count of how many times we have now been. No more than 3 days from a visit. And sometimes back to back days. I haven't bothered to track the cost. It must be fairly significant by now however. Not that it matters. I am not counting. We have settled into the same pattern of treatment for Athena. Endless eye drops. Irrigations. Anti biotics. The bombardment of potions and liquids every few hours doesn't stop. We are now on 4 different regimes of liquid in eyes. And the latest advice is for one of them to be done as often as possible. But there is no shift in condition or improvement. I think, as ever, her eye is lost. We are just fighting some impossible fight to keep it hydrated and in a permanent state of not quite dead. But her sight is still gone, has been gone for weeks at this point. Her eye is still the same gnarled scar of opaque tissue, sometimes bloodied, awful looking. I don't think it will recover. Nevertheless, we persist,...

 Vet visit today. Eye is still bad. But doesn't seem to have got any worse. Which isn't a super high bar to clear - if it gets worse, Athena loses her eye. It's that simple. The vet seemed to think that perhaps the center had stabilised a little - not better, not worse, and maybe was a good sign. The eye wasn't lost yet he said. But it remains a delicate tricky space. On Tuesday he said it looked like it was going to pop - go through the last corneal layer - and lose the eye. Today. Doesn't seem to have got that far. So we're maintaining what we're doing and we're back again on a short follow up. Next week, Wednesday. The vet is also sending some pictures off to a specialist to see if they have any input. We're pretty sure we know where we are, but, get an expert to look them over. At the moment we're waiting - and hoping - that the eye improves just enough that steroids can be used and, the vet seems to think at that point a lot of the scar tiss...

 Tired. The days dissolve into blocks of four hours between each Athena set of eyedrops. My ADHD like itches constantly trigger, constantly watching the clock, constantly figuring out how much time, constantly giving me executive dysfunction as well, its only 3 hours away, I can't do anything. It's exhausting, and not just from a, hey, I'm not sleeping for more than 3 hours at a time ! Yesterday, on top of everything else, I also had to go flat sit Hazel's place for a while so the inspector could come round. He was, of course, late. Stupidly, when I got a little energy back sitting waiting at Hazel's, I decided to do her washing up and her trash runs and generally tidy the kitchen. She is absolutely a trash panda disaster. I'm a bit of a disaster myself. She makes me look great. 3 sinks full of washing up, 3 runs to the bins, and a pop over to the local shop for some cleaning supplies to clean her grubby stove top, and the kitchen was a bit better. I sorted putt...