Bork Slowly Borking

Health is poor. Up and down a little. But persistently bad. My stomach or whatever is continually on a knife edge. My eyes are a disaster. And the anxiety is back. My ill health is pulling my mentals down and my anxiety up. Last night in a particularly low state I considered that ending it all would be the kind thing at this point. On top of the other reasons to do it. Being so ill all the time. I don't want to suffer. And all I'm doing right now is living incredibly defensively to the point it hurts with all the ifs and buts and rules. And still feeling shit. Sigh. Today I am at least not suicidal. But anxious. And unwell. I nurse my strength to try and give me little windows of feeling better. Today I was up early to take Hazel and Poppy to the vets. It was rough. I felt like shit. But we got it done. The xray has found something. What has yet to be communicated. But it's clear there is something wrong with the shoulder. As I suspected all along and thought an X ray would...

 I feel so ill all the time. The period after waking up is often the worst. I feel truly terrible. I always have bloodshot eyes. Sometimes I can "feel" them because they are also stinging, sometimes I can't. The shadows beneath my eyes deepen. I have moments where I feel a bit better on some days. And sometimes I can push myself to do a few things. But generally, I am just really ill all the time. I realise I have become mostly bed bound. Not entirely. I get up and noodle a little. But mostly. When I take a step back and look at the trend across time, it is grim. As I said to my friend just before Xmas, whatever it is I have, it's progressing. At times it crushes me mentally. The hopelessness is real. But I just feel so ill that I don't want to do anything, don't want to continue. It's a bleak existence. At other times I can shake myself off, grit my teeth, and just get on with it. But like earlier this year when I realised I was suffering from trauma from...

 Feeling fairly shit at the moment. Not as bad as I was overnight. But. Not good. The nausea is back, not as bad as it was, but, it has become once again very common, sitting with me for most of a day. It's at the level where it can go either way, either, pushing you into not doing anything feeling unwell, or, gritting your teeth, getting on with shit despite feeling green around the gills, and achieving a few minor things. Marvellous. Yesterday I decided I needed to get out and get some fresh air. So. I decided to go see Hazel for a while. Just to see how she was doing, how Poppy was doing. It was good to get out. But sad. Hazel talks along about Poppy and the dogs she has seen and met and yada. Which is nice. But it is bitter sweet for me. I say nothing. But. After a while. It makes me very sad. I cannot help but think about Ares or Athena and their experiences, it makes me terribly sad. We also talked about her Aunt a bit. With MS. Its latest symptoms. So very hard. I cannot he...

 2.30am. I am pulled awake by a feeling of being very unwell. I feel somewhat nauseous. Very faintly feverish. A little too hot. A little too "off". Everything feels very wrong. I feel weak and buzzy. Oh dear. This is a mix of the same shit I have been feeling for months. My eyes are punchy. This is kind of what I was afraid of. That I would get this ill whilst being away. Instead I am this ill at home, where I had in the back of my mind imagined I would perhaps be best geared to have the least burn to my energy. As I sit up, I feel more ill. Unable to sleep. Hmm. Not good. Perhaps it will pass. It feels like this year has been building to this general worsening however. I feel so very weak. Can't keep my arms up to type. Going to try to get back to sleep. I expect it's going to be rough. Ho hum.

 Christmas, and today hasn't been too bad, but it's definitely had it's better and worse moments. In hindsight choosing to stay at home this year, burn very little energy, and nurse my ailing health was absolutely the right call. There have been points today where I haven't felt too bad, before soon enough my energy burns out, I feel tired, ill, and need to lie down and be quiet. I think if I had pushed my luck today my health would have absolutely suffered for it. As it is, I feel like it has maintained a bit of a status quo. I've felt far worse. I have obviously felt far better. But all in all, today was ok. Yesterday in a fit of being social I made sure to ping a whole bunch of people to say hello and wish them a nice day. No comments about my health or shit. Just. Hope you have a nice day. A few did ask. How you doing. Why are you at home. Well. Shit. And because I'm shit. But otherwise. I kept it light. Today I have noodled around a little with some cooking...

 Phonecall bright and early this morning. The GPs. Cancelling my appointment. The doc was feeling poorly, so, cancelled appointments all round. Could I instead do the 6th of January. Shit happens. People get ill. And docs get ill more often than most I would imagine. So I can't really be annoyed by it. I accepted the re-schedule without any fuss, sure, I can do that. The problem here is not the sudden cancellation. This is to be expected. But this combined with the fact that it takes weeks if not months to see a doc then becomes a huge problem. The problem is the rest of how it works and not the fact you have to cancel last minute on a given day. So. Jan 6th. I think this will be something like 8 weeks from the beginning of trying to get an appointment to actually getting one. Assuming that by the 6th, all things equal, I actually see a GP. Once again I mull over the thought of what is the point in having a GP "service" there at all, if they are seeing you at best withi...

 Today the knife was driven deep. I woke up feeling very rough. Eyes red and bloodshot. The deepest bruises ever around my eyes, even, oddly, this time up into my forehead. A bruised crease line in my forehead. Deep ugly marks around my eye sockets, wrapping around my the side of my head, blotchy shadows. More than ever this morning had you looked at me, you could visibly see how much of a kicking I am taking. An old friend was due to visit today. I felt like shit. Leaden. Nothing functioning. Both my arms buzzing with pins and needles. I had said to my friend I would make a high effort to be available. Because fuck it. So I slumped for four hours. Nursing a cup of tea. Trying, slowly, to pull myself together. 20 minutes before he arrived, checking he was still due, I struggled up, did some washing up and made lunch. I took it easy. Nursed what little energy I had. My friend turned up, we spent most of the afternoon together. It was good. Good to catch up. And I took my recently pr...

 Yesterday was a better day than I've had in a very long time. I had a touch of nausea again at night, this seems to be something of a mini pattern at the moment, but otherwise, it left me alone. After the previous really busy day of being out so long, you might imagine that yesterday, the day after, I would pay the price for it. But that didn't happen. Instead I felt actually pretty decent - in the relative scale of things. I even went out to get some Xmas groceries, and as I noodled around the supermarket, I didn't flag, I didn't feel ill, and I was better there than I have been in literally years. I noticed it. Of course. Huh. I'm. Doing ok. Amazing. Toward the end my energy flagged and the ghost of not feeling well passed over me, but it was very mild. A distant warning. Hey. Fuck face. Don't push your luck. So I finished up, got home, packed it all away, and still felt relatively ok. The rest of the day went similarly. Well. I thought. Maybe the day out did...

 Busy day today. Pushing my luck. Today I went and picked up a scrip for Poppy from my vets, then immediately went to meet a friend, and then right after that, took Hazel and Poppy for their hydrotherapy. All day out. 6 hours or so. A lot.  A touch of nausea again this morning. I had a little late last night. It stayed with me in the morning and I felt rough. Took time to slowly wake up and warm up. And by the time I headed out I wasn't well, but, it was doable. I can't say I was looking forwards to visiting my local vets. As lovely as they are. As wonderful as the service they provided was. It is haunted by both Ares and Athena. Both of them took their last breaths there. No matter how well I cope, or how I frame it, those shadows draw long at the vets. I understand that I am broken. And that it is, to some extent, or a greater extent, or something, my fault that I cannot shake it, or live with it. A failure to be a functioning adult. So all I see in those places are shadows....

 The nausea has subsided a lot. It pops up now and again during a 24 hour period, but, it does seem like it's finally on the way out. Time wise, it would be around six weeks start to finish. Which would put it slap bang around the time for an untreated peptic ulcer. My anxiety on the other hand has gone through the roof. Each day is a constant high strung moment where every other thought can be an inspiration of fear and uncertainty. I can also feel it in my limbs, that oh so typical high stress, high anxiety, depression "weight". My mental state is poor. But. I think it's moving in the right direction, albeit very slowly. My sleep is also continuing to be a challenge, the push to have weird sleep hours is very strong as I require many hours of sleep and where i don't feel well at the best of times, the tendency to help it with sleep means a regular sleep schedule is very difficult. Despite that I am still, just about, keeping to some kind of normal schedule, albe...

 Better day yesterday. No nausea for the entire day. The relief this was and the difference it made was huge. I felt fragile. But. Not having the constant blegh feeling was amazing. So I actually sat up, played some games rather than being forced to be in bed all day. As soon as I went to sleep the nausea was back. Woke me up. Unlike the last few days this was not accompanied by a feverish type feeling and all the rest. I tried ignoring it and rolling over, only for it to come back worse. Gulped down some antacid and that seemed to do well enough to let me get back to sleep and stay there. Today, the nausea is back. I've had worse. But it's there, making everything feel shit, harder to concentrate, leeching every bit of motivation into a just leave me alone feeling. Big anxiety spike this morning in the early hours as my body decided that maybe now would be a good time to kickstart. I tried just being chill with it. This is likely the cortisol kicking in. Just. Chill. Let it p...

 A quieter day symptoms wise followed by a diabolical night. It's getting slowly worse, not better. The nausea at night gives way to an odd malaise of feeling incredibly ill and slightly feverish. Too hot. Prickles. And the oddest sense of.. ill... in my upper back. I don't know. The aches there are pretty bad, both sides, lower lat area. Aches like an ass. Then can leech away after a while. Weak and shaky. It's better if I am awake. It is terrible if I sleep. I am so tired. Exhausted. This is definitely a trajectory. Whatever is going on has got worse. Roll over. Suck it up. Keep going til you drop. What else is there ? I have woken up a little, sat up, it makes it feel quite a bit better, but I still feel weak, slightly feverish, and nauseous. I am extremely tired.

 Very ill last night. Nausea is now waking me up from sleep, and I can't get rid of it lying down. I just have to wait it out.. for hours.. major nausea last night, and some stabbing pains. Just have to turn over and ignore it. Not good. The rest of me nausea wise is not doing good either. Eyes are a mess again. Tinnitus has screeched up. The face crawling has started up again. Gout is grumbling in the background, exhaustion, the shakes, and on, and on. My mentals are collapsing. I am back on my mental meds. Maybe or maybe not in the nick of time. My anxiety is spiking, and I am getting very sketchy mentals throughout a day, verging on panics, and just that general "madness" of split second thoughts that go instantly sideways - hard to describe. It's just quicker to say bonkers. My physical health is absolutely sketching me out hardcore mentally speaking. I am doing my best with it. Trying not to overthink it. Trying to just rest. And being optimistic that the mental ...

 Really. Fucking. Ill. I typically have a period of feeling a bit better in a given day. A calm. A relative normality. Maybe 2 hours. The period changes depending where I am sleeping and eating in that given day. Sometimes it's the period just before I sleep. Sometimes it's the period not long after I wake where I have slept for a very long time. That small window of relative calm comes with a long list of caveats. Don't move. Don't exert. Don't do shit. And you will have that window. Fuck with it. At all. Do even the slightest of exertion. And you will find out, and slump into a shitty ill state. Regardless. After that small window, the ill comes on. Nausea. Exhaustion. Mood bounces. All the rest of it. At the moment. I am feeling more ill than ever. I don't see how this continues really. But eh well. I have to remind myself it doesn't matter. You aren't enjoying yourself anyway. What does it matter if you just end up carking it. But like my friend say...

 A very dark mood has overtaken me. Very. Dark. Today after a little sleep, I roused myself to go out and pick up a few supplies to make a one off fairly special curry. This time I did not walk around the grocery store with a death grip. Very little pain this time. But something different. Anxiety. I was afraid of being out. My health hovered in a kind of ok, but just on the tipping point of kicking off. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop. Damocles sword hovering above your head suspended by a single hair. I felt jumpy. Anxious. Not altogether well, like a badly put together jigsaw puzzle. Functioning, doing things, but something fundamental was terribly wrong. I didn't make a long job of it. Making a long job of anything these days is A Mistake. Keep it short. But even so, by the time I was finished, my health was deciding that it was surely time to start shitting the bed. My nausea had been slowly increasing. I could feel my thoughts slide away in that oh so familiar way, re...

 Slightly better day today. Which is something I suppose. Although of course I crashed out half way through and went to bed at 4pm. Because of course. The nausea has been considerably better today. The rest of it. Eh. Meh. Not so much. I've not done shit except rest, which helps. I think I am just going to take the next few days to rest and not do a hell of a lot. I answered a couple of Q's for work today, no big deal. Ostensibly I am still in zero to low working mode. In theory I am due the time off anyway. So after mulling over the Hazel situation I've decided to help out. Not a little of this decision has been after listening to a couple of friends advice. One who advocated cutting her off in no two ways, and one who acknowledged how difficult that choice was, that it wasn't fair of her, but that you knew what you were getting with her ie, expect fuckery. A key unintuitive thing he said was to be "selfish", and pay to help, because not paying to help would...

 Rough few days. The garage phoned up, car had been fixed, MOT passed, waiting pickup. Cool. They phoned literally at the end of the day - 30 minutes before closing time, was I going to come in and pick it up ? They had woken me up out of a deep and groggy sleep. I was 20 minutes on the other side of the city. Not including getting myself ready, and a taxi on my doorstep. Yeah. Probably not today then. The following day I was up very early. Super early. Fucky sleep cycle. The internet went out. Proper, out, all round. Fucked up. I was tired. Exhausted. I felt sick. Everything was hurting. I had no car. I had no internet. I couldn't watch shit. Everything was a problem. These days I tend to live on the edge anyway. The prospect of being alive is not a given for me. It's. Dubious. At best. On Saturday, coldly, calmly, I really fucking assessed whether it was worth sticking around. This is it buddy. You're not enjoying yourself. Everything is suffering. I contemplated it. Seri...

 I spoke too soon about the nausea. Oh, it's getting slowly better. Yeah. No. Today was bad news bears. A lot of nausea that persisted, making me feel not only nauseous but really horribly ill on top of it. I wouldn't swear to it, but I strongly suspect it was connected to me sitting up in a chair for 40 minutes, slightly hunched over. Sitting anything like upright or hunched over is an almost guarantee for me to become nauseous. It gets worse the longer I hold it. And typically it starts small, I ignore it, gets worse, I ignore it, until I can no longer ignore it, and I feel absolutely bloody terrible. So. Nice. Nausea has been terrible. Also. The gout is back baby. It never really went away. But it has started to flare. Exactly the same places. Ah ha ! What did I eat ?! The ironic rub. I haven't eaten anything even slightly gouty. A cheese roll. An apple. A packet of crisps. Two rice crackers. Some multigrain cereal loops. Marvellous. There have been numerous other days ...

 I need to talk about AI. There's a lot of hype around AI at the moment. There's also a tremendous amount of hate for it too. Overhyped. Bullshit. Not intelligent. Crap. Uh huh. I've been noodling with tech for 40 years at this point. Coding the machines for 40 years. I am, professionally, at the tippety top of what I do. I have taught countless people. Architected, written, developed so many projects I have absolutely lost track of what I've done. So many apps. So many companies. So that being said. I'd like to offer a bit of insight into AI, in particular AI when it comes to IT, code development, figuring shit out. Less at the idiot end user. More at the tech professional. Let's start with this. It is paradigm breaking. It is the biggest leap forward in computing since ever . It is wildly powerful, amazingly capable and completely overhauls what it is to be a developer. It is close to eliminating devs entirely , but not quite - and I don't think will for ...

 Exhausted I have slumped into sleep. Only to immediately fall into a bad sleep pattern again. Finally awake at 10.30pm, at a time when I should be thinking about sleep. I have rested uneasily, not sure what to do with myself, not feeling well enough to do shit, dithering between attempting to just sleep more, and staying awake. Nothing productive. Hmm. Didn't hear anything about the car today, which is a little surprising. It makes me think they haven't started on it today at all, otherwise, there would have been a call about, ok, this isn't working, and this needs doing, and is that ok. Uh huh. I suspect I have slid down the waiting list because I am not being a hassle. Whatever. I am not hugely fussed beyond just wanting to know exactly when shit will get done, as opposed to do it now. I can wait for the car. Not knowing when it's going to be done however is mildly anxiety inducing - and I then have to hover in a state of permanent alert to see if the garage just cal...

 I have made a painful concerted effort to pull my sleeping hours the right way around, by overburning and trying to push my waking hours back. It's. Kind of working. I am now awake - ish - during daylight hours. And sleeping - ish - during dark hours. But it's kind of tricky.  Nausea is varying. On the whole better than it has been. It seems perhaps to very very slowly be heading in the right direction. I've completed a lot of work this week. A lot . Worked more this week than many weeks put together in fact. I've made good progress, and it's good to actually be productive again. But. Eh. Difficult. Today I briefly helped my brother with trying to setup some streaming software. And whilst doing that. I was looking over some of my capture samples, and then some of my captures of games I had been working on. Cool stuff. And inevitably we get to green leafy walks, and Athena, and beautiful scenery... ... and the misery descends, and the grief hits, and it is brought h...

 I seem to be getting worse, not better. Each day I am going through a horrible period where I feel truly awful, I can't even begin to describe it, and this period takes up the majority of the hours in a day, and, is almost always centered around sleep. The absolute worst of it is around the third hour or so of sleep. If I happen to wake up around then, I can't even describe it. Ill to the soles of my feet. Heavy. Sluggish. A "buzz". The buzz is all encompassing. It has some parallels with how you feel when you are very flu ridden. That hot, ill, feverish state. But, it's not that. Take away the fever. Add more "buzz". Double down on the sluggish ness. I don't know. There are so many attributes to it. It's hard to describe other than, you feel super fucking ill. If I don't wake up, then the ill feeling pervades my sleep. I can feel how shit it is when I am sleeping, pervades dreams, but also, it feels terrible just sleeping. Again. Hard to de...