Tag: chronic fatigue

I Got A Dog

Bones

jamie-street-uNNCs5kL70Q-unsplash

As the COVID lockdown loomed, I sped out into the back country of New Zealand to one of the largest sheep and beef stations in the North Island.  There, I was met by a woman and a dog.  A dog named Flash.

A dog who will, hopefully, become my “helper dog”.

I call him my “helper dog”, because here in New Zealand we have very strict legislation about what can be classified an Assistance or Service Dog.  Despite the training he will receive, he cannot be classified as an Assistnace Dog until one of the named charities certifies him.  There is one named charity that certifies owner trained dogs, and they are not taking new applicants at this time.

But that’s okay.  I don’t need him certified for him to help me around the home, or at work, or on the farm.  I just need him to be gentle, willing, and trainable.

After two days with him I can confirm he has all of that, in absolute spades.  He is a collie cross, a purpose bred heading dog, bred to stare at sheep until they move.  He just … didn’t do sheep.  At all.  So at the grand age of one, he was fired from basic training, and passed over to me.

It’s early days yet, but I am cautiously optimistic that he will fit in with the rest of my hairy horde and complement our lives.

How to Survive the Festive Season with Chronic Illness

Bones

paola-chaaya-QrbuLFT6ypw-unsplash

Now that I am through the festive season, I would like to extend my best wishes to all readers – whether you be transient or regular – for the holiday season, and my heartiest congratulations for coming out the other end.

If you could hear my hysterical laughter you’d understand that ‘surviving’ is about the only thing I can lay claim to for this past holiday season.  I managed to not yell at anyone.  I did politely snap a couple of times – when mum told me not to do a thing with the laptop that had to be done (I do know what I’m doing), and when my amazing human got salty about where we had coffee because we could have had coffee at the coffee place up the road (yes we could have, but we are not, because we are having coffee here, because you said you didn’t care where three times before as we went past cafes and I shoved us all into this one because you were getting grumpy).  But overall I managed.

Which is a fucking feat of perseverance if I ever did see one.  I went into it burnt out from the impromtu therapy session with mum wherein I was the therapist and helped her unpick and reframe a narrative that has been with her since she was two.  The good news is, she’s looking a lot happier, and she’s going to start looking into a therapist.  The bad news is it took so much out of me.

Throw me straight into two very long drives back-to-back (only one of which I had to do), my amazing human’s family arriving for two weeks, and the act of ‘running interference’ to ensure my amazing human doesn’t become overwhelmed by his parents, and you have a very stressed out and exhausted lady at the end of it all.

I rarely had time to myself to plug in my headphones and listen to anything.  I didn’t have time to do any of my self soothing routines.  I was out and about constantly, pushing myself to ensure everything went as smoothly as possible.  I was mediator, decider, herder of cats, support … the works.  My role in my family has always been as mediator and keeper of the peace.  My role in my amazing human’s family is apparently the same, with making decisions (because no one else does) and herding cats on top of that.

I failed miserably at implementing any kind of self care over the holiday period.  It’s hard to say ‘no’ when you’re trying to keep everyone else happy – and that’s a holdover from my childhood.  If I keep everyone else happy, no one will be grumpy, and I won’t be grumped at.  Well it only partly worked.  I still got grumped at.

But, in my rambling way, I survived.  I made it through.  The only incident was the dog eating a part-empty tube of cat laxative and having to clean that off the carpet (she’s fine).

And next year hopefully we won’t have two families combining over the holiday period.

Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020

Bones

jude-beck-bvTtUo04Nmg-unsplash

Well.  What a decade this has been.

I moved country.  Twice.  With a lot of animals.  I was married.  I was separated.  I am not yet divorced, but hey that’s coming this year.  I got more animals.  I moved city to pursue the career of my dreams.  I gained a weird older brother in my flatmate.  I met some truly amazing humans through my university course.  I met one of my truest and best friends to date through fandoms.  I met, and fell in love with, my amazing human bean.

I had a breakdown.  I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  I built myself back up.  I was diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia.  I built myself back up.  I got rid of more narcissists on the way.

All throughout I was supported by the most amazing, kind, generous, loving and supportive humans I could ever have been blessed with.  My parents, for whom without which I could not have even begun my journey into my new career, let alone continued on it.  My nearest and dearest friends who have shouted me road trips and meals and yarn, who have given me hugs and cuddles and lent me their ears to vent and rage and cry.  My amazing human being who has stood beside me through ironing out my quirks, my panic attacks, my depression, my medication trials, my descent into physical disability, who has cooked me nutritious meals, has made spiced hot chocolates when things get tough (“I can’t fix it, but I can make hot chocolate!”), has enthused over anything I have shown interest in …

And then there are my amazing animals, three of which I will not get another decade with, who I cherish more than I can say and who have provided me with company, love, fur, poop, barf, and so many laughs.

This decade has, without a doubt, been the toughest I have lived through yet.  The physical, emotional, and mental toll of fibromyalgia and trigeminal neuralgia can not be understated.  It is brutal and it is every damn day.  And yet I feel very fortunate.  I have learned that the people I am surrounded by have more love than I could ever have imagined, and I feel truly honoured.

I am relieved this decade has, at last, passed.  There are many things I look forward to leaving behind.  While I do not ascribe to this ‘new year, new me’ (or ‘new decade, new me’) thing, I do find it is important to identify a ‘turning point’ so to speak, a point at which you can say ‘this situation did not go past that, and it is done’.  For me, the shift from 2019 to 2020 is that, in terms of freeing myself from narcissists (both romantically, and platonically), and the start of my journey into chronic illness.

Now bring me that horizon.

Fibromyalgia, Stress, and Exhaustion

Bones

cris-saur-GNUcUx-iObg-unsplash

I had some news on Wednesday that reminded me of my beloved pets’ health, the fact that they are old, with many of the associated diseases, and had a realisation about their mortality.

You don’t think about it that often.  Or at least I don’t.  I’ve had one of my cats since he was barely a month old, and my other since she was 2.  I’ve had my dog since she was 6 months.  My derpy boy is now 13, my girly cat 15, and my pupper coming up to 6 years old.  They’re starting to get into their ‘geriatric’ years.  Both of my cats have geriatric diseases – hyperthyroidism and renal failure (to differing levels) – and my girly cat has other serious problems with her back and legs.

It hit me like a Volvo truck to the face.  They’re old.  They’re going to die.  If I’m lucky I’ll get another 3-6 years out of any of them.  But sometime soon they are going to die, and I’m not ready for that.  I’m not ready for my babies, who I’ve had since they were so young, to be old.

So I did what all people do when they’re faced with mortality: I had a meltdown.  I sobbed.  I curled up and rocked for a bit.  Then I sat and put on high quality distractions so I could just exist as a brainless blob for the rest of the day.  By the time I was due to go to sleep, I was already aching.

The next day, yesterday, was agonising.  The stress kicked off a flare.  All my joints were stiff and muscles burned.  My head was foggy.  I could hardly see straight, let alone keep my eyes open.  After a few hours of fighting the fatigue, I curled up on the couch and slept for 5 hours.  I was still incredibly dizzy and exhausted, so I continued my blob.  I slept like the dead.

Well today I’m still overly fatigued and my entire body feels heavy.  Even typing is hard today, and I strongly suspect another nap is in order, despite the long sleep I had last night.  My joints are still stiff and achy, especially my knees and hips.  My motivation levels have completely bottomed out.  My ability to do even easy things, like play a game, is completely nonexistent.

And the only thing I can do is ride it out.  I’ve had to put on hold all the things I needed to get done because I just can’t.  Some of them involve driving for hours and heavy digging, which I can do on a good day, but holy hells bells I can’t do when I’m like this.

When this kind of thing happens you can either fight it or relax into it and embrace it.  I’m still working on the relaxing into it, I really have to force myself.  But it’s better to relax into it than to try and fight it!

The Importance Of The Outside

Bones

slawek-k-1d4omOevjx0-unsplash

I moved house three months ago.  Well, I should say, we moved house three months ago.  We moved from a small, 70s built house with a very small lawn (2x3m, with a 1.5x10m run down the side) into a large, 60s built house with retrofitted double glazing, a catio (a patio that’s fully enclosed to allow cats outside time without them being free-roaming), three lawns, multiple edged and established (but overrun and very confused) gardens, a rose bush taller than the house, and two raised garden beds fenced off down the back.  We have apples and pears, an olive tree (I still don’t get this one), so many magnolias of different colours, roses popping up out of trees, and a loquot.  We also have a fig tree stump with a lone fig stubbornly growing on it.  Oh, and a grape vine!

This garden is a mishmash of things and it is very overgrown with ivy and jasmine and weeds and I have never gardened before in my life.  The closest thing I had to a garden before now is my small collection of succulents who, despite all neglect from me, have continued to survive.

Now I have an established and overrun garden to manage.  And I never knew how much I needed it until I had it.

I grew up in a large, old, draughty villa with a 1/4 acre section and a veggie patch.  There were trees I would scale all the way up until I was too “cool” to do so (around aged 15-16, I was a slow bloomer), a cinderblock I would use to contain any fires I lit just because I could, and an overgrown section down the back end of the garden that I could hack at with my trusty home made wooden samurai sword (whittled out of a branch courtesy of one of my friends).

My holidays were spent at the beach.  We had a small, lockwood holiday home within 5 minutes walk of a quiet beach.  There was no TV, no dialup internet or world wide web (in fact, some of this took place before those days!), and mobile phones were still a pipe dream.  We had to make our own fun.

What I’m trying to express here is that I grew up in and around nature in every part of my life.  I was a hippy child, a wild child – give me some rocks and I’d scramble up them faster than you could say “that’s a big rock”, and I would try to climb every tree.  Most of the time I was even successful.

As I got older I withdrew from the outside more and more, finding solace for my teenage angst on the internet and the people there.  I had an Angelfire Page – actually I probably had about five.  I was onboard when MySpace first came out, and Live Journal.  I was on Yahoo Groups and DeviantArt.

I stopped going to the beach for the holidays.  I stopped going outside.

I moved into a tiny little cupboard of a room in an awful little apartment with only concrete and horrifically overgrown “gardens” to speak of.  Then into a house with a single tree and a lawn you couldn’t even swing a cat in.  Next up was a house with a bush back section and a small raised lawn, then apartments.  I became “modernised”.

That little wild child who lit fires in the garden and ran on the beach and screamed into the wind because it was fun just … withered.  And died.

Looking back knowing what I know now, I suspect a lot of that was to do with my fibromyalgia, the incredible stress of working full time in a highly demanding job, and the stress and anxiety of being with a narcissist.

Regardless, I neglected an important part of me, that little hippy girl, and it took moving to this house to realise it.

She’s slowly coming back, that dirt grubber, with every step I take on soil without shoes and every weed I pull out without gloves.  With every time I sit in front of the open doors to the catio and breathe in the fresh country air and admire the green that creeps everywhere.

She is slowly coming back, and with her, I become more grounded.  More robust and at peace with my life.

The importance of the outside is, to me, immeasurable.