Isolation & cabin fever

I have a very boring life.

Seriously, since Covid hit the world my life has been boring and extremely isolating!

I have a weak chest, I have asthma, but I have also survived pneumonia four times over the past eight years the second from last bout nearly killed me!

Therefore this has meant I am one of the few thousand vulnerable who is so scared of going out that I haven’t left the house since July 28^th and that was to have a tooth pulled!

I didn’t start going to the library like I said I would at the end of November.

Though I caught Covid19 on Thursday the day before Good Friday 2022, I did pretty well – I wasn’t hospitalised at least and it was around 9 weeks after my first ever Covid vaccine. 

I am sharing this because there are rumours going around that I no longer live with Paul as nobody has seen me in months!  Believe me I am still here, I am just hiding from all the germs!

Because I can’t find a mask that is safe enough to wear whilst having asthma, my asthma is still pretty bad and I don’t breathe very well through my nose because of sinus issues – so it’s really not an option to wear a mask.

I was starting to think about going to a gym and going back to the library weekly starting from January, but now I hear there is an even deadlier new strain coming out of China again and China is opening their international doors again!

So I thought, aw fuck it, why now?  Just as I was about to risk going out at least once a week and without a mask! 

So I am in limbo again and this is part of the reason why my depression hit me hard the other day – I just want a normal life!

I don’t trust the NHS to save my life if I were to get the new strain of Covid – especially as the NHS can’t seem to get me my second dose of Astra Zeneca and they agree with my health issues the other two are a no-go option!  Yes, for nearly ten months I have been waiting for them to contact me about Astra Zeneca for my second shot, I am not fully protected!

The NHS is also struggling to get me a much needed appointed for something else – an overdue appointment, I won’t mention what.  But should it take a year to try and get a simple appointment and still there are none available?  We try every single day in hope of a cancellation, but to no avail and I am in pain whilst waiting!

So we decided to go to the pharmacy and buy the kit to do it ourselves, but when they heard I had a symptom with it, they said, no you really need the hospital to do it… WTF? 

The pharmacist thinks it’s urgent, the NHS doesn’t!

I’m glad I am not any sicker than I was the last time the doctor saw me, because based on what the doctor feared, I could have been dead by now – but that’s really not important apparently!

So because I haven’t worsened in the three months, six months and nine months the doctor contacted me by phone, they are presuming it’s not cancerous.  That’s all I am saying on the matter, yeah so for cancer they are still dragging their heels with appointments.  But that’s not all, I have relatives and friends of relatives tell me that cancer patients are more or less considered the walking dead now as the NHS is bankrupted and cancer diagnoses have a two year waiting list and guess what?  Most people are dead by the time they get checked out!

But right now I don’t care about all of that – I care about getting out and about again!  I can’t go into my own garden thanks to the twat that lives next door and his vicious dog!  I haven’t felt the breeze on my face or wind in my hair or the rays of the sun for months!

Months!

I feel like an indoor caged animal, left in a cold room all alone and forgotten! 

I can do lengthy isolation, my childhood trained me for it, but I have never ever in my entire life gone more than three weeks without leaving the house, before Covid came about and during those times we were always guaranteed at least three to five different visitors per week on average! 

Paul and I are hardly speaking these days without arguing, we get approximately thirty minutes a day to talk now – Henry is too absorbed in whatever he is absorbed in at the time that I generally get less than fifteen minutes with him, other than the house rabbit Ray – I have no one I can verbally talk to anymore and guess what?

I am embarrassed to say, its causing some of my long forgotten speech problems to come back – I stammer occasionally again and my lisp can be caught every now and again, problems I thought I got rid of in college!

Why?

Because I am not talking enough to anyone!

So as crazy as it sounds, I told Paul – you will hear me talking to myself in the bedroom because I need to keep practising my speech, as problems are reoccurring.  So I record myself again, yabbering on to myself in the bedroom like a crazy woman, to try and prevent the speech problems from coming back!

I am talking about everything, doing running commentaries on anything I can see and hilariously I forget to shut up when I am in the company of both Paul and Henry occasionally.  They think I’ve lost the plot and I know they’re right!

So with that being said…

I love you all… I am going round the twist… and I hope I make it to the other side in one piece!

At least I know I can last five months before cabin fever starts setting in!

Thanks for reading!

Personal events of 2022

I had taken up a new protein diet and exercise regime, which worked well.

I have lost 93 pounds of weight since last year and hoping to lose another 50 pounds to reach the goal ideal weight for me by July 2023.

I have unfortunately lost three relatives this year, two due to Covid, as well as a family friend.

I have made some good close online friendships with other creative people.

I have broken up from a long-term relationship and I am now single.

My son has been officially diagnosed with autism on a mild spectrum.

I am no longer on a free from diet, because we have learned I had problems with mustard and soya.

One of the debts I had has now been paid off, that debt was due to paying things off from Christmas 2017, when the government cut our money unexpectantly by £200 just 3 weeks before Christmas!

Thanks for reading and being with me throughout the year!

Swan song

I have been rejected, told to get ready for my swan song

I am no longer needed here

Is this a trick or is it true

Am I no longer needed by you?

I was told only moment ago

That your thoughts have wavered till finally no…

You don’t want me, so I shall go

Preparing a place to sing my song

Wondering what I have done wrong

I have suffered here in life for you

Suffered so much, you have no clue

But if you don’t need me then I shall leave

There isn’t another like me

These words – do heed

I am one of a kind, made just for you

But if you don’t want me, what can I do?

Once you’ve decided I am no longer a dream

I have to vanish, though it’s extreme

I have to go; there is no place for me here

But if you want me again, you’ll have to wait for years

For I will have to live again

Start anew with different kinsmen

I only hope that life is kind

That you will want me, that’s my bind

But you can’t wish a new life for me

Doing something else away from thee

You have no power over that

I was made for you and that is that!

Do I sing my song and die quite soon?

Or in your heart, is there room?

For a little one like me?

You have such power, don’t you see?

What’s weird is the spirits told me to add 16:16 to this but didn’t know how, so I chose it as the time.

When am I sending work to an agent?

Because of the Covid I had at Easter my plans to send work to any publisher by the start of Autumn 2022 has been shifted now to late winter 2022/2023; this is because I know that the current finished products are not ready to be sent to the world, but there is one that I am confident will be finished by the end of this year because it is so fresh in my mind and the most unique of the stories I have planned to send.

Basically I want my first published book to be special, who doesn’t?

Also I am in a quandary about one of the two books I am thinking about sending out – because one of those books I really want to make as a comic series, but I have little knowledge in creating comics and though I have studied a lot of “how to” books and watched a lot of “how to” YouTube videos, I am still not very confident about shifting a novelisation I have made into a comic book format, especially as I am not confident as an artist!

At the moment it is being written as a series of novels, I hope that eventually I will gain confidence in breaking it down into comic book form, because I think making this particular idea a comic book series would do better for it, than novels.  I doubt I would get advice on this from my future agent, but I hope it is something I could talk about with them eventually.

It is the second idea that is likely to be published first, the pure, simple, traditional novel with no comic book planning whatsoever.

Though I am sure that someday there may be comic book adaptions written by fans as it could work as that eventually too, but then again, most books of this particular genre end up in comic book format eventually.

Neil Gaiman’s snippet at the back of one of his Sandman comics about how to write comics has been a big help, as well as Peter David’s book “writing for comics” and a YouTube channel called Serkworks Art Lab.  Without these, I’d be even more clueless about what I am doing.

The thing is, I want the comic series, more than I want the novel idea out there first.  But, I am just so nervous about presenting a novel to an agent as a book, then saying, I can eventually break it down as comics, which was always my intention… how willing are agents to take on work like that?

I have to admit I am a little too afraid to approach them on that even as a question as I hate wasting people’s time!

The comic book I am writing has a lot of characters and action, but it is focused particularly on a group of three characters which work as a team together against a common evil, though the evil is from the same source, they too are different groups – it is like a gang warfare dystopian comic series with mild horror elements, to allow it to be sold to a young adult and possibly an older child audience.

To make life easier in explanation I will call this on my blog a dark fantasy side of my work, which would likely be under the pseudonym of my family entertainment side of my work.

Because I don’t want it to be too dark for family enjoyment!

It is about as dark as Watership down meets a tamer version of The Suicide Squad…

Just to tease a little there…

My actual novel which is likely to be sent out by the end of the year is more Warhammer meets Robocop, there are cyberpunk and fantasy elements in that story.

So there you have it, my plan for the year in writing.

Price of ink and financial rants

My situation is such that when I write I will print off as I go along, because I don’t trust clouds and data saving technologies, because they have failed me numerous times before.

Recently my finances have become worse and this has affected my novel writing more than anything, now I am able to get back into novel writing since I had Covid, it has meant that because of the decline in my finances I can no longer print the seventy pages a week I used to, I can only afford to print twenty a week at most and one week in the month, nothing at all.

If it is novel writing, I will print it as I go along, because of two reasons – I do not trust data saving technologies and I find it difficult to read and edit from a screen, whether I create a blue background to read from or not.

It’s frustrating because I want to write towards four ideas immediately and I can’t write by hand anymore because my arthritis is getting bad.  Every time I write more than an A4 page of handwriting, my hand swells up to the extent I can’t properly hold the pen anymore and if I ignore it, the cramps come on.

My arthritis has meant I have had to give up my knitting hobby altogether, because not only does it exasperate the arthritis, but it has also reawakened my carpal tunnel problem too!

I miss knitting, because of the style of gloves I used to make for myself and the scarves – because the style and colours I like can’t be bought cheaply, like it can be made!

I don’t have the money to buy a knitting machine or else I would do that, I also liked making toys for children I knew, but now I have been thinking about learning felt crafts or sewing the toys instead – because for some reason or another sewing doesn’t affect me.

At the moment we have a printer that is breaking down, because it appears not to be getting a hundred pages per cartridge anymore and we can’t afford to replace the printer for at least a year.  The cost of the ink is always £15, cheap in comparison, but for us it’s three days meals.  We’re near the brink of needing food bank help again – and no Lee Anderson, I can actually cook thank you very much, in fact I cook most things from scratch and manage left overs very well so there is never food wasted here!

Amongst my cooking skills are homemade pies, cakes, soups, casseroles and pasta dishes, not to mention the fact that I have been fakeaway cooking at least ten years before it became “fashionable”!  But when your colleagues Mr Anderson insist that because I have a bus stop outside my house which is within the walking distance I can do without an asthma attack they cut my mobility money by £100 a month, which meant that I could no longer afford to manage the finances which included getting medical help to try and get me back on my feet (in order to work), because you took the money I needed to travel to the local hospital 20 miles away in another town, which costs me £20 a time and I need treatment around twice a week quite a lot of the time – which meant I had to decide to become anorexic and get treatment, or just give up fighting to get my life back and make sure my family doesn’t starve to death!  Which one would you choose? 

Because when I had to do the above we had £10 for the week for food and I often had to cancel at last minute the doctors, because I couldn’t afford to get there – because doctors don’t house visit anymore, no matter how poor you are!

Along with this, we’re still not getting a lot of free stuff sending our child to school.  We had to cancel his eleventh birthday last year and all household birthdays and have the crappiest Christmas ever just to save up to get him school uniform for his new secondary school, because you can’t get it free here and there was no way in getting second hand, we checked.  The child gets reprimanded at the school if their uniform is not complete, whether you can prove poverty or not!

We would love to give up the internet in order to get £6 a week more in our pockets to eat better and maybe get some medical attention – but that would mean my son can’t do his homework so losing the internet is not an option for us!  The irony is, they say that they are doing more and more for kids in poverty these days, honestly I don’t see it!  His meals aren’t free at school; it costs him an average of £3.50 a day for a hot meal in winter.

Don’t you dare blame the poor for poor management!

Free schools, meals in schools, the NHS was all originally created for the poorest in the community, but these days the poorest in the community are not reaping the rewards of yesteryear, it basically is slowly turning back to how it used to be.  Everything is slowly privatising again and they think we don’t see it!

I don’t normally turn my posts into political rants, but this Lee Anderson has a lot to learn and remember about the society he is trying to lead!

Funny thing is, despite being bed bound and housebound sick for around twenty weeks of the year, I could work, at the pace I can.  There is some work I could do, but the problem comes with practicality – I’ve tried slogging on looking for a job outside of the house whilst managing my sickness and nobody wants me!  No one wants someone part time three hours three days a week, even on a check out, because I have ailments which embarrass the company!  I have what appears to be a permanent streaming cold!

No one wants to work alongside someone who is sniffling all year around and then needing three weeks off four times a year because she can’t even get to the bathroom she’s so sick!

So I told the benefits OK, there are other things I can do, I can write, I can do art, I can upcycle things to sell, help advise me in how to set up my own business to do that and teach me what I need to know to run a business from home.  They won’t.

But understood only this… you said you can work?  OK we’re taking your ESA away and making you go to job search centres five days a week all year around and if you don’t turn up for three consecutive days because you are sick, we’ll pull your benefits again and it will take six weeks to reapply for benefits again, meanwhile there is no transitioning money…

So, who is going to opt for all their amenities to be switched off and starving your family for six weeks solid?  What sort of incentive is there to actually get your ass off benefits if you are sick?  What kind of incentive do they give the sick to try and work out their own ailments in order not to be a scrounger?

Because seriously, this is how it is here!

So people who call sick people on benefits scroungers, talk to your government about their crackpot schemes, and don’t go attacking us!  It’s not our fault!  Most of us would love to be independent and work and get even £5 extra a week in their pockets, because no one likes going through those humiliating interviews every year!

Paul and I had thought about going to Ireland as they take care of artists and writers on sickness benefits more than they do here in England – but lately we’ve seen the news, there are political issues cropping up – will we be welcomed in Ireland?

I know my great grandfather was Irish (from Roscommon) and I know that genetically I would be accepted with opened arms, but it’s still looking complicated…

I am very frustrated, because there are lots of things I need in order to get myself a job and there is absolutely not help at all and the money is being cut again and again, to the extent, that I haven’t impulse bought a thing since 2017 and I am losing a huge amount of weight, but can’t afford to replace my clothes as the weight falls off and I am looking ridiculous!  I have lost four dress sizes in nearly a year.

Doctor says that they don’t find that a worry because I was so large to begin with.  I was a size 28, I am now nearly a size 20, they won’t worry until I am a size 12 potentially – potentially I might be dead by then, before they investigate why!

They know I have an IBD because of my high markers, but they won’t investigate until I literally start screaming in pain at A&E, seriously, been told that, NHS is so badly stretched financially that they are now only dealing with life threatening conditions as they appear, cancer not one of them, government recently warned the UK that if you get cancer now, you are more or less fucked if you rely on NHS!

Also, I have a new cholesteatoma growing in my left ear, but my ENT specialist said his department is in so much debt right now, he will not deal with it until it is life threatening! I have been through this before when I was a teenager, I really don’t want to go there again, but I have no fucking choice, because he won’t help me! That means, if the worse comes to the worse again, I won’t be able to physically care for myself bathing wise for nearly three years again nor bend down! I will also be 100% deaf!

Anyway, I am going to close this rant up, because people are home now.

Happy reading everyone… if it was that kind of experience, which I doubt. 

P.S sorry for being an Eeyore today!

Sickness and feng shui

Covid hit my Henry in the first week of April, then it hit me a few days later, because of this I have been functioning at zombie level, because not only did I have Covid at the time but I was recovering from a non-Covid chest infection and gastric flu – which coincidentally, happened again just a couple of days ago.  More gastric flu hit the house on Wednesday and apparently gastric flu is spiralling in and out of everybody’s lives a lot in the last few weeks or around here in any case.

Because of all of this, I haven’t written a word towards a novel since the 2^nd February 2022, ironic considering this was going to be my hardest working year in writing and I wanted to start as I meant to go on for the year.

I am exhausted but recovering slowly, my asthma seems much worse these days and my bronchial tubes seem to be permanently filmy and half opened, along with this it is also a bad hay fever allergy year for me.

Just existing is difficult these days, but I am trying to push through and though I have never been a huge coffee drinker, Covid has made me become one of the worlds many addicts as it seems to be one of the main things which is helping me through it all!

I don’t know if it is my neurological problem or Covid which has made this happen, but recently I am struggling to walk in a stable manner and I am finding it hard to sit up from a laying down position.  My legs feel like they have weights on them, however the weird thing about it is, it is as though I am walking on air at the same time, or that the ground has become marshmallowy.

My appetite has decreased further, where a simple dish of a small salmon fillet and half of a small a jacket potato with nothing else, is a feast to me!  This has meant, finding highly nutritious and varied foods on a small scale has become hard to manage.  I literally need micro-meals, I don’t mean microwave meals either, I mean small meals, miniscule for an adult, perfect for a 5yr old and I need to eat at stupid times.  I now regularly have to have a small meal at 10:30 pm just to get enough calories and nutrition in the day, which doesn’t help the insomnia.

A positive thing though, is I have discovered I am not actually lactose intolerant at all – I have found I have issues with gluten and lactose purely because those foods contained soy, since eliminating soy completely from my diet, I am now able to eat gluten and lactose again and let me tell you, its pure joy!  Though being a Chinese food addict means I can’t indulge in that anymore unless it is homemade and without soy!

I found out because twice I accidentally consumed things containing milk and then expected a bad night of gastric like proportions, but no, nothing happened.  Then I had another food which had milk and soy and I reacted, Paul thought that maybe it’s because I ran out of enzymes, but then we noticed that my lactase pills were not working for certain food items.  So I began a soy elimination diet, as suggested by a friend.

So I had been spending £18 a month needlessly on lactase pills, because it wasn’t a lactose problem at all, it was a soy one!

Despite being ill a lot this year, there is a noticeable improvement in other areas of my health, since going back onto lactose and gluten.  My skin and hair have improved a lot and a couple of other personal issues.

Henry is currently sick with very bad gastric flu and his fever broke earlier today, he had a temperature for so long that the doctor had said that on Saturday, if there was no improvement, he would have had to of been admitted, so there is a lot of relief there that the fever has now broken!

Because of all these health issues and so on, I decided that I should reconsider the house in a feng shui style, I knew certain aspects about feng shui, but not a lot, and I realised that things were better in certain years when furniture was in different places and worse when it was moved in other places.  Considering this, I read some books about what I did right back then, but was doing wrong now.  I found that there is a lot of blockages in areas that was good, particularly the health – which explains why we’re sick potentially.  The health centre of our house was established around the time I started to get sick eight years ago as a laundry pile area – not good feng shui, also we have small mirrors which we glued around each other so our reflections are always fragmented and cut up into bits, again not good feng shui!

Also I noticed that I moved dragon ornaments away from the places that they would like to be according to feng shui, we did better financially when a dragon and a tortoise was in the south west corner of the living room, but things have changed since I put them both in the south area of our bedroom!  Effectively moving them from the transformation area to the career area – career wise things may have improved as we are developing good contacts, though have not dedicated ourselves fully into creating a career just yet – so we will not move them back to the transformation area, but instead, move a spare dragon from another area to the transformation area and then move the tortoise out of the bathroom, which is a bad area to keep it according to the practise, especially as the bathroom is half in the health area!  Because our health centre is split into two rooms, which is unusual and complicated in Feng shui terms!

I love Chinese culture a lot, I believe a lot in the Chinese astrology and I do not like western astrology, I believe Chinese astrology to be more accurate in my life.  So, the idea of throwing me into Feng shui as well, I think, is a good idea!

My grandmother always said there was Chinese in my family, but I found out that she was slightly wrong about the nationality; they were actually Vietnamese and Singaporean ancestors, which kind of explain my so-called throwback eyes as some people call them (I actually think it’s kind of rude, but there you go).

 I would love nothing better than to move the furniture around again, but at the moment the family is sick and the areas I want to move would cause bad things to happen moreso this year, because those areas are all the areas of this year’s sha chi, which means if you move those areas outside of good construction days (according to chinese astrology) you will activate the bad energy there and make things much worse.  So we can’t make improvements until the 9^th of May or the 23^rd and 24^th of May, as per the household’s astrology signs.

I am a water dog, Henry is a metal tiger and Paul is a fire monkey!

Anyway, thank you for reading and maybe in the future there will be more about the feng shui as I learn more.

Shingle me this…

My new writing and art area has been put on hold for a couple of weeks due to illness, this time it is not me;

On Wednesday, Paul woke up with a rash on his chest, it was quite small at the time and he thought it had something to do with the new deodorant he started to use the day before, but it wasn’t.  On Friday that same rash spread all around to his spine and even more on his chest but had turned into hundreds of red raw looking blisters!  Turned out he has shingles and now (because I have a suppressed immune system) we have resorted to sleeping in separate rooms for the time being. 

I have heard that people who have had their second covid vaccine may get shingles approximately 16 to 20 weeks later, as a high number has, but the doctor insists this isn’t the case for Paul and that it must be stress because of the worry about my pending neurological diagnosis.  I have to admit, I don’t believe that.

Paul is not taking this well, it is mostly the medicine that is making him exhausted, but I am still worried because of his age, despite how healthy he is for his age I am worried.  Paul is twenty seven years my senior!

I still hope however selfishly this may sound, that we will be able to set up the new desk and art area before the 1^st October in time for my daily posts for inktober; but if this doesn’t happen by then, the art will still be done, but may be added to the blog a week or two later.  At least my art table is set up, just not in the new area, that’s all.  My inks and sharpies may be a little dry now as I haven’t done much art with inks or sharpies since Easter, but I hope they’ll be Okay, Paul says that they are water based inks so should be fine with a touch of water.

Having Paul ill like this has made me realise just how much I simply can’t manage without him, I have to admit it is an eye opening time for us all right now!

I am somewhat getting used to typing via laptop however much it does lag and some of the keys do not work on first punch (is that the right word?).  So I am starting to do a little bit of typing on my adjustable table on the sofa downstairs or rather, right now, in bed, because everybody had decided to live upstairs since Paul has become sick. 

I feel sorry for Paul because we do not have a TV aerial for the spare bedroom, even though we have a spare old TV for him, he is missing a lot of his favourite science documentaries and the meds are making him feel too sick to eat, he has lost weight even in this short time.

I am also annoyed at him for not wanting help, he still thinks he can do everything even when he is swooning around on the verge of passing out!

Anyway, we will hope he slows down soon and gives himself a break!  He needs it!

Happy reading, everyone!

A tardiness update

Hello everyone, long time no writes, I know, sorry about that!

I want to say that I have been having a lot more infections than usual and a lot more chest and breathing problems which are not Covid related; I have not been infected with Covid luckily.  I have completely self-isolated since March 2020, I have only left the house twice in that time for dental appointments – I have been scared of Covid especially as I have a history for chest infections and pneumonia anyway!

Other than dental appointments I must admit I have steered clear of all doctor clinics and hospitals because I think that if I go, I am more likely to get infections – now this is frustrating because before Covid the doctor could care less for my health problems and whilst Covid has been a factor I have had to turn down huge amounts of appointments because the doctor is now ready to try and solve them… it is like the world is conspiring to trap me to get Covid lol!

I think there is one good thing about the fact I was isolated all of my life by my mother, that is, Covid19 isolation is literally a doddle for me as I have always learned to cope with what I have and make the best of being at home.  But it is also deeply depressing that again, I feel like the world is conspiring to keep me cooped up for all of my life!

I have mental health issues because of my past and so many people have been concerned for how Covid isolation may be affecting me mentally.  But they don’t understand that it is normal for me, I have been so used to it for so long that it is second nature.  So unlike the rest of the world that has always had some kind of freedom, I don’t go stir crazy just because I can’t leave the house for a time.

Staying at home or even cooped up for prolonged periods inside a single room really doesn’t bother me as long as there are things I can do.  If the room was empty, that could be a completely different matter, I may go crazy after a few days, but I would make do with meditations, visualisations and if I were not causing trouble to do so, singing and reciting poetry etc. 

The thing with me is, imagination is easy.  Imagination is my friend and I have learned to harness it on command for any situation.  I do meditation and visualisation so well, that there has been times I have been hungry and I have visualised eating a meal and I have come out of meditation not feeling hungry anymore!

It’s amusing really that I am overweight; when I consider that I can do this.  But I will be completely honest with you; I am overweight for only three reasons.  As part of the abuse I have been victim of, a large part of that was being fed constantly, my abusers were feeders.  I have lost a huge amount of weight since being away from them, but not enough to be of healthy weight.  Secondly, I am addicted to caffeinated sodas such as cherry cola and Pepsi, but still, not as bad as I used to be.  I have gone from a 5 litre a day habit to only 1 litre now -still trying to fight the addiction.  Third reason – the biggest one of them all is.  I lost a majority of the weight I had because when I moved in with Paul and got away from the abuse, I started to religiously walk 9 miles per day and I that was doing the trick with normal eating.  Since becoming sick back in 2012 I then walked only twice a week for about 2 miles and since Covid I walk nowhere at all, except around the house.

In my humble opinion I need to lose a lot more.  I have tried to go on a diet, but diet alone is not working at all.  I have stuck religiously to a diet for 3 months and I haven’t lost a pound!  It’s only going to go via exercise, which this body just can’t cope with right now.  Every time I try to exercise I get weird symptoms of lower back shakes and unsteady shaking legs and hands.  I am residing myself to the fact I can’t garden anymore, not for longer than 15 minutes a time.

I have to make do with trying to think about what I want to do versus what I can realistically do these days.

I love gardening, but short of sitting at table with pots, that is something I can no longer do the exact way I love the most – which is to kneel down with my hands in the dirt, pulling and pruning and chipping and replanting from ground to ground in true food forest garden fashion.

I have to reside myself to the idea that someday, if I get a little money, I can get someone in to pull my whole garden out for  me and make me hip high raised beds with seating around them, so I can sit and garden the lame man’s way.  Sorry, but to say I don’t feel bitter about not being able to do it the usual way, would be a lie!

My disabilities are affecting my creative crafts too sometimes.  Hand shakiness (presumably not Parkinson’s) are sometimes affecting me using utensils when eating as often as once a week, as well as hand cramps and so therefore drawing and painting on those days is a no go. 

My writing can sometimes be affected on bad pain days; sometimes pain is so bad I misread things, miss-type things, mispronounce things and even have spoonerisms coming out of my ears!  Hand shakiness and pain can affect how much I read in a day too as well as depression.  On a good week without much pain or shakes I can read about three books, if the depression isn’t there.  I think I mentioned this before.  You can more or less tell how I am doing by how much I am reading on Goodreads.com

But don’t be overwhelmed with sympathy for me not getting down to my art and writing however!  There are other factors besides health which leads to my tardiness – the phases I go through.  I tend to find it hard to narrow down precisely who I want to be.  So I go through weeks at a time being so involved in one thing or two and then move on again. 

For example; Between October and April, I have got into the phase of watching around 3 hours a day of YouTube videos from people who are homesteaders and food forest permaculture gardeners, as well as food preservers and artists.  February and April 2021 I have gone through another spiritual soul searching phase.  I have read books based on spirituality and cosmic ordering and I have been thinking about my self-definition a lot.  Since the start of April I have re-established my love for The Sims 4 and have been playing that daily for literally 6 hours a time.  Disgusting I know.  But I have still been practising my art approximately 3 days a week for an hour a time, which is becoming a record now, because that too, used to come in phases!  If this is an unusually long phase, then I have been in this once since last summer!

Writing is on a severe back burner, I am writing about 90 minutes three times a week since March, whereas I wrote a lot more, before then.

On a very positive note however; my art practises are for the very reason that I have decided to make a children’s picture book series and I am practising my art to get the same characters right in several different poses.  Now I know, you are all thinking that I am not a children’s author and that would be very true!  But something happened in my mind, where I just have to have this children’s series about a dragon in true infant picture book form.  I don’t know why this is happening, but I am going with the flow!

But I will tell you now; my main genres are dark fantasy and dystopia that will never change!

Until next time, thank you for reading.

Research what your doctor diagnoses you with!

As someone who has had pneumonia once a year for the past 5yrs, I was told when Covid19 came into the world that I should consider never going out as I am on the very vulnerable list especially as I have other health issues on top of it all and Covid19 as we all know is known as a super pneumonia! 

Being used to isolation since childhood, it seemed to me to be a doddle of a thing to accept.  But it is frustrating, because I was just starting to get my life into gear and I am starting to feel that this is some kind of curse my mother has put on me.  I know it sounds ridiculous because the rest of the world has it and surely she can’t have cursed the whole world?  Of course I know that is nonsense, but it still crosses my mind a lot!

How ironic that this has happened just as I am free from her isolating me and shutting me away?

Well anyway, Monday was the first time I went out since the first ever lockdown in the UK, because I have dental issues that need to be seen to and I am due to have an IV treatment for my teeth in February – coincidentally today I have woken up to feel as though my chest is bruised and I have a cough and a cold on top of my usual respiratory problems.

A few days ago I started getting into the habit of making smoothies, particularly green ones, because I wanted to boost my immune system for when I have my tooth seen to in a couple of weeks’ time; when I get a cold and a cough like this after being on a really super rich high vitamin and mineral diet for the last 2 weeks, it makes me wonder why I bothered in the first place?

Surely I would be stronger by now?  But no, I have a cold or something…

Well anyway, desperate I am to find any recipes for immune boosting so I found something called Goot, made it myself, lemons, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, apple cider vinegar, garlic and honey, going to take 2 spoons 4 times a day to see if I get better any sooner than I would normally – which would normally be around 3 to 5 weeks’ time – a lot of colds and flu turn very chronic for me and last up to 6 weeks on average at the chronic level, something doctors could never understand!

Well anyway, a few years before I met Paul, I remember being diagnosed with pernicious anaemia, but nobody explained to me what that meant so I presumed, much like my mother did, that it just meant really bad anaemia – well Paul after hearing me reminisce this, decided to research it to find out it is an auto-immune problem which can make absorption or development of vitamin B12 very difficult for me, which would explain the neurological problems I seem to be developing!  I have been living with pernicious anaemia for a little over 15yrs and no one told me what it meant or treated me, no wonder I am falling apart!  I have also been diagnosed with and untreated for 17yrs with rheumatic arthritis!

Pernicious anemia can severely damage your nervous system and digestive system over a course of years if untreated, it is an autoimmune disease which can make you severely malnourished of certain B vitamins!

So because I am scared to go out unless absolutely necessary because of Covid19 I am waiting until things die down a bit so I can tell my new doctors here in Rugby, Warwickshire about my health past and how I have never received treatment and see what they got to say about that!

I think perhaps this is what my doctor meant when he phoned me a few months ago about a medical review, because I gave him a list of symptoms in an email and he was concerned and said he is going to look into my files etc. about other things and see if there are links – but I never got back to him!  Perhaps he has seen my medical records and understood I am not being treated right!

My doctor knows that I have suffer from chronic anxieties at the best of times and I am very OCD, so getting me out of the house unless it is an utter emergency during covid is going to be a huge challenge!

Just thought I say this to update you all!

Hope that the UK takes lockdown seriously this time around so I can get my health back into check by keeping to my appointments and investigations!