Sick Diaries 5 Alternative Remedies

My sister in law recommended an alternative remedy, which involves drinking a lot of apple juice "to soften" the gallstones.  Presumably this makes them less painful when they are bashing about, the "cure" continues with you taking a lot of epsom salts and so on and lying very still while you pass them, and eventually deposit them in the lavatory.   I query whether even these softened stones would pass painlessly.  Besides, after you have done this, they recommend you have a colonic irrigation, so I may have to give that one a miss.   Subsequently I have heard of one person who performed this operation successfully.     However, I began to drink apple juice and then I stopped.  By coincidence the period when I stopped drinking it was when I began to feel better, so I now wonder, having resumed the apple juice, whether it is actually churning them up somehow.     I don't even know how this would work.  Presumably it's malic acid that softens them, but how does the malic acid get into the gall bladder?  Is it filtered out through the liver.   Or what?   I may stop taking the apple juice and see if it feels any better.

My nephew Harry said "Milk Thistle" was the thing to help liver function, so we have bought a box at vast expense.  I don't even know how I'd notice a difference but perhaps if I have a less tender liver and fewer pains in the liver areas I might feel better about it.   The only negative side is that it promotes oestrogen production, so not very good for fibroids, and I've only just about got over the whole unexpected bleeding etc.

Another suggestion, fairly harmless I think, is that I could have Epsom Salts baths - and this apparently draws out impurities - which is one of those nicely imprecise alternative medical phrases that sounds reasonable and reassuring without being very specific.  Anyway, it can't do any harm I guess.

What else do they suggest?  I dunno, should do more research I suppose.  

Sick Diaries 4

I have to say that I felt much better on Tuesday night after the trip to the specialist, all my nagging fear that it could be something worse had gone.  We ate a fairly normal meal by most standards, although for us it was quite abnormal - a "luxury" ready meal combo for Valentines Day, and I had a glass of some decent white wine.   The next day things weren't too bad.  I taught and went out and about.   However, since Thursday I have felt pretty awful and have gone to bed in the afternoon - or slept for hours in the morning.  I've also been having lucid dreams and the co-codamol doesn't seem to be working much.  Additionally there seem to be increasing pains higher up - under my ribs and in my breasts, and lungs.  This is presumably my swollen liver having a grumble.

So, what to do?  Yesterday I saw my friend S and she suggested various things.  Mainly that I stop trying to DO things, and just take a month off, and try to get myself healthy enough to go on holiday.  It is appealing advice, and we talked about the psychosomatic elements in the disease, and the disappointment and rejection I'd been feeling.  Curiously, I dreamed about being a priest last night - can't remember the context though.  The feelings I have about the lack of interest in TMOF or The Road through the Woods as it's now officially known are similar to the feelings I had about being turned down when I thought I had a vocation, I feel a sense of having been betrayed by my intuition, by God, that my sense I was doing the right thing, trying to exercise my talents to a positive end, had been absolutely futile.

Whether I can get to the bottom of my feelings of rejection and misery is another matter, whether I should even think of carrying on with my efforts is similarly unimaginable.  There is clearly a lot of psychological stuff to deal with...

Sick Diaries 3 A visit to the gastroenterologist

Today I finally went to the specialist.  He had an excitingly vowel-free Polish name and I was expecting a 40-something energetic young man with a nice strong accent.   Instead I got an extremely steady and low key man of about my age with a home counties accent who is probably a product of one of our Catholic grammar schools, to which all bright Polish boys went without exception.  Or maybe he went to one of the private schools if his parents were more affluent.  I almost thought I knew him from somewhere.  He was steady and quiet which prevented me making jokes.

Before I went in I was weighed and had my blood pressure taken.  The nurse who did this was far from young, again, about my age.  I suppose it is a product of getting older, you really start to notice people like you, who would once have been retired, now still at the coal-face.   My blood pressure was good 122/72 - much better than last time.   I expect my weight loss has helped.   There was another, younger, blond nurse, everyone was very friendly, and it was terribly quiet.  This part of outpatients is called Area B which sounds nicely science fictional, you enter Area B and there is nothing but a sea of blue seats, with one person sitting at the far end.

The gastroenterologist asked me if I had had developed any new symptoms.  I told him about the chest pains, but forgot to tell him about the shakes and lightheadedness.  He ordered an MRI scan, and more blood tests.   He told me he thought a stone was stuck in the bile duct and that was why it was grumbling all the time, if so, while annoying, it is very reassuring.   If this is correct they will send down a camera and remove the stone, subsequently, if necessary, they will remove the gall bladder.  Joy.   There is some concern about my liver, which is fatty "because you are fat" but is behaving badly probably because it is being affected by the gallstone situation.

I took my blood test form down the passage.  My veins were playing up, and it was touch and go, even with the butterfly on the back of my hand.  Sometimes it has come out so slowly that it has coagulated before the sample pots are filled.  This time there was a new sample pot, with a brown lid, as well as the more familiar purple lid (the other familiar ones are yellow and green).  I vaguely associate brown with the liver - the meat, liver spots etc. liver-spotted dalmatians.  But perhaps it's nothing to do with that.

The sun went in and cloud came over.  We went home.  What next?

Sick Diaries 2 Painkillers

I have never been a great one for pills, but in the last year I have found myself taking four a day, regularly - and occasionally more.  Two of these I've been taking for years, for my high blood pressure - losing two stone hasn't made much difference to that yet.  The other 2 are the high dose of anti-uric acid I am taking for the gout.   Recently my GP tried ant-acids but they didn't make much difference.   I stopped taking them, as ranitidine has some nasty, albeit rare, side effects.   So the other pills I take, occasionally, are pain killers.

I am puritanical about them.  I take ibuprofen for any joint/muscle pain, but I know that taking them regularly is bad, and does increase your chance of having a stroke.  As my mother took them regularly from her 50s on wards and had a stroke aged 72 I tend to avoid them unless the pain is unbearable and prevents me doing things, or wakes me up at night.    

Recently my GP has suggested paracetemol for my pain, coincidentally I heard a medical programme on Radio 4 which said what I had always suspected, that paracetemol doesn't actually work (except for getting temperature down and delighting babies - I can clearly remember the Calpol magic, the first time I gave Ned a spoonful). I've very seldom used paracetemol, as a child we usually had aspirin, until we were told paracetemol was better.  Perhaps it was.   When I had period pain as a young woman there was a magnificent drug called Veganin - which I don't think exists any more, but it was an aspirin and codeine mix.  I realised then that codeine was probably the only really worthwhile easily available painkiller.  This view was confirmed when the Greek government banned its import into Greece: you couldn't take it in your luggage for personal use.

So now I am taking co-codamol, and it works for several hours and I am able to take it in the evening and it helps me sleep without waking in any possible pain.  I am also experiencing bouts of light-headedness and occasional shaking... possibly low blood sugar?  However, I find if the pain is bad in the morning, I take it then too and it helps me get through the day with an illusion of capacity.

Sick Diaries 1

One of the reasons I haven't been keeping up with the blog much is because I have been sick.    The gynaecological (fibroid) problem petered out with my oestrogen supplies, but I still found that my foot problem, which turned out to be gout, was getting me down.   However, by October, the gout medication was working, I was far less stiff and achey and I had the benefit of a lovely Neapolitan holiday, so I was feeling almost oojah-cum-spiff.   In November two things happened, firstly another attack of gout, and secondly the beginnings of the stomach pains.    These have ebbed and flowed for the last two months, and have been provisionally diagnosed as gallstones, but as a result I have been more or less in pain every day since.

The reason I think things are a bit odd is that the pain is not behaving like gallstones (yes, I do have pains across the back, but there are other symptoms too).  What I have learned is that I can only eat minuscule amounts of anything.  So I can have a perfectly satisfactory lunch of 4 chocolates - giving me all the fat and calories I need to keep going, or an apple, but an apple seems to inflame my stomach (as does apple juice - which I was told was a sovereign remedy for gallstones - it softens them apparently).    Things that seem to agree with my stomach are: cheese, chocolate, cake, biscuits coffee, bread, porridge, milk (this would point towards an ulcer), while fruit doesn't seem to work, apart from bananas.   I am also finding that the long food free afternoon is bad, I get ravenous and then eat too much (in quantity terms, not calories) before supper.  I then spend the evening in pain.   Last night I discovered fish and chips was not terribly good.  Probably ate too much.

Anyway, the crux of this is that I feel considerably lower in energy.  I went down stairs earlier, washed up, hung out the washing and then felt knackered.  In the middle of doing that, I felt great, I felt "better", but bending and stretching played havoc with my stomach and the pain came back.    So all my thoughts that I WOULD manage to do some submissions to agents this afternoon, have turned to mush, and I am not feeling up to it.  I don't know how long this period is going to last, but I am thoroughly fed up with it.

I have been promised a fast track appointment, to look at this, which ought to happen in the next week (as it did not happen this week).  Perhaps that will make some progress.   I imagine they they will whip out my gallbladder within about 6 months, after which, life may return to normal.   In the meantime, I just wish it was possible to live without eating.

Absorbing a death

My mother died more than 7 years ago now, and it has taken me a long time to make sense of my response to it.

Firstly there was a shock, and a small sob, and then the machine swung into action, I drove up and down and arranged the funeral, the order of service, the catering, the wine etc.  and finally there was the funeral, at which I spoke, and the burial, at which I briefly and finally broke down.  When it was over, I was very tired (there were about 3 weeks between the death and the burial).  There were other things happening in my life too, difficulties in the marriage, the invasion of the LO into my life and so on.  The thing that obsessed me in that period was that I didn't really feel sad, I didn't miss her very much, because the stroke had already removed a lump of her personality.   But after her death, all I ever seemed to recall was the negative things about her, all the worst things she'd ever said and done to me.  I talked to an older friend who had also had a difficult relationship with her mother.  She said the same thing had happened to her, but that after a few years she had found it wore off.  So I waited, occasionally being stung by painful memories, assisted by strange anecdotes about breastfeeding and her fury when she discovered she was pregnant with me.    I remembered how my parents used to say sadly about some friend of theirs "he was rejected in the womb" as if this was the most dreadful thing.   I guessed now that technically, I had experienced this too.  But over the years, occasionally I would read something, and realise that I had much more resilience, because when I was born I was surrounded by people who were delighted and excited to see me and greet me and were just full of love for me.  I was my father's first child, and my grandparents' first grandchild and I was loved and a little (tho not excesssively) spoiled until I lost my unique status 2 years and 4 months later.  Whatever disregard my mother felt, I knew I could find love elsewhere, my grandfather was probably the first choice, I spent more time with him than with anyone.  My grandmother and father worked full time during the week, so I saw less of them, but my grandfather was there every day.

So, this thought has especially consoled me.  Nevertheless, it has still perturbed me how little love and sympathy I have felt for my mother in the years since her death, and I tried to make sense of them.    This evening M and I were discussing one of our former friends, one of the "flouncers" - there are four, no, five people who have flounced off in a rage in the last three years.  One of them has flounced back, but I sense that she doesn't really like me.  Never mind.  She behaves very well.  But when I think of them, and specially of the latest exit, last year, I feel a similar feeling of release.  The feeling is of liberation.  After one has experienced a period of putting up with bad behaviour, and smiling, and pulling one's punches in a relationship, one is liberated to speak one's mind, one is no longer constrained, no longer has to make excuses for them.  One can say what one honestly felt about the person's behaviour without directly attacking them, or poisoning the rest of the relationship.    I remembered how liberating it was to complain about and criticise those erstwhile friends who had to an extent held one in thrall.   One had cast off the chains of a restricting relationship, and after so many years, I realised that this was what had happened when my mother had died, but that the parent child bond is so sacred,. I was not allowed to rejoice in my freedom.   I had not even allowed myself to consider that I was liberated, although, I do remember consciously thinking "now I can get on with my writing" when she first became ill, and it was apparent that she would never really be able to read again."

Wicked, perhaps this seems, but I realise that I did have to put up with quite a lot and it has taken me a long time to work through those feelings.  I hope I get rather more years to enjoy more life than she did after her mother died!

Anyway, in the best facebook tradition, here's a picture of my mother showing me affection when I was about 2 or 3.

What to do with money

Of course, I occasionally indulge in fantasies about money.   What I would do if I had more, just a bit more, and what I would do if I had an enormous amount more.

I would pay for proper psychotherapy for a couple of people I know.  Finish doing up the house, and get carpets!

One of the things I would enjoy would be the relative freedom to do things I liked.  Ever since our trip to Naples last autumn, I've subscribed to an email called "Naples Weekender" which tells you fun things to do in Naples.  It arrives every Thursday.   This weekend it informs me that Rigoletto, one of my favourite operas, is coming up the Teatro San Carlo for a couple of weeks.    If I were rich, I would book a couple of flights to Naples and go and see a performance, spend another day or two there to do something else, see a museum or a church we missed last time, go to some better places to eat, and then buzz home again.

In the grand scheme of things, this probably wouldn't cost more than a thousand pounds, because we wouldn't stay anywhere posh, the opera tickets aren't expensive, and neither are flights in January.  However, although I do actually have £1000 available, it also has to be available for a great many other things, so I will not be doing this.  It's a shame.  I loved Naples and would gladly go again.

There is a downside to this idea, the time spent travelling there, the relative discomfort of planes etc.  But still, I'm sure it would be worth it, it's not as if we would be doing it every weekend.   But how lovely that would be, to be able to go to the opera in Naples or Verona or Rome or Venice whenever we had the urge.  Of course, we can go in London, whenever we have the urge - except that I believe it would probably cost more to buy a pair of the best seats in Covent Garden plus the cost of the rail tickets than to buy a pair of the best seats at San Carlo and the cost of the plane... and we might have to spend a night in London if we wanted to see an opera that closed after the last trains.