I’ve heard reference to this explanation before and instinctively had a sense of what must be involved. But reading this in full made me cry. It is so true. Those of us who go through this every day live in a different world to everyone else. If you want to know what I face everyday when I get up then have a read of this post. I hope it helps all those out there struggling on everyday and inspires all you healthy people to do something amazing today.

Barefoot Baroness

A theory I live by, a theory that saves my life~ It’s also an incredible and thoughtful way to express to people in your world/life what having a chronic illness is like. They’ll get it much easier by relating to spoons of all things~

Thank you to the author of this piece Christine. You have helped me save so many relationships with people who just did not get it. If you have read this before Bravo, you are doing as much as you can to communicate what your life, days are like.

The Spoon Theory

My best friend and I were in the diner, talking. As usual, it was very late and we were eating French fries with gravy. Like normal girls our age, we spent a lot of time in the diner while in college, and most of the time we spent talking about boys, music or trivial things…

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Where is a poisoned spindle when you need it …

I want some liquid morphine. My sister got some why can’t I? The headache is appalling today. I’m barely sleeping – only an hour or two at a go. I’ve been tossing back the painkillers every four hours.

 

I did manage to use my hours in the dark to mull over my next scenes. Looks like my characters are trying to go off on their own plot again. I’ve decided to let have their way for now but they will listen to me later. We have plot points to hit!

 

I’ve been enjoying the diving and equestrian today. I can potter on my computer and see the TV out of the corner of my eye so I can look up for the good moments. I got very distracted by the diving though. Eye candy anyone?

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 5 hours in 2 sessions 😦 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 9 😦 😦
Nausea level : 5 😦
Joint / muscle pain : 4 😦
Fatigue : 6.5 😦
Brain Fog : 4.5 🙂

Ahh, not the lurgy monster again …

I don’t know why I bother crawling out of bed some days. Today I’ve been wrestling with the lurgy monster. I’ve come down with a cold: sore throat, nausea, severe migraine, chills and flushes. It’s been a day of chucking back the painkillers and hiding in the dark.

 

Given that sleep has been pretty difficult I was up at 05:00 this morning and typing away. I managed to get two scenes written today. I haven’t quite figured out how to finish one scene. I’ve kinda just stopped but that is what the editing process is for. Final word count today is 43, 750 words. Chapter 18 is probably done for now so I shall move onto Chapter 19.  It was slow writing today. I’m writing the scenes showing the horrors of the invading army’s occupation. It is pretty hard going in places. I’ll be glad to get back to events in the capital and the politics – even though I’ve been dreading it!

 

My sister is looking up. She is walking around reasonably spritely and not tossing the painkillers back. So I’ve taken back my title as ‘the sick one’.

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 7 hours in 2 sessions 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 7.5 😦
Nausea level : 5 😦
Joint / muscle pain : 3 🙂
Fatigue : 8 😦
Brain Fog : 8 😦

Hello from the land of nod …

I’m so tired. I’m managed to come down with a sore throat on top of my backlash issues. I get hours of feeling bright and then hours of totally crashing.

 

I did manage to write 1148 words today so my total word count is up to 41,677 words !! Actually I had a bit of a breakthrough this morning. Never underestimate the creative power of sleep. 🙂 I was worried over how to fill up the time between two events and I found that my new female character will do the job admirably. I also figured out what I wanted my invasion to look like on the ground. So when my male main character walked into an occupied town this morning I knew just what it looked like. Yeah !!

 

My NaNoWriMo experience is going well. I’ve been making Writing Buddies and learning more about my fellow writers. I seem to have attracted the younger crowd but maybe it is because we are all new together.

 

Right I’m off to watch the Olympics now. The opening ceremony was fantastic. I was really impressed by it. Go United Kingdom!

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 10 hours in 2 sessions 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 5 😦
Nausea level : 2 😐
Joint / muscle pain : 3 😐
Fatigue : 6.5 😦
Brain Fog : 5.5 😐

Tick, tock, tick, tock …

Another day crawls by. I’m signed up for the August camp of National Novel Writing Month. 6 days to go! Time is going too slowly. I haven’t got much writing done – only 74 words today. I can’t really focus on writing when I’m this tired and distracted.

 

I have got my mum’s transcription done though so that’s one less thing on my agenda. Of course then my sister became a much bigger priority in my life. When one door closes a whopping great big hole in a wall opens.

 

My sister is doing well – tossing back the painkillers ever 4 hours. I managed to get a bit more sleep today but my body is still resisting me. I’m intending to up my dosage of beta-blockers so hopefully that will help. Still I don’t really mind. Time with my sister is never wasted. Looking after her makes me happy even if it is just watching over her as she sleeps.

 

A trip to the acupuncturist today means at least my back pain is down to normal levels and my headache reasonable. Dark glasses are still as standard though.

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 5 hours in 2 sessions 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 3 🙂
Nausea level : 0 😀
Joint / muscle pain : 3 😀
Fatigue : 5.5 😐
Brain Fog : 5.5 🙂

Doctors – 1: Lurgy Monster – 1 …

My sister is coming home today, whoo ! The surgery went well. She was in pain overnight but should be back on her feet in 7 to 10 days.

 

I managed to get 9 hours sleep overnight so am feeling reasonable this morning. Of course I am reciting my ME mantra ‘Just because you feel ok-ish, doesn’t mean you’re fine’. The backlash from ME is almost always worst 48 hours after the big event for me. So the next day I feel tired but ok, the day after that I feel totally trashed.

 

Anyway my sister will be back home sometime today which will be good and bad. Good because I can stop worrying about her all alone in the hospital, bad because I can worry about her here and wait on her hand and foot. So of course I will be overdoing it in the next couple of days. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep a lot of my hand holding restricted to watching tv with her rather than fetching and carrying too often. I will let my dad handle those elements. He’ll feel the need to make himself useful just I like do. I can’t cope if I can’t be fussing over the sick person. Sitting and waiting is the worst thing ever.

 

I’m grateful that my night’s sleep has reduced by back pain. I was on a 6 for back ache last night. Hospital chairs even with a cushion are just not that comfortable. Especially since my feet didn’t reach the floor from the bedside chair that I was in most of the night. I used another chair to prop my feet up but still I do wonder who they design these chairs for? I’m not that short! – 5 foot 4 inches.

 

I think now that I’ve eaten something and taken my tablets I’m going to go and crawl back into bed. Hopefully I’ll be able to sleep over all the lawn mowing neighbours taking advantage of the hot weather. They might be sensible and stop over the hottest hours of the day, although being English I’m not counting on it.

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 9 hours in 1 session 🙂
Headache intensity / pain level : 3 🙂
Nausea level : 0 😀
Joint / muscle pain : 3 😀
Fatigue : 8.5 😦
Brain Fog : 8.5 🙂

The lurgy monster downs a victim

I’ve spent the last 45 hours in a hospital. My sister was struck down with appendicitis. So a wonderful trip to Accident and Emergency (4 hour wait), moved to a temporary ward (overnight), surgery this morning.

 

I got my first lot of sleep, since Friday night (Saturday morning), this afternoon. I did get a couple of minutes or so at a go in the hospital in a chair beside my sister but I’m not sure that counts as real sleep just unconsciousness from exhaustion ! As you can imagine I am in a right state now but hopefully with some bed rest and sensible time management I’ll be back to my usual level of health by next week.

The lurgy monster has targeted our house …

All four of us have been laid up today with headaches and generally feeling awful. My mum and sister are on the cough sweets, Dad and I are tossing the painkillers back.

 

Despite all this, prior to the brain sucking monster returning, I managed to get a significant piece of writing done. After reading my novel through yesterday, or whenever it was, I realized there are huge chunks of information that I know that the reader doesn’t because the point of view characters don’t. So I was mulling it over last night. Currently I have the details of invasion covered as well as the details of the surveillance covered. But I don’t have any information included on the wider military and political action. So I have created a new point of view character ! A big step since this is a completely new character and therefore I haven’t got any fleshing out work done on her. It is useful though since I can use her to give me inside information from the palace as well as female voice to balance the two current male point of view characters.

 

Right that’s enough writing talk. I must have done something else with my day right! Hah, not really. I pottered about on the internet, watched a episode of Dexter Series 2 and went to bed for the afternoon. Upon crawling out of bed at 19:00 I simply pottered around on the internet looking at NaNoWriMo forums until I could physically get the energy to chew anything. For dinner I went for scrambled eggs, toast and chopped tomatoes – anything to avoid chewing as much as possible. The painkillers eventually kicked in and so I tackled an hour on my mum’s interview transcription.

 

Since then I’ve been making the rounds of my internet favourites. I was hoping my new book on writing ‘The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White would have arrived today but sadly not. So I shall patiently ( 😦 ) wait for it to arrive on Monday. Please Mr Postman !
Hours Sleep Today so far : – 11 hours in 2 sessions 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 6 😦
Nausea level : 0 😀
Joint / muscle pain : 1 😀
Fatigue : 6 😐
Brain Fog : 4.5 🙂

If I only had a non-insulated heart …

For the record four hours sleep is not sufficient for a healthy working day. I was up at 05:30 enjoying the dawn chorus 😦 ; I would much rather have still been asleep. My heart is acting up again. I’ll be lying in bed and it will feel like there is a think layer of insulation around it right in the center of my chest. I get this heavy feeling which feels a bit like indigestion accompanied by that tickle at the back of your throat. Sometimes it even feels like I can feel a value fluttering away in my heart. I’m not even sure that is biologically possible !

 

Anyway I gave up on lying down and decided to tackle my novel instead. I haven’t been writing the last couple of days and was worried I’d lost my flow. So this morning I read through my novel so far on my Kindle to get back into the rhythm of it. I avoided editing, even though there were some obvious word omission issues. The Superhero Nation articles got me thinking about who my characters are – are they real people or cardboard cut outs? Reading through my novel I feel like they aren’t perfect people so that is okay. But there are some issues with follow-on. The shift from one chapter to the next is quite abrupt. I will have to work on a way to smooth over the transition or key the reader into the change in POV, date and location.

 

I did manage to write 1607 words today. I think I have the timeline worked out so that I can cover the next set of significant events. Looking at the timeline it is clear I am going to have to go back to the early chapters and add in some details so that it is clear what information is flowing where. I was considering whether I need another POV character to cover the capital and the internal military intelligence situation but I am hoping my main male character will be able to that from now on. So I will have to work out a way for him to be told the information needed in the early chapters.

 

I managed to do an hour of interview transcription so I only have 20 minutes to go ! 🙂 I still have some commas to check but I am nearing the end of that project. And to cap the day off I won twice at The Settlers of Catan bringing my sister’s benevolent reign to a crashing halt. But mostly whatever I’ve been doing today if I wasn’t writing I wanted to get back to it. I’ve got the writing bug again 😀

 

Hours of Sleep Today so far : – 7 hours in 2 sessions 😦
Headache intensity / pain level : 6 😦
Nausea level : 0 😀
Joint / muscle pain : 1 😀
Fatigue : 5.5 😐
Brain Fog : 5 🙂

Want to join me for an evening of cancer and gambling? …

I’m not sure what I did today really. I did spend an hour doing my mum’s transcription – 14 minutes completed, only 30 to go !! I then spent a bit of time checking comma usage before I gave up and crawled off to bed. Of course I did spend a bit of time pottering around on the internet. 🙂 I’ve got a regular routine of pages I check through when I get on the computer first thing: Hotmail, Facebook, NaNoWriMo, Superhero Nation, here.

 

My sister arrived home not long after I got up so we have spent the evening watching DVD’s: The Big C – Season 1 final 4 episodes and Las Vegas disc 3. A good way to spend 6 hours !

 

I still haven’t got back to reading any fiction yet but I have looked longingly at a few of my favourites. I’m intending to implement The NORTAV Method on a couple of my favourite authors once I get some time, so I have made a ‘little’ pile of them by the TV.

 

Novel wise I haven’t written anything for a couple of days. I’m trying to work out what I need to do with my male character to make him believable. I’m a bit worried about him being too ‘nice’. I’m thinking I need to have someone read what I’ve written so far and tell me what they make of the characters so far. That way I can gauge whether my image of the characters matches the readers experience of them. My best friend V  said she would help me out with proofreading so I may ask her to be my beta reviewer. I know she is not a big reader, or fan of fantasy so she would be a naive reader to the genre. I might have to find someone familiar with the genre who will be mean to me if I need it.

 

Hours Sleep Today so far : – 12 hours in 2 sessions 😐
Headache intensity / pain level : 3 🙂
Nausea level : 0 😀
Joint / muscle pain : 1 😀
Fatigue : 5.5 🙂
Brain Fog : 4.5 🙂