Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Living in the middle of nowhere.

    Except for the busy fuck-off highway running along my front fence, I live in the middle of nowhere.

    It’s great for a few reasons, lots of space, very little pollution, farmland all around. I get to watch the sheep and lambs in spring and the cows are constantly chewing my hose fittings on the communal farm pipe off and breaking them.

    It means we can plant trees without worrying about how big they’ll grow and we can have animals on the property without anyone saying anything. Ducks? Sure! Let’s get ducks! And chooks while we’re at it. And a rooster to crow and wake us up.

    Rooster, chooks and ducks having breakfast.

    It also means that an impromptu duck singalong doesn’t bother anyone. Except the chooks.

    Duck Singalong

    I get spectacular sunsets and sunrises, because I can actually see the hills surrounding my property..

    Sunrise.

    Sunset.

    Of course, living in the middle of nowhere means that I am extra careful about my internet privacy. When you live in a suburb with only 6 houses in the main stretch, you can’t afford to let anyone know where you are. It’s not like being able to say I live in Hobart and knowing that so do 10,000 other people. Unfortunate.

    I get to make up for it with views like this from my mailbox.

    Winter has been horribly dry, as you can tell. We’re slowly getting some rain now and it’s amazing how fast things start to green up.

    I’m hoping for a wet spring, because extra water is never bad.

    These aren’t my paddocks by the way. These are the ones that have had the irrigators running, watering them all winter. Stupid weather when you spend all winter watering the paddocks so the stock can eat.

    Of course, when you live in the middle of nowhere, sometimes your animals get confused about where they should be laying their eggs.

    This duck for example, is sitting on the side of the road. Sure, she’s under my hedge, but on the wrong side of the freaking fence. When she discovered I was stealing her eggs from this nest, she started laying under the pine tree, next to the post box. Again – outside of my property. She’s come right now (I think) and she appears to be laying in the nesting boxes. Of course, I might be entirely wrong and she might appear in a few months, bringing ducklings from MILES away.

    You just never know.

    There are downsides of course, the closest supermarket is 30 minutes drive away and most of our shopping is done 45 minutes from here. All our hospital appointments require an hour of driving to reach and if we ever get pregnant with a 3rd baby, we likely won’t make it to the hospital on time. Also, an ambulance takes 20 minutes to get here, on a good day.

    And it means the neighbours (the one further away, luckily) have roaring parties and rev their cars at god awful hours. But hey, we’d get that in the suburbs too.

    All round, it’s pretty lovely living so far out.

  • Terrible skin and asking advice.

    My skin is terrible. So terrible that in most photos of me, I utilise the power of the ‘heal’ tool in photoshop.

    I think most of it is EDS and not healing very well, or very fast, but my skin = shocking. I get a lot of period related pimples and they take forever to heal, leaving me with giant red spots all over my face.

    Sexy, right?

    I’ve had some sucess with using an insane amount of vitamin C to help with healing, but as for skin products, I use very few.

    So I’m asking your advice, my lovely beautiful internets on what works for you. My skin is combination/oily and at the moment, I use a garnier daily moisture cream and avon clearskin cleanser and warm water.

    Obviously that regime is working SO WELL.

    However, while the vitamin C isn’t really helping with the pimples and healing, it does seem to be having some effect on the bruises I develop. 80% of the time I don’t look like a beaten wife. I used to joke that someone seeing my legs would think that Nathan was hitting me. Luckily the bruising seems to be limited to my legs/bum/back, with a few on my upper arms. I don’t think I’d cope very well if I was bruising everywhere – lovebites are disgusting looking and even worse if they’ve just appeared for no reason.

    So what do you think would work well for my face? My skin is quite sensitive and I’d like something that cleared up blackheads too, as *shudder* they are the scourge of my life.

    Dammit, I’m broken enough, the least I could get would be awesome pretty skin! Wouldn’t it be nice if pimples stopped with the end of puberty?

  • Throwing rocks at the windows of cars is NEVER okay.

    We were driving home this afternoon, after an Early Intervention appointment and various other things, when someone threw a rock at Isaac’s car window.

    Our car was almost on the highway when we heard the crash and felt the car shudder. Nathan spotted the rock rolling away in his rear view mirror and pulled over.

    Luckily, SO SO luckily, it missed the window by about 6 inches and hit the side of the car instead.

    You can see where it hit near the petrol cap and scratched. That window you can see in the corner of the photo, that’s where Isaac is.

    For Tasmanians, we were leaving Chigwell, on the sliplane to the Brooker Highway when it was thrown. There is a bank there, on the left of the car, with houses, back fences and lots of scrub. Speed limit 100kmph.

    The rock was thrown HARD – hard enough to shatter a window if it had hit and it was a large rock. Because whoever it was was above us, there was no way they were aiming for anything other than the windows.

    I am still shaken and so so angry.

    This rock, it could have killed my son. I hope whoever it was is proud of themselves and they’re bloody lucky that Nathan didn’t catch them.

    The person had bolted, but the rock lay in the middle of the road still, with our paint on it.

    A large rock, thrown hard at our window.

    We called the police from my BIL’s house about 5 minutes later and they came and looked everything over and filed a report for us. The officer was lovely and understood exactly why we were so upset. He was also amazed at how large the rock was, normally only pebbles are thrown. Heh, normally. Rocks shouldn’t be thrown at cars. EVER.

  • Ehlers Danlos and Nausea

    Probably one of the hardest things I find about dealing with EDS is the incessant nausea. It’s one of those things, that if the nausea went away, the rest of the EDS would be easier to deal with.

    But add nausea to extreme fatigue, joint pain and constant dislocations and I get a little miserable.

    Some things help – oranges for example. If, when I’m feeling like throwing up, I can force myself to suck on some orange segments, I can usually stave off the throwing up for a little bit. I also have anti emetics, which help with the vomiting, but don’t make the nausea go away. It’s really frustrating.

    Even more frustrating when I talk to doctors (not my regular GP, who prescribes Pramin without blinking) and they can’t understand why nausea is associated with EDS. Aware only of the joint and dislocation side of things, the other symptoms of EDS often get overlooked, or played down.

    Like a geneticist said ‘I have no studies showing incidences of nausea or more dislocations as it relates to a hormonal cycle’ regardless of the fact that anecdotal evidence shows time and time again that a rise in progesterone leaves female EDSers with more floppiness and nausea is a part of EDS for everyone. But of course, if it’s not in a study, published in a journal somewhere, then I can’t POSSIBLY have those symptoms as part of EDS.

    Ugh.

    At least now, after reading BendyGirl’s blog, I know I’m not the only one who vomits after sex! Maybe it’s all the joggling of my stomach, or maybe it’s the hormones released at orgasm, but either way, sex = nausea. Luckily, sex is more than worth it.

    But I digress.

    I’m stuck in a sort of rut with my nausea lately. A mucked up cycle ala a blighted ovum has sent me spiralling back into a 6 week long cycle, with ovulation fuck knows when – day 14 it feels like, EXACTLY where it should be. Unfortunately, that means I get a month of rising progesterone levels before I get my period and they fall off again. Which leaves me retching and feeling like the dead for oh, about 30 days of 42.

    Not fun. Not fun at all.

    When I see new doctors, for whatever reason, I do my best to give them a run down of what they’d expect to see symptom wise from someone presenting with EDS, who didn’t know that they had it. I do this to student doctors, physio’s, nurses, basically everyone in the medical field I can get my hands on. I educate them.

    If you are a doctor/nurse/friend and someone presents with fatigue, nausea, achey joints, headaches, reduced concentration and a general feeling of unwellness and it’s lasting for a long time, months or years, then maybe, just maybe, it’s a connective tissue disorder. Generally, those symptoms above are the ones people notice, because if you’re bendy, being bendy is so normal that we don’t think to tell the doctor ‘On top of all that, I can put my feet behind my head and I’m amazing at yoga and athletic sex, oh and by the way, my joints do this *click*’.

    The other thing I tend to try and educate doctors on is that most of the time, if they can’t come up with a diagnosis, it’s not because there isn’t one, but because they’re not looking hard enough or thinking outside of the box. I never ever want to see anyone else fobbed off with a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome if there is more to be done or investigated. Blood tests are not the be all and end all of diagnostics.

    There. Educating. See?

    When I was first sick and trying to get a diagnosis, because of my vomiting and nausea issues, I was ‘diagnosed’ with just about every form of eating disorder out there. Which was insane, because given a choice (and when I was feeling well) I was perfectly capable of eating bread and jam, topped with whipped cream, all without counting a single calorie or even feeling guilty about it.

    I spent a lot of time then living on pasta with a little tomato soup through it, topped with lettuce and tomatoes. Healthy food and somehow, pasta (gluten containing, sweet sweet gluten) and salad was easier to keep down.

    Nowadays the only pasta in my house is gluten free and somehow, it’s not quite the same, even when I do top it with salad.

    So nausea. Probably one of the more draining sides of EDS. I’m sick of not sleeping because I’m too busy head down in the toilet, or not eating because I can’t swallow without retching.

    Not fun.

    If you’re interested, other EDSy bloggers can be found here:

    BendyGirl
    The Tensile Times
    BubbleGirl
    Everyday Stranger
    MeriLizzie

    (I know I read more than these, but my brain is blanking. Speak up if you’re blogging about EDS and I’ve not linked you, I’ll edit to include you.)

  • Australian Blogging Conference

    With the help of some amazing ladies, Brenda and I have been getting the balls rolling to organise our own Australian Blogging Conference, with a bent towards personal and mummy bloggers. Think BlogHer, but Australian.

    And so, now, we’re asking for YOUR help.

    Yes you. You lurker. And you, my favourite commenters ever.

    We have a survey running, asking which city you’d attend a conference in (Sydney or Melbourne) and the kind of things you’d like to hear spoken about.

    I would really REALLY love if you could fill out a survey and let us know your ideas, so we can finalise some details and get into the nuts and bolts planning stage.

    Survey! Fill it out here. Please.

    With lots of thanks to Karen, Nicole, Brenda and Tina.

    If you’d like to add anything else, not seen in the survey, feel free to add it here and we’ll discuss it.

    I’m excited. This is a really big deal for Australian Personal and Mummy Bloggers.