Sleepless Nights

Author: Veronica

  • Avoiding a wheelchair is a really big part of my life

    Last year, I spent some time seeing a pain management team, which included a pain management physio. This was a SPECTACULARLY crappy experience, ending with me being handballed off to a psychologist before my physio would work with me again.

    Of course, I’ve since finished therapy, having worked out that my feelings of anxiety and impending doom are actually a physiological problem, not a psychological one. Basically this means that I’m fucked, but that it’s my screwed up nervous system’s problem, not my brain.

    My brain is fine, thank you.

    The reasoning behind me needing to see a psych was something along the lines of needing to get my license, to make getting into the city easier. But I’m too scared to drive because a major dislocation while driving is life-threatening, at best. Even with braces on, I dislocate in and around them. Which is so much fun.

    All of this is to say, I’ve been dumped by my physio, who hasn’t been in touch since sometime last year. I’m sure as hell not chasing him up, as his reasoning on EDS was pitiful at best –

    [Joint dislocations shouldn’t hurt because they’re not causing any trauma, because you’re bendy already. It’s just a fear response to perceived damage. To which I asked what about the torn muscles and ligaments that sometimes accompany bad dislocations? He changed the subject.]

    – and I decided that he was simply an arsehole.

    He was my third physio – the first one deciding that I was too complicated for her to manage and sending me away, the second being lovely, but part of the public system and I have no idea how I fell through the cracks of her system, and the third being a fuckwit.

    Now I’m pregnant, which requires management by a good physio.

    Which I don’t have.

    Insert maniacal laughter here, because of course I don’t have a physio when I need one. OF FUCKING COURSE.

    It’s like the time I had to cancel an orthotics appointment because I’d dislocated my knee the night before and physically couldn’t walk. They said “we’ll call you back with another appointment” and I never heard from them again and the next thing I know, the clinic has moved and I am lost in space.

    But I digress.

    Pregnant with Isaac, my pelvis started to separate sometime after week 20 of pregnancy, causing excruciating pain. The pregnancy physio associated with maternity saw me, put my pelvis back together, braced me and gave me the info about my joints that I needed to get my diagnosis changed from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.

    I am 10 and a half weeks pregnant now and I can feel my pelvis falling apart, which is causing a trickle down effect through my lower back, ribs, hips and knees. I was hoping to avoid this until after I’d been referred and seen by Maternity at the hospital (with access to their, frankly amazing, physiotherapists), but here we are.

    At 10 weeks, I am falling apart.

    BUT (and here is the good bit) I predicted this might happen (albeit, not this early) and planned ahead, by buying an elliptical trainer. Something recommended for low impact exercise and pelvis/hip/back/leg strengthening.

    I think it’s helping.

    And when your motivation to exercise is staying out of a wheelchair, it’s pretty hard to make excuses.

  • Real life just makes me tired

    I write here, a lot. In fact, WordPress tells me that I have published 1061 (now 1062) posts here in the last four and a half years. Hundreds of thousands of words, hundreds upon hundreds of stories.

    But some things are not my story to tell and so I walk away from the computer, tired with real life and unable to sink into storytelling like I otherwise might.

    There’s things going on at the moment, family things, and while I could blog them if I get permission (and may, yet), it’s Nathan’s story, not mine.

    I’m tired, Internet. I’m tired of dramas and pitchforks rabblerabblerabble and feeling like everything I mention online requires weighty substance. I’m sick of justifying why I’m not blogging about charity X Y and Z, or why I’m not donating time, or making more noise, or Doing Good Works.

    Can’t I just write stories, without feeling the pressure to give them a moral resolution.

    (Yes, yes I can and I will burn my guilt on the pyre of your pitchforky flames)

    And in the scheme of things, are our Internet rabblerabblerabble’s terribly important?

    Tired.

    Out of energy.

  • Why Pinterest is damaging the Internet

    Pinterest seems to be the new OMG HAVE YOU SEEN IT thing lately, which, okay, fine.

    It took me a while to get into it and then only a few moments to forget about it again. This probably says more about how my brain works than any particular thing wrong with the premise of Pinterest. I’m not a designer home kind of girl and pretty things usually just make me grumpy that my house is falling down and my finances are limited at best.

    Every few weeks though, I would click through to Pinterest to see what was happening in the gardening and food sections. Gardens and food are something I can do and there were some nice ideas.

    Ignoring the fact that I seemed to see the same pictures pinned over and over and over and fucking over again, I was able to peruse photos of walkways and overgrown vegetation and delicious foody things.

    Until, one day, I found something that looked interesting. So I clicked on it, to find it’s source, so that I could read more about it.

    Source: Google.com

    Huh. Just one image, snagged by a Pinterester, using Google image search. There was no accreditation for the original photographer, and nothing available to tell me what on earth it actually was, or how to cook it.

    Slowly as I found myself clicking on more and more things, I was finding more and more images grabbed from Google, with nothing about the original author.

    And okay, I get that kittens or fuzzy bunnies or whatever maybe don’t technically NEED a source, recipes.

    Artwork, crafts and awesome ideas however, definitely DO.

    It’s like a giant game of Chinese Whispers, once things have been pinned half a dozen times, no one knows what it was originally about.

    I am a big believer in not watermarking images, instead choosing to resize to “Internet friendly, but you can’t print it out”. I think watermarks distract from a photo and make things look messy.

    But Pinterest makes me want to start watermarking things. It also makes me want to put a giant padlock on my site and disallow third party search engines from collecting images that Pinteresters could then pin, with no thoughts of accreditation.

    Also, I think Pinterest enables people to use images in blog posts and then only give source credit to Pinterest. I’m sorry, but “found on Pinterest” is not source credit.

    NO, NO IT ISN’T.

    I’m calling you out Pinterest. I think you’re damaging for artists, for craftspeople, for food bloggers, for photographers and for people with interesting ideas that they kindly share with the Internet.

  • Apparently, they can only squeak and whine

    I just shouted at my daughter for chopping a lemon into pieces with a filleting knife. While I’m proud that she didn’t chop her fingers off, I’m rather unimpressed that she destroyed my next-to-last lemon.

    At the same time, Isaac ran away outside, holding a bowl of water and pretending he didn’t hear me asking him to lay down and get changed. Again.

    I’ve got no idea what he is doing with the bowl.

    For that matter, I’ve got no idea why Amy wanted a lemon.

    Considering they’ve decided to converse solely in puppy whines (making me tell Amy more than once “If you continue to sound like a puppy, I’ll put you outside like one”) and squeaks, I’ve probably got no chance of finding out.

    This has been my Sunday.

    How was your weekend?

  • I really don’t feel guilty about this at all

    We were in the garden the other day when Amy spotted two snails having sex.

    “Mummy, what are the snails doing?”

    “They’re making babies.”

    “How do snails have babies?”

    “They lay eggs.”

    “Oh. And then the babies will hatch and eat our plants?”

    “Probably.”

    Five minutes later, the snails were slowly going their separate ways (they must have been at it all night to be done so quickly) and the ducks were at the gate looking hungry.

    So I picked the snails up and threw them to the ducks.

    I’m pretty sure they died happy, if we ignore the moments of terror when first they flew, (snails are not designed for flight, by the way) and then were eaten by hungry ducks.

    This means war.