Hyper-something, hypo-something

The good news is my tiredness seems to have lifted, mostly. The bad news is that I woke up this morning with a roaring headache and couldn’t shake it for most of the day.

I’ve noticed that being chronically ill gives you a bizarre form of semi-hypochondria: every little tweak of a muscle, snuffle or sneeze suddenly seems laden with horrible possibilities.

This morning’s headache, for example. More likely than not, it was a simple, common or garden headache of the type we all wake up with from time to time. To my slightly addled brain, however, it could be a recurrence of the old CO2 headaches I used to get before I started on my NIV overnight. The issue there being that since I’m not actually using overnight NIV, it would imply that my lungs have deteriorated further and the NIV isn’t working hard enough to clear the CO2 from my lungs while I sleep.

The chances of this being the case – considering there are no obvious other signs of major chest complaint (no significant drop in lung-function, no increase in volume of sputum etc) – are pretty low, but it doesn’t stop my brain working the scenarios over in my head almost constantly.

Most importantly, I guess, is the fact that I can see my slightly skewed look at things and take a bit of a step back from it. I’m not fretting my head off about it, but it is still playing on my mind a little. I’m sure I’ll sleep soundly tonight and wake up tomorrow with no problems at all, and I’ll feel foolish for even letting the thought cross my mind. But when you’re sitting on such unstable ground, you get a little hyper-sensitive.

I shall be trying to get back into my exercise regime again tomorrow, having missed almost a week now through tiredness. I shall also be attempting to get back into the screenplay again, having failed to match yesterday’s 10 pages with any pages at all today. I’m a bit hit-and-miss, me.

On the plus side for today, K’s little 2 year-old niece and 15-month old nephew (I’m sure I’ll have got that wrong now, I bet I get shot for it, too) came over for a visit today, which was just gorgeous as they were both in such fantastic moods. Even though I was feel really rough with my head banging and pretty short of breath, I managed to have a lot of fun. Luckily, I could play mostly sat down on the sofa or the floor and not move around much (I left policing duties to K and their Mum, who would race after the little one as he crawled off at top speed to reek havoc in other rooms).

I spent most of the time being either a fairy or a ballerina. I’m not quite sure what that suggests our niece thinks about me, but I’d like to think it means she understands that I’ve got a wonderful imagination, just like her.

Even when you’re feeling tired and rough, there’s something truly infectious about children’s laughter – it reminded me what I used to love about working with the Youth Theatre. Having a child’s simple outlook on life is so rare and so delightful, to focus 100% on what’s going on right now with no thought for the history or what comes next.

With two children as gorgeous and laughter as infectious as theirs, it’s impossible to say I’ve had a bad day.

“We do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children.”
Native American Proverb

Something in the water…

There must be something about being tired and a little bit down on yourself that sets the inspiration glands working over time, as I napped this afternoon and got up to find myself sat in front of the computer churning out 10 pages of my screenplay.  Even I’m impressed.

Stuffing knocked out

Sunday may have been a great day, but I’m certainly paying for it now.  Three days on and I’m still shattered and my chest is tremendously upset about something, though quite what it’s problem is I don’t know.

I feel tight, I feel tired and I feel pretty unhappily breathless, too – a great combination for poor K as she has to put up with a very grumpy Oli (for a third day in a row, too!).

I don’t know if it’s all Sunday-related or if part of it is the curse of the project-mention in the blog, but something is conspiring to give me a really rough ride this week and I don’t like it.

I was supposed to go to Oxford today for an exercise sesh with the physio, but there is no way my body is going to put up with 2 1/2 hours in a car and half-an-hour’s worth of treadmills and step-ups.

As if to rub the proverbial salt in, I’ve also not been sleeping at night now, either, which just makes the day-times seem worse.   It’s all one-thing-on-top-of-another and I know it’ll sort itself out soon enough if I just keep resting up and keep my calorie count high, but it’s a real b*stard to go through right now.

I suppose the lows are always harder to deal with off the back of big highs, too, since you’ve had that much further to fall, but I’m doing my damnedest not to let it get me down.  The trouble is, I just don’t have the energy to be up.

It’s a funny thing, that.  Being “down” takes no energy at all – it’s almost like a default position, whereas being “up” requires an investment of energy, even if it’s just a small amount.  I think that’s skewed, someone should write and complain.

Still, there’s nothing better than writing a post on SmileThroughIt to remind me that I’m supposed to be SmilingThroughIt, so I’m off to search YouTube for videos of stupid people falling off logs and bumping their face.

Sunday I’ll fly away…

I know that, technically, the tense of the title is wrong, since it was yesterday and not next week, but it was such a fantastic pun which came to me in my half-dead stupor in bed last night that I just couldn’t let it go, grammatically-challenged although it may be.

Anyway, to the point – I had the most amazing day yesterday, flying down to Ipswich to see my Godfather and his family. Yes – flying. To Ipswich. The only thing more remarkable than taking a helicopter down to visit friends and family in Ipswich is that someone who can afford to own a helicopter and fly his friends and family around would choose to live in Ipswich.

I love flying – I’ve done it a few times at school when I was a cadet in the RAF. The only reason I signed up, in fact, was that I heard you got to go for a buzz in a Bulldog – which, for those of you out of the loop on these things, is flying in a type of small, 2-man aeroplane, not unnaturally interfering with a canine.

Helicopters are so much more fun than planes, though, since they are infinitely more manoeuverable than their winged cousins. The float serenely up into the sky – well, as serenely as you can with two engines and four blades shuddering around above your head – and whisk you much quicker than you’d imagine to wherever you want to go.

My Godfather lives in the middle of Nowhere-outside-Ipswich, which is a very quaint little village which does, in fact, have a proper name, but navigation is much easier when you just fly straight into his garden. Road names are rather arbitrary.

They have recently been redoing their house – and by “redo” I mean gut and rebuild, basically – and I could go into immense detail about the 6 bedrooms, 5 en suite, chill-out room, grand staircases, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, televisions behind pictures on the wall and double-pool spa-complex with gym hidden behind a wall of mirrors at one end, but actually I think all you need to know to create a picture in your mind is the fact that you can land a helicopter in his back yard.

There are 2 things you notice about the East of England when you fly over it from anything ranging between 500 and 1,200 feet (we yo-yo’d a little bit, for fun and frolics): 1) East Anglia and Suffolk in particular, is incredibly flat and boring to look at, endless miles of monotonous fields and the odd semi-major road and 2) there are more stately homes or Very Big Houses than you can shake a big stick at. Mind you, your chances of finding anything as interest as a big stick in the landscape of Suffolk is close to zero.

Monotony aside, it’s a wonderful experience flying over everyone’s heads, seeing your shadow chasing across the fields below, spotting the rich areas by counting the number of swimming pools and tennis courts per x number of houses. Helicopter is way to travel. Even a comparatively boring 40 minute ride like ours was about 100 times more interesting than spending 40 minutes on the M1.

I could fly all day – even over Suffolk. I do it a disservice by knocking its dull flatness, because anything is fascinating from the air – watching the roads wind around the countryside, spotting the big houses, fields being ploughed, small country airstrips (of which there are far, far more than you would imagine).

Although we weren’t quite high enough to see things properly, there were times when you could even make out an interesting lie of land that would appear to indicate the presence of an old fort or similar – like being in a live episode of Time Team.

All of which is a very long-winded way of telling you that we spent the day with my Godfather and his family in Ipswich, which I completely and dearly loved every minute of. The fact is, without the convenience of flying pretty much door-to-door (we did have to drive 15 minutes to an airfield at our end), I’d never have been able to go.

It was a really, really wonderful day and it left me completely drained and shattered. Today’s been spent almost entirely in bed and tomorrow will probably largely be, too, but it was totally worth it. I’ve not spent time with them for absolutely ages and K’s never met my Godfather before, although she had met his wife, who’s one of the world’s greatest people when her scathing eye is trained on someone other than me. Luckily yesterday, her husband was around to deflect most of the attention, and I had K there so I didn’t have to endure the “when are you going to find yourself a decent woman” conversation, either.

In fact all she had to complain about was my lack of visits recently, which I assured her I’d make up post-transplant by using her house as my rehab centre. For one thing, it’s got a better-equipped gym than any NHS hospital and a good deal of private city-gyms too, I suspect.

It was great to get away for a bit and catch up with people I love to pieces and see far too infrequently. And to have the luxury of flying there and back, well, that just takes the biscuit.

Ooooh, photos!!

Training 3

WAY too hot for training today, so why on earth did it turn out to be the first session I’ve done since… Tuesday, I think? Maybe it’s guilt.

Anyway, got through 8 mins of steps and then did half my strengthening – 3×8 curls and 3×8 shoulder raises. I think doing all of the strengthening in one go with the step-ups is too much – I noticed a distinct lack of energy the next day, which I’m taking to be residual tiredness – so I’ve decided to separate them into upper- and lower-body exercises and do them on alternate days.

SIDE NOTE: Weight is now up to 52.4kg – I think this is the heaviest I’ve ever been, or at least close to it.  Hope it keeps going on.