Vasovagal Aetiology

I got an 'ology'! Well, possibly maybe an ology...and a P2 murmur just for extra special benefit! Nope, I have no idea what it all means either...Apparently the fainting episodes are linked with vasovagal syncope, origin as yet undetermined. Have just had the cardiac tests with the results pending - once through I can hopefully rule out cardiac issues as the cause.

It's a bit spooky, seeing inside your own heart. Well, for the first five minutes it was fascinating. The technician was excellent - she talked me through everything on the screen and showed me all the valves - as my heart was going at 130 beats per minutes, the sight of my flappy valve thingies going at speed was just a little bit too much...I decided to close my eyes for the rest of the test. Either that or barf...

I then had a 24hr ECG. Simples? Nooooo, oh no. Who knew I could be allergic to the sticky chest pads. I spent twenty of the twenty four hours desperately trying not to rip my skin off. Needless to say, sleep was in shot supply and my temper even shorter the following day. Even the ECG technician was shocked when the gaffer tape came off - red, bubbling welts all over my chest. I looked liked I'd been attacked by giant mutant suckers, probably attached to some hideous sea monster with crunchy inner teeth...

Ahem. Enough about my eel issues. Tilting tables and possible projectile vomit next - what fun!

GD: happy as a pig in muck (hmmm...actually a pig in muck?!); listening to Buffy! The Musical!; lamenting the loss of Borders UK - fecking global capitalism really doesn't work.

Broken Doll

Paloma Faith - Broken Doll (takes a minute for her to start so bear with it)

First round of tests yesterday - not so bad apart from the vomiting pensioners all about us. Positively streaming green bile. Modesty sent flapping into the breeze as usual, with them sticky little ECG pad things. They then dumped a tea towel over my salient assets - really, I wouldn't have bothered. They'd withered with the cold already.

Heart rate: excited. Heart murmur status: still present but presumed innocent. Actually, the registrar was wonderful, very thorough considering I'd lost my voice completely and had to suck soothers throughout the examination in order to squeak on demand. I have to go back for an echo cardiogram, 24 hour ECG and the topsey turvey tables but they already suspect they know what it is. And it's nothing majorly serious which is a relief. No formal diagnosis until the tests are complete but naturally the advice still precludes me from having beer, chips or chocolate (though I was so thoroughly sick of myself today I had a skinny latte and ginger loaf cake from Starbucks when I got sent home from work yet again...ok, so I'm probably infectious but I'm also lonely. My germs are lonely!).

I'm positively fed up, if you can be such a thing. I think I need to write my manifesto and a new design for life. I'm going to end up sacked if my health doesn't improve, and whilst my manager is absolutely wonderful about everything, I am genuinely concerned.

Still, it's the weekend. I am getting marginally better, and I have had cake. I bought tickets to go see the lovely Paloma. I'm slightly obsessed and would quite happily swap my scraggy old bones for hers. Doubt she feels the same somehow...

GD: in bed but still managing to have cold feet; listening to Paloma, Eden House and Incubus Succubus (eclectic mix but hey! I'm bored). Lonely.

Apology for Absense

Apology for Absense, by Julia Darling


Look, it's as if my heart is a damp cupboard
filled with old brass that needs polishing.

Or I must cover myself with moss, damp down,
try to establish new growth in the rotting.

Sometimes I am ripped for shreds by the North wind
and must curl up beneath a counterpane.

I need to practise dying, to imagine health,
to eat tinned pears, light unecessary fires.

And love can be tyrannical, so sweet, yet edgy.
I am overpowered by its fragrent red roses.

Sitting rooms are too vivid. Things get torn.
I have to disappear, to darn each rip.

Forgive me, brave daughters, for the questions
that I have failed to answer. And my love,

please don't say I malingered,don't be
angry later, when you add up the ticks.

This is from a wonderful collection of poems written by Julie Darling during a period when she was dying from cancer. I cannot recommend these poems enough, though some of my liking for these is due to my familiarity with the places and the streets depicted within.



I have a heart murmur and have to have more tests. The advice is all:

So I guess that's what I'll do, until they tell me other.

Limbo

I am somewhat subdued at the moment. Specifically, I have to contend with my mortality in a serious way for probably the first time in my life. Oh, we all know it'll come, and we all hope for an honourable send off with flowers, wicker coffin and a stupendous wake.

I passed out twice last week. Passed out is probably the incorrect description - I retained consciousness but couldn't respond to my body's strange mind bending propensities. Fell on my knees, the first time, in a crowed shop and felt like a complete tit. Felt OK afterwards so didn't really think about it. Second time the world distorted and buckled, and when I regained control it had taken on nightmarish qualities - everything was rolling, curved - like a world you'd find at the top of the Magic Faraway Tree. Topsey Turvey World. I stayed there for 24 hours, which made for an interesting return home on public transport.

I'll be honest - I haven't been treating this rather fragile body of mine well recently. I've been drinking too much, under a great deal of stress and devouring cake. A day hasn't been complete without cake. And I've had a chest infection and antibiotics. And my acquaintance with vegetables remains remote. I guess I forget I'm 37 and technically middle aged (SHRIEKS HOLLOWLY IN OWN SKULL!).

Then you realise the doctor thinks you may have a heart problem and everything inside of you ends up in your mouth, soaking it with fear. I should never have googled 'blood test crp', honestly, I should have just sat in blissful ignorance until the results come back next week. But I'm curious...

So, four vials of blood later, I have to wait a week for the results (I should add in the interest of balance that I'm also being tested for diabetes, thyroid problems and calcium deficiencies), I'm thinking 'Hmmmmm...'. I haven't had cake for five days (a big deal in my world!), or alcohol (even bigger, sadly). Apples are my only fruit. I have strict orders to go direct to hospital if it happens again (Do not pass go, do not collect £200...).

Probably a storm in a teacup. But I'm scared, sad though it is, because I know exactly what heart disease does to people. Have done since I was thirteen and my step-dad had a massive coronary event that has blighted his life ever since. So I'm drinking lots of herbal tea and reading obsessively to switch my brain off.

Oh, and don't google 'blackout cause' either. That one really freaked me! The Internet is a two edged sword and sometimes it cuts deep.

GD: morose, a fan of True Blood, thinking she better get a step on finishing the magnum opus before she karks it! And listening to the Cure and Kasabian. And a little bit of Billy Joel - we all need cheery cheese!

Definate lack of cool

I know I'm not cool because:

• I am listening to Clannad
• I am currently teaching myself, through various You Tube videos, to crochet a granny square. And I'm doing it badly.
• I am wearing a Celtic t-shirt with a gold knot work ring and bright green dragons and I don't care who sees it
• I have red hair
• I don't like Twilight
• Conversely, I do love Charlaine Harris's 'Dead' series and have just bought another three volumes; upon which purchase I was laughed at by the shop assistant
• I like Starbucks skinny lattes, even if they are all froth and no coffee
• I'm indoors hiding, when it is probably the most glorious day of the year so far
• I have never stopped wearing thick black (occasionally ribbed) tights all year, and now it is the season, I am contemplating moving into my woolly versions
• I like proper hot water bottles without novelty covers
• I have a Peugeot 206 that is covered in dog.
• I write bad poetry
• I love Dr Hook and Billy Joel, and I'm playing 'Innocent Man' just a bit too much these days
• Just as graphic novels gain some credibility I find I'm going off them. C'est la vie

So there we go. Not cool. Not bothered.

GD: emotionally screwed and thinking she's about to break (I'm not kidding - I ran away from home today for three hours and ended up in Starbucks. Some rebel, I). Physically crippled but unable to get a doctor's appointment because the crones beat me in the 8:30am stampede.

The Abundance of Snot

I have cold, so therefore it follows logically that I must be fed up. Which is true, but not necessarily cold related. No, I have cold because I'm stressed and my immune system has hit it's peak of brokenness which inevitably kicks in when I am mentally below par.


I am dreaming of face eating zombies, which is also affecting the quality of sleep I am achieving. In recompense, I have also dreamt about Sean Bean in (and possibly out) his Sharpe uniform, a dream so filthy I was actually blushing when I awoke. That I most definitely am not complaining about!

Sean Bean, aka Sharpe, aka a very, very bad man...

There's so much going on outside of the virtual life that I can't post; it's not myself that is suffering most but there are times when you wish for the worst, because the increments become ever more difficult to endure.


So I sit here in twee land, listening to Buddy Holly sing True Love Ways, I drink cappuccino and eat toast and I read Charlaine Harris obsessively (which incidentally may be where some of the more extreme elements of my dreams may be stemming from...!). Not great literature perhaps, but certainly great escapism.


I will be back sometime soon, indelibly changed and most definitely older and sadder. Until then, be well virtual world.

You Can't Start a Fire without a Spark

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman approaching forty with no offspring hanging of her shirt tails or bank balance occasionally falls in need with some inappropriate object of desire and thus commits themselves to many years of joy, financial ruin and advancing critters of the night by buying a shack.

Well, I haven't bought a shack - WE have (or at least are currently awaiting the bank giving us the cash...) to purchase a woodland shack. They call it a chalet on the details - they lie. It's a wooden hut with bedrooms and the occasional running water. There are holes in the cladding and the insulation is shot. One bedroom is a fetching mix of lime and dark greens. And for 6 weeks of the year (high summer), it's off-limits for me thanks to my screwed immune system.
But it's beautiful. It's in an ancient woodland near the banks of the Tyne. You have to drive through a corn field to get to the car park. You think you're in gnome-y, twee hell as this is surrounded by (admittedly very pretty) chalets that are populated with the old folk who don't retire to Spain. Cuprinol skin is popular. So you park, and then you see a small path twisting off into the trees. Following it you step into the heart of the wood, and then you step onto the veranda and....

It's positively beautiful. There is a terraced open space, coolly shaded by deciduous trees, through which a small rivulet of water has been trained to create a small pond area that teams with tiny silver fish. If there is a heaven, I'm actually able to buy it....(well, lease it seven months a year!).

So we gave in, offered, offered again and are now undergoing security checks to ensure we're not going to go Blair Witch through the trees in the near future.

It's a step. Step one of us changing the way our lives work (and in P's case, don't). Step two will be to downsize Albatross (our house. The name is self explanatory: if not go read the Coleridge poem).

I can't afford to bugger off to Rio or Tuscany to write my magnum opus. But I can bugger off to our shack in the woods, with it's open fireplace and seclusion. I can sit dangling my feet over the veranda and watch my silver fish play. I will be able to lie under the canopy of trees and stars and look to an uncertain future with a smile.

It's a step. A very significant step. And I for one am so very glad that for once in my life prudence and common sense didn't hold me back from having something of very little practical value but of immense beauty.

GD: listening to Depeche Mode's Playing the Angel; very snotty and hungover (only myself to blame!); eating cake. Too much cake!

Teaser Tuesday: Book Related

"Grab Your current read. Let the pages fall open on a random page. Share two teaser sentances from that page. Don't forget to name the book!"

Well, why not? After all, I am on a steady diet of trash at the moment, why not share! So we'll begin with Laurell K Hamilton's Narcissus in Chains, one of my current bedside 'classics'. Purchased from my local library's slush pile, this cost me a whole 10p. It's number ten in the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter novels, when we've gone from Anita being a straightforward zombie raiser and vampire killer to full on vampire / werewolf slut. Some parts are making blush. Really blush.

Selection One, for mass consumption (page 131):

He had a perfect imprint of my teeth in the right side of his neck. The
wound was still seeping blood, so the circle of toothmarks was filled with
crimson.

So, our heroine was playing rough with little Micah, was she? Now that wasn't all she got up to with him, particularly in the shower...

Selection Two (page 303):

I was reminded of the scene from the Wizard of Oz where Dorothy puts oil on the
Tin Man's jaw after he'd been rusted

Hmmmm...I haven't got that far so have no idea what it refers to. But these books make Anne Rich's Vampire Chronicles look tame. Lestat is a puppy in comparison with these nymphos. Good rollicking fun, and no doubt not the last LKH book I ever read.

GD: is tweaking her website for inspiration (hence new blog colours), listening to Turin Brakes, coming back to life

One day...

One day I'll accomplish everything that's in my head to achieve. One day. But hey - why do now what I can delay until tomorrow, next week, the end of next year? Procrastination, my poison prince, your knife cuts deep. Or is it inertia? I've muttered about this less than savory character trait before. At the risk of sounding boring I suspect it's because it's one of my biggest flaws (along with the vengeance / lack of forgiveness thing, obviously!).

My mother reckons I'm too laid back. I've been inclined to disagree with her. If I'm honest, mainly because it's HER opinion. From others I may have considered it a bit too close to the truth, but from Hyperactive Harridan I've never really given it much credence. Perhaps I should: even though I feel like I boil away under the skin, I'm not hugely proactive about dealing with the things that I should. I have no real drive - ambitions are fine, but they remain intangible when in fact, with a bit of a push and hard work they're probably more achievable than I think or assume.

I think shyness holds me back considerably, coupled with deep rooted fear that I'm just not good enough. I'm trying to overcome this by joining new groups and challenging myself to participate and some of it's working. Its just that there's so much going on outside of ambition at the moment I'm not sure what to choose. My personal relationships exhaust me to the point of illness - do I cauterize the wound and cut the dead flesh free?

I have mental goals but they don't drive me. I'm all ad-hoc girl. I expect my *brilliance* to shine through with the smallest snippet of effort. It won't (and I'm not brilliant). I watched my father holding court from his bed like a fuhrer yesterday, looking for mischief and expecting to be treat like the god he thinks he is - where did he get that confidence from? Why don't I have it? Then I watch him treating people with a lack of basic respect and think 'OK, that's why we differ so much....'. But you can be over deferential.

So what do I do? I'll set some goals, here now, in my next post perhaps. I expect failure at the very most. I'm stuck in stasis and I'm afraid I'll be moored here for ever.

I'm very sad today.

GD: Mopey sod; skint and about to be skinter thanks to Suicide Boy; no ambition; a spark that's fading; thinking that 'What kind of Fool' by all About Eve sums it all up perfectly.

When life gives you a lemon, jump ship

Nuff said. I never meant to break, but if you will not take any responsibilty for yourself why should I?