The ups and downs

Most of the snow has melted, at least in the yard.  My roommate/friend and I did a little outing to see ice-out on Lake Superior.  Get this, we were too early! It has been such a cold, long winter.

Not that ice-out happens all at once, but it can be pretty interesting to catch a part of it.  One year we found these huge frozen ice pans that were floating in very shallow water and we stood on them.

One year the ice was candling (which means disintegrating into numerous vertical columns, hard to describe).

open water near river outlet, in the distance, entire bay still frozen

This year the whole bay was quite obviously still frozen in, so we went to one of the local river outlets.  The river was extremely high from the rain and the snow melt.   It was pretty amazing and twice the volume of water from my last visit - loud over the rapids and a misty spray rising from the cascading water.  I'm posting a few photos - some taken from an old railway bridge above the river outlet.

Also, a week ago I went to the local harbour down the road and just looked at the ice.

I know I said I'd been having a good week, and the day after I wrote that I crashed hard.  This week has been a series of ups and downs.  Decent days followed by horrible weak and fluy days.  Also, I have been having poor sleep, waking up multiple times a night with sweats, bad dreams, and just not getting the quality of sleep I usually do.

I'm fed up with the cold and grey.

I'm also frustrated with the side-effects from my POTS/OI drug.  I can't get the dose high enough to notice much of a difference with dizzy spells and tachycardia, because the side effects (headache, shivers and chills, and head tingling) are persistent still on the very low dose.

Otherwise, I've been tooling around with some unsuccessful art and waiting for my research to make it through the university ethics assessment.

Sometimes I find this illness so isolating.  Not only because I'm mostly homebound and have virtually  no local friends, but because I feel as if I live such a different life from most the world.  When I do connect with friends, the last thing I want to do is complain or talk about my boring sick life. And yet what do I have to talk about?  I try to focus the conversation on the other person.  For one, I can enjoy their stories and live vicariously. Also, almost anything is more exciting discuss than my life.

My exciting life:

"I had a bath today", "I ate some chocolate", "I watched Big Bang Theory", "Of the hours I was awake, I lay on the couch for 5 hours and in bed for 8", "I read 5 chapters of a book".  

I don't make for a very interstering conversationalist.  In fact, sometimes I'm surpised I have any friends left at all.

That being said, what with all the time I spend resting, reading, watching TV, and just coping with illness and dizziness I often feel fairly busy.  And in my own little world, sometimes life feels normal. It's only when I spend time around a well person and experience the contrast, or try to do a short task or errand, that I realize how seriously incapacitated I am.  For example, I tried to pull a few weeds this week and got dizzy and arm shakes/weakness almost immediately. (FYI this by no means will stop me gardening…I will just keep it to very very small spurts and get help with the heaftier tasks like turning the soil).

local harbour still iced in