Decline

While I hope it's just temporary, I've entered a period of decline health-wise.  Why now? Honestly I have no idea.  I would have thought after helping care for my dad and mom last fall and winter, clearing out and selling a house, and moving my dad I would have had a  relapse….except I didn't.  So if I got through all that with only enduring nasty crash days here and there, why would my health decline months later?

The mysteries of M.E.

On the other hand, late winter early spring have almost always been my worst time of year.

I am still doing little things on my "good" days but I have no resilience or strength, and the fluey days are worse and more often. I also can't get away with anything.  A short outing with my dad and I will absolutely be very sick the next day.  Some days I wake up achy, it hurts to breathe.  I step out of bed and have a swooping black out.  I let the dog out and feed her (another swooping blackout), I get coffee and go back to bed for hours, well to be honest, basically the rest of the day is spent in bed or on the couch.  I feel so ill, I just want to sink into my bed or the sofa and die, I want it to finally be over.

And sometimes I feel angry, so angry that almost 14 years since getting sick, I'm still this ill.  I have no power over it, and there is not a single Dr. that's been able to take even the edge off through treatment. Most Dr.s are ignorant and dismissive of M.E. and yet I'm this sick, disabled by sickness, weakness and dizziness.  Similarly, most of my non-sick friends and family, years down the road still seem to think I'm mostly just tired or "it can't be that bad, because I look great".  It is a feeling of profound isolation.  As if being chronically ill, spending most my days alone feeling awful, weren't isolating enough.

Perhaps as the spring continues I will bounce back. Fingers crossed, I usually do.

As for my work, I'm procrastinating.  I need to start planning my course but I avoid it to do other things (like write a blog post).

On the plus, the other day while laying on the couch I was thinking about how great it is to be home.  How I spent almost half a year at my childhood home and while I'm very glad I did, after my mom had passed, it seemed like there were just too many obstacles to ever come home again, and I was too sick to overcome them.  Thankfully, with a lot of help, I was eventually able to get through that time.  I still have pangs of guilt or panic about getting rid of some of the stuff that I did.  So much went to charity as my dad couldn't remember what anything was or meant, and I didn't have the energy to research every bowl, book or nick knack.