Aftermath

 

I’m better. That’s the main thing.  I’m not frelling enough better but I’m MUCH BETTER.   And thank you for all the friendly forum messages to this effect.

So first there was the really bad ME day, as I thought, which was my warning, except I didn’t know it. And then there was the memorable forty-eight hours of twelve-hour bouts with minor hiatuses between of throwing up every time I stood up.  This would be an interesting experience anyway but it was made exquisitely more interesting by the fact of a hellmob and no back up plan.

A hellmob, what’s more, who will not crap in their own garden(s).  And only Chaos is willing to pee in the cottage courtyard which is, admittedly, small, and he only pees there because he has recently developed prostate problems and HAS TO PEE WHEN HE HAS TO PEE.  Which is often.  Pav, by the way, is the most supernaturally continent dog I’ve ever even heard of, and this talent is probably worth keeping her entire* through the dramas of fertile season, all questions of beauty and bloodlines aside, even with two entire male hellhounds in the vicinity.  Mind you, this talent often causes me additional anxiety when the circumstances are that she has to pee here and now and the vicinity does not suit her hellladyship, but I’ve given up arguing with her.  She knows what the command ‘squat’ means and she’ll piddle like three drops while looking at me out of those bright evil little eyes, and then stop when I know she’s got a full tankload on board . . . arrrgh.

Anyway. The whole staying up till three or four a.m. really comes into its own when you have stomach flu and need to get your hellmob out of their garden so they will frelling well crap, because there’s no one around to notice you heaving in the shrubbery.  Sigh.  Let’s not discuss how interesting picking up after them has been for several days, and the dizzy spells that go with not eating.**  We should perhaps also not discuss Peter’s reaction when he found me (still) sleeping on the floor of the dining room Sunday morning.  Lighten up!  If I’d wanted a bed-like object I could have lain on the frelling sofa!  I was sure I was going to be enough better any minute to amble back to the cottage as usual!  And therefore I didn’t want to sleep really! I was just . . . resting in a posture less likely to make my appalling stomach go into another of its cursed paroxysms!

The second forty-eight hours was the beginning to be able to stand upright again phase, or might have been able to stand upright if there were any available calories to provide energy for this surprisingly complicated task.***  Stomach:  We’re fine, we’re fine, stand around all you like if you want to, just don’t bother us with any food. Every other cell in my body:  We’re starving!  We’re STAAAAARVING!  Stomach:  It’s good for your character.  Every other cell in my body: STAAAAAAAAAARVING!  Every other cell in my body won, partly because of the passing out in the shrubbery while tottering after hellcritters post-acute-stage thing.  Whereupon we entered the subset of the second phase, which is the Large Burning Column Occupying Most of Your Body Especially the Stomach Area subphase.†  I’m not quite out of this . . . but that may have as much to do with the last week’s business falling on me as from a height today when I’m finally almost recognisably functional again as it does with the remains of my deplorable lurgi.

Meanwhile, speaking of life catching up with me, I have a Samaritans duty tomorrow††, Street Pastors again Friday, and a meeting with Alfrick on Saturday. From which I hope to come home inspired finally to finish the KES ep that has been dangling around hopefully for a fortnight or more.  Oh, I haven’t wasted all my KES time however:  it may interest some of you that The Story So Far list is finally up to date.

* * *

* Spaying is notoriously hard on a bitch’s bladder control. Most bitches are fine after, but you still don’t want to press it too hard.  Or at least I have always tried not to.  Among other things a clean dog hates losing it indoors.  He/she will be miserable and ashamed.  Which is how I found out Chaos really couldn’t hold it any more.  And the miserable-and-ashamed is why you don’t put your critters in a position where they can’t help it . . . if you can help it.^

^ I have mostly managed to put Boskone out of my mind, and going back to America for the first time in a decade. Not.  And if never going anywhere starts haunting me I can frelling well sign up for that homeopathy course that I’m going to take, I’m just having a little trouble finding time right now.+  Oh, and money.

+ I’m sure there’s a homeopathic answer to this lurgi, but my usual stalwart in these cases had no effect at all and I was not . . . in much shape for hunting for a better match.

** I’ve never particularly bought into the Sensitivity of Your Furry Companions theory. They may lie down beside you on the floor in a friendly and affectionate manner but that’s because you’re on the floor, and if you get up suddenly and abruptly and disturb their slumbers they will look at you reproachfully.  My experience is more that they want what they want and when you aren’t providing it they want to know why. They’re not great on compromise either:  The hellmob don’t crap in the garden and that means they don’t crap in the garden. And, you know, this around the block at 3 am thing?  Where are their hurtles? Also the hellhounds entirely stopped eating the minute I took my eye off the ball/food dish and have probably lost as much weight as I have arrrrrrrrgh. It doesn’t suit any of us.  Haggard is not kind to the late middle aged.^  As an ex-fat person I can say authoritatively, There is such a thing as thin enough. I am that thing, or was last week.  There is also such a thing as being too thin, which is what I am now.  When your frelling belt, required to keep your trousers up^^, gives you frelling pressure sores on your hip bones, you are too thin.^^^  Fortunately you, or anyway I, gain weight lost through illness back pretty fast as soon as I’m eating again, which is still a slightly aggrieved issue.

^ It’s not actually kind to anyone and as an elderly feminist who has been through the whole body image frenzy decade after decade after decade after DECADE, it makes me NUTS that nothing has really changed, including that young women—and, apparently, increasingly, young men—are encouraged, or maybe I mean aggravated or harassed, into thinking that skeletal is attractive. No!  It’s not!  Not unless you’re a straightedge or a picket fence!  It’s just you can get away with better it when you’re young and your skin still has some collagen!+

+ Me?  I’m used to the way I look.  Do I have body image problems?  Sure.  I’m still breathing.#

# And food is only the enemy if your digestion is possessed by demons.

^^Interesting Conversations with Your Stomach:  Me:  Look, you perverse organ, my jeans will fall down.  Stomach:  No!  No!  No belt!  Can’t stand a belt!  No belt!  Me:  It won’t come anywhere near you, you prat, you’re in direct contact with my backbone.

^^^ I suppose I could take a few penknives, keys, small notebooks with writing implements etc out of my jeans pockets for the moment.

*** I was knitting^ while listening to the radio tonight and there was one of these snippet-science programmes that reported earnestly that eating protein is GOOD for you. Here we go again.  Even before I officially had ME I had energy-fluctuation problems and absolutely must have not merely unfashionably high levels of protein but unfashionably high levels of animal protein including red meat.  I’ve been fighting this battle for decades too and vegetarians are fine, some of my best friends^^ etc, but the holier-than-thou brigade of [insert superfood of the week here] and pure thoughts really get up my nose.  The revelation that more than a minimal level of protein is good for you reminds me of the walking is not weight-bearing exercise allegation a decade or three ago.  No, no!  Of course it isn’t!  We didn’t evolve to walk, we evolved to train in gyms on fancy weight-bearing exercise machinery!

^ Contrary to pathetic tweets earlier in the week I actually have done a fair amount of reading and knitting recently.  I can’t remember if I told you that Aloysius loaned me a frelling great brick-like volume which is a commentary on the first four books of the Bible+ and when he was checking up on me earlier in the week he asked how I was getting on with it.  It is too heavy to read lying down.

+ With constant irritating references to the Pentateuch.

^^ Including Sunshine

† I managed to eat something very nearly resembling dinner last night which disappeared into the calorie deficit with indecent haste and I was then hungrier than ever. I usually have fruit both first thing in the morning and last thing at night and I WOULD FRELLING KILL FOR AN APPLE, I am an apple junkie and most of the year eat several a day.  I was staring at the fruit bowl last night with a savage lust and . . . eventually ate a pear, not because one raw tree fruit is likely to be less provoking than another raw tree fruit, but because I’m so deprived if I ate one apple I’d probably eat six, which I’m sure would not be a good idea right now.  But what is it about pears?  You can have totally over rotten, hard tasteless grainy meh and DIVINE all in the same pear.  Nibble carefully.

†† We are not a secret society: hey look, the hot link among south of England Samaritans^ this month:  http://forumpublications.co.uk/hampshire-people/

It seems to me a good interview with a good guy, although I’m seriously, brain-explodingly fried at the interviewer’s suggestion that the deaths of Peaches Geldof and Robin Williams may glamorize addiction and suicide. WHAT? WHAT?  Um.  No.  That would be nooooooooo.

^There are quite a few of us around:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/search/samaritans+hampshire/@51.3135647,-0.8434543,9z