How I Spent My Holiday…

See what happens when you have a major meltdown and take some time away from your blog – the bastards go and change it all! I’ve spent twenty minutes just finding the New Post button. If this post ever goes live, it’ll be a bleeding miracle…

Okay, so it’s safe to say the past year hasn’t been one of my finest. In fact it’s been pants. I’ve veered away from Funny Internet Dating and blundered into Whiney Doctors-Really-Get-On-My-Tits territory, but hey! I’m still here. I’m still breathing. I still have a stupid sense of humour. Life is just great.

In the last six months I’ve experienced just about every emotion known to man – well, to woman, because we all know that blokes don’t have emotions. Except maybe joy when Arsenal score a goal. Or envy when they spot someone with a bigger willy. But my mind’s wandering again…

I guess it’s normal to go through an angry stage when you’ve just been landed with a life-altering illness. I think I’ve come out the other side, but who knows. Maybe morphing into a pre-menstrual monster is something I’ll do regularly from now on. Mind you, if you spoke to The Ex, he’d say I’ve always been one…

Aaaaaarrrggghhh!

But enough of my madness, I really wanted to share all the things I’ve learned or discovered in the last six months, things that may help you if you’re ever find yourself laid up on the sofa with a horrible illness:

• Wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown and slippers outside of the house,  at any point during the day, will elicit strange looks and laughter. Really, what’s the problem here, people? I’m talking fleecy jammies, a towelling robe and – well, you’ve seen the slippers. It’s not as if I’m parading through town in a Babydoll nightie or crotchless knickers and a peephole bra. And I usually slip a jumper over the top if I’m going shopping…

• Four days and three nights is the absolute maximum you can spend in the same set of clothes before you start gagging on your own stench. Three days is pushing it to be honest but, you can just about stretch to a fourth if you keep squirting yourself with air freshener. Although this masks your odour,  unfortunately  it does absolutely nothing to keep the flies away.

• When a crop of cold sores break out on the end of your nose, you really do look like Rudolph. Yeah, I know he looks kinda cute, but believe me,  it’s not such a great look on a middle-aged woman in a clashing fuschia-pink dressing  gown.  I think it’s something to do with the way ME affects your immune system, but I seem to always have cold sores – on my nose, up my nose and around my eyes. And people are so rude; they stare and make grimacing faces as they step away from you in case it’s contagious. I’ve found the only way to deal with this situation is to step closer, as if you’re about to confide a delicious gossipy rumour, and say, ‘Yes, such a shame. I’m absolutely riddled with herpes.’
                                                                                                                        

• The body is a wonderfully skilled feat of genetic engineering. Until it goes wrong and then it’s about as effective as a man trying to find your G-Spot. Even I can’t believe how you cannot have the strength in your arm to lift a cup a tea or chop a poxy vegetable for dinner, or how, at the end of the day, you really do not have the energy to get undressed, and just collapse into bed, shaking with the effort of getting your fat arse upstairs. It is truly incredible, but it’s true! As evidence I should have kept a vlog of me looking like Rudolph in a tea-stained, fushcia-pink dressing gown and Eeyore slippers, crawling up the stairs to have a pee. Amazing.

• Underneath all that chemical dye, my hair is, in fact, white. I haven’t been able to dye my hair since Christmas last year because I just can’t keep my arms up long enough to do it. So I’m now sporting about eight inches of grey roots – Wrong! Underneath all that Auburn Sunset hair dye, my hair is pretty much all pure white. I don’t know whether it’s been this pale for a while or whether I’ve literally gone white overnight from the shock of not being able to reach my tea cup, but one thing’s for sure, if I ever manage to dye it again, the colourant is gonna react reallywell on white hair: Auburn Sunset is going to be more like flaming flourescent orange. It’s gonna cause a major clash with my dressing gown…

  

  Arrrggghhh!

• Chronic Fatigue or ME is ‘all in yer ‘ead, love!’ I don’t know if this is the same overseas, but in the UK, ME is very much an imaginary condition. In true British-Stiff-Upper-Lip fashion, we are often told, ‘Pull yourself together, chaps! A jolly good dose of psychotherapy and graded exercise routines will have soon have you back in the trenches!’ Despite the fact that 250,000 people in the UK suffer with this illness – a quarter of whom are pretty much bed-bound for decades of their life – our government spends less money each year researching the causes and possible treatments, than it spends on researching hay-fever. True, dat. And in the meantime we have no effective treatments or even the sniff of a cure. I won’t go on (too much) but it’s pretty much the only illness that evokes no sympathy or understanding from our society – and that includes the medical profession.

•  Twitter is God. Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve slagged it off in the past, but it’s been a real link to the outside world while I’ve been ill. I haven’t been able to spend more than about 20 minutes on the computer at a time, so I couldn’t keep up with my blog or your fabulous blogs and I was missing the company. Because the messages are so short I’ve been able to keep in touch with you wonderful peeps on Twitter. You  do find out who your friends are when you hit a crisis, and you lot have been stupendous (posh British word for awesome)     😀