"One of the most powerful things ME taught me is that I can choose to change. I needn’t fear my weaknesses or my feelings: they are windows onto a garden of opportunity, beckoning me toward a wholeness that goes beyond my physical recovery."
Dr Clare Fleming
I feel happy! Alert the media. Well, I suppose I am alerting The Meeja (as it known in some parts of Kent) by blogging about it. Or at least, alerting a medium.
The cause of my happiness? Retail therapy. A new pair of boots. And a new Gillian Welch CD. Possibly? Then there was making toast at a real fire with my beloved and his son. Definitely.
I'm having a perfect November afternoon. After toast and marmite I rested for half an hour listening to an impossibly young Richard Briers in some comedy drama from the late sixties or early seventies. Got up slightly refreshed, put my new CD on and sat down at my laptop. It is dark and raining but I feel warm and cosy. Just five more minutes before I get on with the dinner, or maybe ten.
I have a cold. How I long for the old days when getting a cold meant a tingle in the nose which developed over a day into the usual runny nose, cough, and headache. Then I'd retreat to bed or keep going depending on the severity of the cold or whatever needed doing. Two days later it was all over.
A cold, when you have CFS is something different. Two weeks ago A. said he thought I was sickening for something. I've had a couple of M.E. meltdowns, a funny tummy, the extreme muscle weakness, shoulder pain, a bout of thrush, and then - a tingle in the nose. The tingle is the only indication that it's a cold. I've got no inner thermostat, no fever although I feel like a furnace and then like a deep freeze, and I'm nursing a slight headache.
I think I'm on the upswing now though. I'm starting to engage with what's happening around - much to A's relief. We got the news at the beginning of the week that we have secured the house (woohoo) and he's been trying to get me to talk about moving arrangements. My virus scrambled brain has been unable to process anything for the last day or two. Words, thoughts and ideas just bounce off the shutters. It actually hurts to think when I'm in that state. I get washing machine head which makes me very short-tempered and weepy.
Today is better though. I feel calm again although washed out and wobbly. So rest and good food is the order of the day.
Cardboard boxes and parcel tape wait onerously in the hallway. I think my stuff has been packed up and moved so many times in the last three years, it can do it all by itself. I did all the sorting out and trips to the dump and charity shops last time. Much of my stuff is still packed as I had the good sense not to unpack it. It will be exciting to unwrap things I haven't seen in months and place them in our new home.
Today, though - rest, rest, rest.
