Me. I am. A bit off. Pains in the guts and just a bit off. I should not be surprised. Like everyone who does regularly not enjoy good health, I dread being poorly again.
I haven’t been well ever since I finished caring for my mother. I was occasionally checked up while I was doing that, in hospital. I had checks for cancer and didn’t have it, until I did and I had a camera down my throat regularly until it was apparent after the surgery that I’d had blocked intestines all along, probably for more than a decade, at least.
I’ve been emailing a friend who had surgery for a blockage and the surgery that caused it had been twenty years ago. It’s amazing what you can have and limp along with. Good health is wasted on robust people who just leap out of bed every morning, expecting to feel wonderful; weedy sickly specimens like me would love a few days of that.
I don’t know if it helps to compare myself with how I was in the four and a half years prior to the surgery, I am definitely better than that, I’m not vomiting for a start, food is going down in the regular way. I just feel off and in pain.
Are the adhesions adhering again? It is what they do and no one knows why some people produce strings of elastic inside and others don’t. Perhaps it’s some sort of evolutionary thing that would have been handy in some other timeline where you might get slightly nibbled by a dinosaur but survive with massive scarring. Am I trying to produce those eight percent elastomer fibre jeans but on the inside as a last ditch effort at a flat stomach? Are my intestines red carpet ambitious?
Like everyone with Internet access I have been symptom searching, including all the anecdotal websites where somebody’s husband had his gall bladder removed two years ago and still can’t climb up a ladder to clear the blocked gutter. (That poor woman has had overflow rain down her cloakroom window all this time, no wonder she won’t let the neighbours come round to see how well her rhubarb is doing this year.)
Or I could just be expecting the old ‘with one bound she was free of pain, a stone lighter and looking wonderful for someone her age wearing trainer socks.’
I don’t know. I’m hoping it’s just a blip. I’m still reporting to the hospital on two counts, so they’re not expecting me to be free with one bound.
It could be worse. I am related to, or friends with, three people much worse off currently, you know one of them, it’s SMIL.
Maybe I have been conditioned by optimistic horoscopes; this year starting this month, Dung Beetles with Milk Jug Rising are in for a windfall, apparently. Though if I’m feeling off I won’t want to go on a spending spree, which, to be fair Milk Men with their moons in Windowpane are cautioned not to do, at least until Pandora turns retrograde in Bus Ticket.
Maybe I’m just overly optimistic myself, expecting not yet a year after major surgery to be plain sailing, the hospital are still taking the wait and see line of reasoning.
Meanwhile I’m doing a lot of assorted card making, drawing and crafty stuff, which is a nice distraction but not the gardening I ought to be doing. Also, I was beginning to think of getting my passport renewed and maybe even go on holiday. But you can only plan a holiday if you expect to be well enough to enjoy it. I know cruise ships for the advanced in age and money come equipped with doctors but I don’t fancy that. My mother loved cruising. I couldn’t imagine being trapped in a floating hotel for a fortnight with several hundred elderly ladies who only close their mouths to swallow. You’d have to be really robust to survive that.
Well, I’ll see how I am tomorrow. Early night and all that. I might wake up full of the joys of spring and not just a bit off.
We shall see. Well, I will. I’ll let you know.
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