Sunday, July 29, 2012

What Happened...

It seemed like only a moment ago it was the beginning of January. Suddenly it’s the end of July. In today’s common parlance I suspect my initial reaction should be: WTF?!

I’d actually started writing a few posts during January, up to the end of February, but they were never finished and therefore remain unpublished – and scanning over the particularly bleak handful of paragraphs rattled out at the end of this Leap Year’s additional day, perhaps that’s for the best.

I’m not sure what to say about the last seven months other than the “day job” began to leach all the fun out of writing, so the last thing I wanted was come here and make some pithy observations once the evenings drew in. Then in early May, in the middle of the night, I found myself awake and bolt upright in bed a split second before a rather phenomenal display of projectile vomiting. That was the entrée to almost ten weeks of being unable to properly digest food, which was fun.

At first thinking it was another kidney stone announcing its unwelcome arrival, I reduced the diet to the tried and tested rice cakes, crackers and cranberry juice. But when anything of more substance, even kept simple rather than spicy, turned out to be like a clean bullet wound – a straight through and through, if you get my drift – I figured it was something else altogether.

By this point any right–minded individual would have scurried straight up to their GP, but I figured I’d try and sort it out myself before I had to slum it with sick people in the waiting room. That meant figuring out what I could and couldn’t eat, trying one new thing a day and hoping for the best. It turned out to be rather a hit and miss affair and would have carried on that way if I hadn’t dragged myself out of my “sick bed” and ventured south of the river to see The Divine Ashby perform with her band.

Happy to see each other, and having forgiven me for being such a lousy map–reader earlier in the year that I got us lost before we had even left London, soon she was on my back for having not seen a doctor by now. So I finally made an appointment and eventually found myself sitting across from a complete plum. Oddly enough, the day before I was due there my left foot became somewhat inflamed and especially tender where the metatarsus joined the tarsus. I wondered if elements of the limited intake had anything to do with it. He squeezed my metatarsals in a vice–like grip until I actually screamed, would only acknowledge that the skin was red after I’d taken my right shoe off to compare the two, and wrote me out a prescription for one hundred painkillers, which I wasn’t sure was the sort of thing to give someone who periodically struggles with depression.

As for the digestive disorder, his answer was to simply send me on my way with a bottle of Cyclizine (even though I’d only been sick that one time) and told me to eat a balanced diet, which was even less helpful. “When do you get the results back from the blood tests?” most people asked when I reported that I had seen the GP. No blood samples had been taken, I explained, which nobody was impressed by. The Divine Ashby’s email reply was short, not very sweet, and mostly written in upper case.

Still, there is an upside. I’ve dropped three stone, spend a little more time exercising, and take the blood pressure meds regularly. I’m still wary of what I eat and airy remains problematic but I’ve widened my diet beyond the crackers and raw fruit and vegetables, and make sure I vary the cans of soup that constitute the evening meals. I’ve also figured out a way to sort out the thorny issues that have plagued this working environment that I’ve been tangled up in, so maybe the recent symptoms were stress related than something abdominal. Although the end is still not in sight, I’ve worked out a suitable exit strategy that will allow me to just walk away. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime I suppose there’s a whole lot to catch up on. Before that, how’s everyone else doing? And what in God's name happened to the blogger dashboard while I was off?

3 Comments:

At 9:28 am, Blogger Unknown said...

Good to see you back. When your post popped up in my RSS feed I was looking forward to a blistering review of the Olympics opening ceremony, so was somewhat sad to read of your recent woes. Like you, I've been "silent" on the blog for the best part of a year despite posting a while back that now I was back from a nightmare job in Switzerland I'd be blogging more. Moving out of London after nearly 30 years here next month, so keep telling myself that once the moves out the way I really will start blogging again - maybe it will happen.

As for the blogger dashboard - who knows? It seems all anybody does these days is take something that works and break it to prove that they're "current". Most of my friends have all moved to Wordpress or Tumblr. In a world where my day job means a new technology is replaced/launched every day I'm too lazy to learn yet another variation on a theme just to put a few words up on the interwebs, but your mileage may vary (and whilst I'm here - don't anyone be tempted to upgrade to Windows 8: it's a total crock that's going to be an even bigger mess than Vista was!)

Anyway, glad to see you back. Hope the health problems sort themselves out soon, and that the work situation improves.

 
At 6:42 pm, Blogger Good Dog said...

Hi Ian,

Oh it's coming! I couldn't stay silent on that particular... ah, I'm not sure how to describe it actually.

Sorry to hear about the Swiss job. Was it the can't-do attitude of middle management in the cantons? They always seem to foul everything up.

Upgrades for no apparent value piss me off. Using a wheezy old G4, I'm getting all kinds of issues regarding plugins because the version of OS X is too old. I'd be happy to pull mu old portable typewriter out of storage and go back to using that.

Basic diet is now sorted, thankfully. There was one night a while back where I actually dreamt of eating pizza, which is still off the cards. But I can live with that. As for this bloody woman driving me nuts... I'll have to see.

 
At 10:42 pm, Blogger Unknown said...

It was a mix of (a) ridiculous high cost of everything followed by Swiss then devaluing their currency by 10% (b) truly horrendous management who adopt a very much "stick not carrot" approach and call endless meetings that are really just poorly disguised attempts to prove "My cock's bigger than yours" which would be funny if the quality standards are so low I'd assumed they were only there in the civil service, not an organisation like Credit Suisse (c) the rules, the rules - no washing machines or lawnmowers on Sunday or after 8pm etc etc. Anal to the point of extreme tedium (d) They won't speak English and my Swiss, German and Italian which are the main languages is non-existent. (e) the "picture postcard" scenery soon gets tedious. Everything is like a perfect model train set. No character or personality. Once you've seen one town by a lake with mountains you've seen them all - trust me - I visited them all because that was about all you could afford to do over there.

Very happy to be back to be honest.

 

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