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writing a few posts during January, up to the end of February, but they were never finished and therefore remain unpublished – and scanning over the particularly bleak handful of paragraphs rattled out at the end of this Leap Year’s additional day, perhaps that’s for the best.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