Yay, I’m back on the road again

Cleared for take off :)

Well there have been no further recurrence of the mini strokes that I experienced, my ecg results were fine, MRI scan showed no permanent damage, cholesterol results, that I was initially told were 11.6 actually turned out to be 5.6 – still high but not unbelievably, dangerously high and blood pressure is down.

And all that means I can drive again WOO HOO. Sadly, it also means I don’t have to work from home any more so I am back in the office from Tuesday BOO. Although my consultant did suggest I ought to work from home more often … I wonder what would happen if I suggested it :) Might be worth mentioning.

Anyway, other than having to see the GP on Wednesday, I am clear of medical appointments for three months when blood tests need to be done again to see if anything has changed. In the meantime I intend to continue with the health kick – low cholesterol/fat healthy diet and lots of walking. Oh and I can go back on the list to have my hernia operation now.

The thing I am most pleased about is I am still not smoking. According to the app on my phone it has now been 43 days, 11 hours and 48 minutes and this has saved me £333.26.

Quite where the money has gone I am not sure, because I am certainly not any better off at the moment. All I can say for sure is I am slightly (very slightly) less debt ridden.

I am sure the financial benefits will come at some point. Although I am spending a fair amount in prescription charges instead now!

And dental treatment – although I had the final piece of dental work done last week, so now I am clear until the next six month check up. There is progress after all. Slow and steady wins the race.

So what have I been up to for the last few weeks?

Well I have been working from home but that means the housework keeps up to date as well.

I’ve taken to walking on the Common a fair bit when the weather hasn’t  been diabolical. I have watched every single episode of every series of Criminal Minds and got through the first two and a half series of Merlin.

I have rediscovered my interest in cooking. I am eating loads but it’s much healthier than it was. If it doesn’t involve oats or lentils, I don’t want to know lol. No, it’s not quite that bad but I do actually love fruit, vegetables, beans and pulses and whole grains etc etc so I am making an effort to use them. My ten bean chilli is gorgeous, as is a recipe I discovered/adapted for apple, oat and honey cookies made with no sugar and no butter yum.

At some point, also given the increased levels of activity, I am hoping the weight will start falling off. At the moment, I am just happy to have lost a few pounds despite the fact I have stopped smoking.

Man has been down to look after me for a couple of long weekends and on Friday I drove to his in Nottingham for the first time for ages and ages.

I have been trying to capture lots of different birds with my camera as I have been on my wanders on the common (although it was lovely to be able to go a bit further afield and visit Attenborough Nature Reserve yesterday) and this has become a bit of an additional hobby.

I’ve also read a bit.

I haven’t been able to get out to see any more churches, but now I’m back on the road again, who knows :).

And I think it’s time to start blogging again.

So here’s some of my birdy photos … rest assured there will be more pictures to follow :)

 

 

Reasons to be cheerful 1, 2, 3

Do you like my flowers? Cheerful aren’t they? I love the bright colours, they remind me that spring is on the way.

They are from my lovely colleagues from work and I think they’re gorgeous :)

The last time I wrote on here was the day I headed home from Man’s house near the end of January.

Before I left his house I had a weird thing happen to me.

We were sitting watching the television and all of a sudden I got really bad double vision and the left side of my head had pins and needles, even the left side of my tongue, it was like there was a line drawn down the middle.

Then the pins and needles switched to the other side. It last about 15 minutes during which time I panicked and Man had me do sensible things like stick my tongue out and raise my arms in the air (can be indicators of someone having a stroke).

Anyway, half hour later I felt fine and decided to drive home, despite Man’s protestations that I should go to hospital. So drive home I did.

The following day I went to the dentist and then to work and worked all day (about 12 hours). Just as I was about to leave I got pins and needles in the left side of my head and down my left arm. They lasted about 15 minutes again.

Having promised Man I would seek medical advice if it happened again, I popped in to the reception at A&E on my way home and asked the receptionist whether or not she thought I ought to see someone.

I spent the next three hours having blood tests and ecgs and being monitored, speaking to the doctor and then being discharged with a referral for a CT scan.

Apparently I hadn’t had a stroke but it was highly likely I had had two TIAs or mini strokes.

I was also told I couldn’t drive for four weeks from that date.

I also had raging toothache from the dental appointment that morning. I was hoping it was just the anesthetic wearing off … turned out it wasn’t. You know that ‘never rains but it pours’ sort of day.

Unable to get to work and not sure what was going on, I worked from home for the rest of that week. By Thursday I could stand the pain of my tooth no longer and had to return to have the first part of root canal treatment done. By Saturday I was back there getting a prescription for antibiotics because I then had an infection in it as well.

On the Monday, I spent the day at the Stroke Clinic.

Such fun. I had a CT scan and an MRI scan and an ultrasound of the jugular, blood tests, another ecg and then a long chat with a consultant who spoke in sentences I didn’t understand. (But at least the antiobiotics were kicking in for the infection in my tooth!).

The upshot was that I should have been admitted to hospital the week before and I was at serious risk of having a full blown stroke. I ticked most of the risk factor boxes – overweight, bad diet, until ten days previously I had been a smoker, family history (grandmother), stressful job, two TIAs in a 48 hour period and a cholesterol level that was more than double what it should be.

And this was on top of my two hernias and gastritis. Not exactly a picture of glowing health.

I took the week off work, I felt dreadful. But, to be honest, I felt/feel dreadful mentally more than physically. Although I fell asleep (a lot).

The consultant, who I didn’t understand, scared me. Was he telling me I was seriously ill? I think he was trying to but I didn’t know what things like statins and lipitors were – his customer relation skills sucked.

I did understand that he was telling me I had to rest, I had to take regular but gentle exercise, I had to eat a low cholesterol diet, I had to cancel the operation for the hernia that I had scheduled for the following weekend and I wasn’t allowed to drive.

I also understood I had to have more blood tests, see my GP, have a 24 hour ecg and go back and see him in a month.

So I walked down to the GP (it’s a two hour process to walk down there, see the GP and walk back) and spoke to her and then I walked back the following day to have more blood taken.

Man came down for the weekend and we walked a lot on the common. Gorgeous daughters one and two have been taking me to the shops and my parents have run me to dental appointments and hospital appointments.

I have been working from home around the medical appointments and trying to make sure I get lots of sleep. But the two lots of tablets the stroke guy gave me (the blood thinners and stuff to lower my cholesterol) set my gastritis off, even though he also doubled the dosage of the medication for that.

I have been trying to get out for a walk every day but sometimes the weather in February isn’t very conducive to that and I have been trying to eat a very healthy, low fat, low cholesterol diet.

And I have been trying to get my head around what I need to do to make some serious lifestyle changes.

Everyone has been extremely kind and helpful and I have been a bit snappy. I’m not very good at talking about things. So people ask me how I am and I say fine, and I say it in a manner which indicates no further questions are welcome. I don’t mean to, well actually I do. I suppose it is a defence mechanism. I just find it very difficult to express myself without being overly emotional and I don’t want to cry all the time :). So I don’t want to discuss it with people. Even though I know they are being kind and they are concerned. It’s almost as if I am embarrassed about it.

But if I bottle things up I explode and so the answer, for me at least, is to write them down. Then I can organise my thoughts into some sort of order. Then, and only then, can I talk about things without running the risk of being hugely emotional.

So, I need to make a lot of changes in my life. My daughters only have one parent and that is me and so I need to look after myself better and that means having a good, hard look at my life and making changes where they are needed.

I had already decided that changes were needed and sort of half-heartedly started making them but I have had my wake up call now so it’s time to get serious. Gorgeous daughter number one would say I am being my usual over-dramatic self and she’s probably right lol.

I called this post Reasons to be cheerful, 1, 2, 3 and yet, it’s been mostly miserable and self-pitying  so far :)

But I do have some very good reasons to be cheerful.

Firstly, some people aren’t lucky enough to be given the warning signs that I have and to be, therefore, given the opportunity to do something about their medical issue before it either kills or seriously disables them. I have been given that opportunity.

Secondly, I haven’t had a cigarette now for 32 days 23 hours and 44 minutes and, according to the NHS smokefree app on my iPhone, this has saved me £252.78 to date.

Thirdly, I have some very beautiful flowers on my windowsill from some lovely colleagues.

Three reasons to be cheerful :)

 

 

 

 

 

What a fun day that was!

Well, I had a fun day yesterday.

I worked in the morning and then had a hospital appointment in the afternoon.

I had to have a gastroscopy – a camera pushed down my throat to look inside. I opted not to have sedation but just to have a throat spray that numbs your throat.

Now I’m probably being a touch over dramatic but it was hideous! And if I ever have to have it done again I am definitely being sedated.

So it turns out I have a hiatus hernia to go with my umbilical hernia and gastritis.

Gastritis can be caused by a variety of things: excessive alcohol (I have about four alcoholic drinks a year), cocaine abuse (nope, never done that), excessive use of aspirin or ibuprofen (rarely take them, prefer just to go bed), immune deficiency conditions like HIV or AIDS ( when I bled into the surgeon’s eye during an operation last year he had me tested so I know I don’t have that) or stress.

Hello, there we go, there’s a possible cause. So, how do I get rid of the stress in my life? I drop kick this work thing into touch and do something different. Sadly not possible yet because I need the money but I need to find a way of working for myself.

Anyway, it could have been a lot worse (apart from the actual gastroscopy procss which was hideous). All of these things are treatable and at least I know what it is now,

Do know something else that I’ve found hideous this week? The Life of Pi. Have you read it?

I hadn’t and I felt I ought to (and I still haven’t finished it) but the description of the hyena eating the zebra and the orang utan is horrific. I nearly put the book down. But I am going to persevere to the end because I feel I ought to.

So because of all this activity I have had no chance to take more photos so I thought I’d show you some of the man-made stuff I found on the Common on Monday.

I think I’ve mentioned before that you can feel the archaeology of the area under your feet in places.

In the early 1940s this was the Hartfordbridge Flats airforce base. Over the Second World War it housed squadrons from England, Canada, the USA, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.

At it’s peak 3,000 personnel were on the base. General Eisenhower visited before D-Day, as did Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and Prince Bernhard.

This was a bustling airfield for many years, now it still has an airfield but it’s mainly for hobbyists.

Anyway, you can still see some of the archaeology left by the camp, as well as random crap that people leave behind like the pellet tin.

And now, I have to head off to the stress pit again :)