helen-louise's journal

I'm not really keeping up to date with livejournal at the moment. I'm skimming the default view of my Friends page once or twice a day, looking out especially for news from the various friends who are Having A Hard Time at the moment, but not interacting too much beyond that. This is because I might have started work on my PhD (!). The reason I'm not sure if I've started work or not is that I'm not sure whether what I've been doing counts as preliminary background reading or as actual work. You see, I gave up biology when I was 16 (which is scarily half my life ago), but I need to know about certain aspects of cell biology in depth in order to understand protein synthesis. Does getting myself up to speed with topics that another student with a different background would already "just know" count as PhD work? I'm not sure. Being in the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology, I permanently feel stupid because of my lack of biological "basic" knowledge. I need to remember that no student would ever be 100% familiar with all aspects of the subject before they start their project. Someone with more biology would almost certainly need help with the chemistry or physics.

What else? Uh... if you look at the big list from hell of things I still needed to do as of 11th February, I've had the DSA Assessment of Needs, have heard from UCL Disability Office (but am still waiting for UCL Estates division to sort themselves out), and I have a desk in the Postgraduate Students' Office but no "special" chair as of yet. Rather urgently need to talk to Birkbeck Disability Office about the broken chair in room 630, again, and about the compulsory Symposium and my access requirements therein. (Thereof? Therewith? I'm too tired to do grammar). Was supposed to have done that last Friday but was Ill with Pain.

Still have Pain but am dragging myself into college via taxis. It is period pain from hell in my uterus, and severe heaviness/achiness in my legs, and weakness of my left knee/ankle, and general evil back pain in my lower back - and to top things off I somehow wrenched my neck so it hurts as well. I've been taking paracetamol, Buscopan and dihydrocodeine all together (spaced carefully for maximum coverage), but none of those touch the neck pain. I know from when I've had this sort of injury before that ibuprofen works wonders on neck strains, but I now have violent allergic reactions to it so can't take it anymore. Bah. I will have to continue being sore until it magically heals itself.

I am grumpy about the fact I ordered some t-shirts from the US at the end of November to be Christmas presents, and I still don't have them. They were posted on 11th December, with an estimated arrival date according to the US Postal Service of 17th-22nd December. I'm absolutely certain the problem isn't with the USPS at all, or even with the "extreme weather" - rather they are sitting in Mount Pleasant Sorting Office waiting for someone to decide how much VAT and import duty I need to pay on them. I know this is the most likely source of delay because Mount Pleasant stamp parcels when they arrive there, and I frequently observe a lag of 4-5 working days before the parcel turns up on my doorstep! This means Richard, Tim and Peter are all minus one of their presents, and we won't have another postal delivery until Tuesday. Bah.

In contrast, I ordered a monster for my mum to be sent via CityLink. I ticked the "PM service", and was mildly surprised to be woken by the parcel at 11.30am. Checking my email, it turns out it was supposed to have been delivered the previous afternoon, and I had a highly apologetic email explaining the delay. That would have been a turnaround time of less than 24 hours. I know you can't really compare international and domestic mail, but Richard often orders stuff internationally to be sent by courier, and typically the packages arrive within 3 days. A lot of the courier companies manage email or a phone call first, so you can pay the Customs fees by credit card before the parcel's delivered, or have the right amount of cash ready.

Note to self: Unless the price difference is astronomical, or you're not in a hurry AT ALL, always tick the courier option when ordering from abroad. At least then you get a tracking number and can find out WHERE ON EARTH IT IS.

I'm currently feeling very sorry for myself. I've been in bed for several days too ill to do anything except reading trashy novels. Ugh. The following has all been wrong:

• Back and legs hurting too much to get up.


• Possible sinus infection - certainly lots of impacted snot and pain all round my sinuses. Dizziness and headache.


• Food poisoning or stomach bug, not sure which. Something with lots of unpleasant TMI, anyway. And a fever.


• Medication withdrawal effects - due to inability to keep meds in my stomach. Mmm, lovely migraine and shooting pins and needles all over my body.


• Period pain, to add insult to injury. A few days early. Couldn't my reproductive system have waited for my digestive system to get better?

With the sinus headache and migraine on top I haven't been in any state to look at a screen at all, and the odd text message that I had to send was wobbly and full of typoes. I've just been lying in bed feeling sad and lonely, but too out of it to actually contact anyone.

I am grateful for the fact that you can now get vanilla soy yogurt in this country, because all I have been able to keep inside me for the past couple of days has been that, ginger biscuits and peppermints. Last night I branched out and had some utterly plain pasta with a tiny bit of Pure fake butter spread, eating it v e r y   s l o w l y. Wondering if I can risk real food yet.

Also my hair is disgusting from all this lying in bed, but I haven't been able to wash it because I haven't been able to control my body temperature for long enough to have a bath. Still not sure it would be a good idea to try.

Moan moan moan.

Very grateful to Richard for all of the looking after me he's been doing. It sucks that he has to spend so much of our relationship being a nurse, but he is very good at it.

I got my "dissertation" in on time. It is pretty awful due to the fact that 2/3 of it was written today. Apparently I went completely overboard and read 70 references before I started writing anything. And then didn't have enough time to include all of the interesting things I found out. Bah. I didn't even have time for childish livejournal posts in which I giggled about "molecular surface matching of knobs and holes" or the method called SPERM (Superposition by PERMutations)!

Still, it is done and I don't have to worry about it any more. Just wish I'd had the weekend to finish it off, even if Sunday is my birthday. (I'd rather have spent my birthday writing a dissertation so it was finished properly than have handed it in rushed and not very finished. Yes, I am strange.) At least it's crap because I didn't have enough time, rather than because that was the best I could manage...

Went to the doctor on Friday, and probably used up all my doctor karma for the year. Firstly, I rang at 8.30 am and got through to a human being immediately! No "Your call is being held in a queue and you're currently number... THREE... In the queue" (punctuation according to the way the message is said), or plain old engaged signal. Secondly, I was able to make an appointment with my doctor, the one who only works 1.5 days a week. Thirdly, when I got into the surgery, I only had to wait 10 minutes to see him, rather than the hour plus that is typical. Fourthly, upon deciding that I should have blood tests, I was able to see the nurse right away as she had a gap in her schedule, rather than having to make an appointment to come in another day. All in all it was really rather pleasing, and will probably never happen again.

Health news is less pleasing. Doctor has no idea why I've been snotty since September. It could be some sort of virus that hasn't gone away, or a bacterial infection (that didn't get killed by the antibiotics I was on for my kidney), or an allergy to an unknown substance, or post-viral bronchial hyperreactivity - except that would normally only last 6 weeks. One of the blood tests will look at my various types of white blood cells to see whether any of them are raised. Am hoping the result will be blindingly obvious so I get treatment quickly.

Doctor also had no real idea about the itching. My gall bladder is ok and I don't have any signs of jaundice, but we've done a liver function test anyway. Due to the locations (everywhere that skin meets skin), he came up with a fancy medical name for it which I promptly forgot. He decided that it was probably a body systems getting out of whack because of depression thing, that it was due to excessive sweating or at least messed-up sweating, and gave me a cream for it. I believe this was hopeless over-optimism, because neither of us want to have to change my mood stabiliser. The cream is all very well but since the doctor's appointment (and before the first application of the cream), a rash started in earnest. And now the rash is growing at a rate of knots - every time I look, the patches of rash seem to have doubled in size. However! I have just found a website with photos of all the possible carbamazepine rashes (do I have to put a squick warning on that site? Is it not obvious from the description?). My rash is identical to the benign, morbilliform rash, and looks nothing like the "will possibly kill you" rash, which is all blistery. Blood tests will be in on Thursday which'll give some idea of how serious the reaction is from the allergy point of view.

Bah.

Today I have been suffering from being so flippin' freezing that I can't think. Currently I am wearing underwear, a thick short-sleeved t-shirt, an average thickness long-sleeved t-shirt, thick corduroy trousers, a belt (reducing the air gap around my middle), thick socks, slippers, a long tunic-style cardigan with a hood, and over the top of that I've put on my new super-thick wolfy-coloured dressing gown and pulled the hood up. The heating is on and I'm sitting with a warm laptop drinking hot herbal tea. And I'm STILL COLD.

The temperature inside the house is allegedly 18.3 °C while the temperature outside is only 2.1 °C. That's cold, but not VERY cold - I mean, my friends in Canada will be laughing right now at the mental image of me all bundled up in my own portable blanket when they're at minus something °C. Nonetheless, I FEEL COLD. And I badly need to get my hair washed because it's at the lank, sticking-to-my-head stage, which is just nasty. But the thought of getting naked just isn't happening right now. Even if a hot shower heats my body, the sitting around for several hours with damp hair part will make me freeze again.

I should write about Christmas at some point soon because I got some rather awesome presents, but coursework is eating my life. All I have time for is moaning! Heh.

Argh. I have been dutifully checking my college email every day and my work email every couple of days, but I haven't read my personal email since October and I have TOO MUCH to clear out. It's making me stressed.

I wish it was possible to set emails to auto-expire. I don't need to know that some company I buy stuff from was offering 25% off for three days only several months ago.

And yes, I'm sure I have lots of other news to relate - but I'm totally bogged under with end of term coursework. And will then continue to be bogged down by the huge amount of coursework that's due in some time in January. And it would be nice if Richard & I could use the Christmas break to reduce entropy in our house. Argh.

I'm in bed feeling sorry for myself. I have period pain FROM HELL, which features in my back, legs, right hip, gall bladder and digestive system as well as the obvious place. I took 30 mg of dihydrocodeine at 16:20, and paracetamol at 18:05, and I'm STILL IN PAIN. Richard is off working at his other job, so is not available to be my hot water bottle. Fortunately, having the laptop on my tummy helps.

Also, for some reason my right leg is covered in insect bites. I thought it would be too cold and too late in the year for mosquitoes. Obviously not. Humph.

Blah. Health is still not fantastic.

Have been achieving sleep moderately successfully via a combination of trazodone and promethiazine. It says a lot about how severe my sleep issues are that neither alone worked, despite the fact that most people who take promethiazine become comatose within 20 minutes. The trazodone appears to help me fall asleep in the first place (though it still takes upward of three hours after taking it before I can consider sleeping) while the promethiazine keeps me asleep, so when I wake up at 5 am to go to the toilet, I can fall asleep again within minutes instead of being awake for hours. Usefully, it seems to be an antihistamine that I'm not allergic to that does actually do something for my allergies, so I am no longer quite the snottiest human alive.

Also, I've had a bad right hip for several months now (it had already hurt for over six weeks before I made that post). Last time I went to the doctor he suggested from where the pain was plus the symptoms (hurts when I exercise, hurts like hell when I stop exercising and sit on the sofa for a couple of hours, really really plays up when I cycle uphill) that I've pulled a ligament that holds my quadriceps muscle to the hip bone. So I've been on a "no cycling uphill" programme of rest, which has mostly been improving things. Except, on Tuesday night, I was in a tearing hurry to get through a queue of traffic to the railway station, and I managed to crash into a (temporarily stationary) car. It was entirely my own fault - I misjudged the timing and turning distance totally (something that I know I have a problem with - this is the main reason I've never attempted to learn to drive. I'm usually safe enough on the trike, but I'd be useless in a normal width car), but this doesn't make me feel any better. The car bumper was entirely undamaged, but I whacked the hell out of my right knee and right upper arm. There is a huge scrape along my right elbow which looks nasty, but it hurts much less than the mysteriously unbruised upper arm and the four enormous bruises on my right knee & lower leg. They hurt a lot, and I'm finding it hard to walk - let alone kneel, and do houseworky things. Bah. Would it have been any better if I'd managed to injure my left knee instead? Probably not - then I'd have two improperly functioning legs instead of one.

And I'm still really tired. Still not quite getting enough sleep and rest because of kids' exams and demand for tuition, and need more sleep than usual because of the injuries. Fun. Today, I've had not much work and have been catching up with livejournal - but I've missed so much that's happened *grumble*. Am supposed to be trying to tidy the place up, but my body isn't really up to it. So we'll have to continue living in a tip for a bit longer.

It was absolutely glorious today! Around 25 degrees, very sunny. I've discovered that on days like this, my face gets slightly sunburnt just walking to the bus stop (~7 minutes in direct sunlight), despite wearing a wide-brimmed sunhat with SPF 40. Various of my prescribed meds completely screw with the natural protection I have due to ethnicity. I had to buy suncream so I could cycle without getting sunburnt. It's the Green People no scent SPF 22 suncream. Amazingly, I am not allergic to any of the ingredients! It's not vegan due to the presence of beeswax, but I honestly don't care about that. I'd rather have a natural source of wax than petrochemicals.

While it is causing me to go red and blistery in UV, trazodone is still refusing to help me sleep. So I'm not falling asleep until 4 or 5 am, then having to get up at 10 or 11 am for work. 5 or 6 hours sleep a night for 16 consecutive nights is Not Enough. I've been sitting here falling asleep over the computer since 9.30 pm or so, but if I go to bed, I won't be able to sleep for hours. I really need to make an appointment to see my doctor, but I'm not sure when considering I am incapable of waking up at 8.30 am if I can't get to sleep before 5 am.

Also I have my period starting so am feeling fat and bloaty and achey. Bah. At least I have delicious prescription controlled drugs again.