helen-louise's journal

I'm sitting in Starbucks on Wardour Street waiting for Richard to get out of work. Someone's broken the only lift into his building so I can't wait there, and Westminster Council hates wheelchair users so much that I can't easily get around Soho by myself due to a severe shortage of dropped kerbs. So I didn't have a great deal of choice. I couldn't even get to Costa because it would have meant hurling myself off 4 inch high pavements and then driving along the road. I value my teeth a bit too much to risk that sort of thing.

I really need to organise some sort of petition/protest/shoot a video showing Westminster Council just how fucked up their access around Soho and Covent Garden really is. That would, however, require spoons, which are in short supply at the best of times.

I'm sure I owe you guys an "I got home from my travels safely" message, but I have been far too ill since I got back to manage anything. Nothing new, "just" severe period pain combined with my usual back/hip pain, the combination of which has required eating enough painkillers that I've been too sleepy for coherence. Joy! "Conveniently" I had an appointment at the Pain Management Clinic already booked for Monday. But it was hard to fill in the pain questionnaire when I'd been lying flat on my back groaning because of my uterus for days.

So after a week of doing absolutely bugger all, today I've got up & gone into London. Earlier it was sunny but not warm, now it is positively freezing. It was 30 deg C in Canada and I got irradiated by strong sunlight every day - here it is a maximum of 18 deg C in the middle of the day. Positively autumnal, and I miss my summer. Going out for dinner with Richard and his vegan colleague who is visiting from Canada. Richard has been unimpressed by the way his company has been treating this guy, e.g. yesterday they went out for steak even knowing that nowhere that serves decent steak in London also does vegan food at all.

I'm tired. Life could be a lot worse, though.

My uterus hurts. It doesn't hurt quite as much as it did on Monday, when I got my old copper coil taken out and a new Mirena coil put in, nor as much as it did on Tuesday when the strongest over-the-counter codeine was barely touching the pain, but it's definitely hurting a lot more than I like.

I believe that the theory is to get all of the pain out of the way now and then it won't hurt much for five years. Especially since copper coils are known to aggravate period pain and the Mirena is supposed to lessen it, but it's like my usual menstrual distress ramped up to ten. Super cramps, dreadfully aching legs, needing to pee approximately every 5 minutes (okay, once an hour), and severe digestive TMI. And this despite the fact I am eating bucketloads of "happy tummy pills" for the over-40s. And I'm only 38! (The "over-40s" pills contain 6 strains of intestinal bacteria rather than only 3).

But it's just that it's gone on so long. If you don't already have a Mirena, then they insist on putting it in during or immediately after your period. And I had the worst bloody period that I've had in years during BiCon. A full week of really bad pain and extremely heavy bleeding by my standards. (I recognise that "heavy" for me is "average" or even "light" for some poor female-bodied individuals, but that doesn't make it acceptable!) And then followed up by another few days of pretty much the exact same symptoms.

Bored of hurting now, can I stop soon?

Joy! Our kitchen ring main has died. I was heating up hot chocolate and heard a fizzling sound, and the microwave stopped working. So did everything else that runs off that ring main.

Like a Sensible Person Who Understands Electricity, I went to the fuse box. Where I found that the kitchen ring main fuse had not tripped. I flicked it to off anyway, waited a few seconds and back to on, but there is still no electricity to the kitchen. Richard reckons it might need a new circuit breaker.

Even better: the fridge/freezer is plugged in somewhere behind itself, and it's too damned heavy for me to move. So I can't actually unplug it and move it onto the downstairs ring main until Richard gets home from work.

Also, ( I am having TMI )

Haven't found time to update for a few days.

We're now staying in Montréal until Saturday 16th February, and flying home that night. I'd been hoping to get to Toronto to see my alt.poly friends there, but Richard now has to work until Friday. The combination of snow and a heavy electric wheelchair makes it too impractical for me to travel alone, and it's far more hassle than it's worth to lug all our stuff to another city for only one day. I'm sad about that because there are a number of people in Toronto who I really like and don't see often enough, but at least epi_lj and clawfoot should be passing through London in May on their way to Paris.

We saw papersky on Saturday, which was lovely - the first time we've met up in over a decade. Put it this way, when we last met in person, her son was 9, and he's now 23. She provided a place to stay for Richard & I on our very first holiday together. We had virtually no money, and got some sort of young person bus/rail pass which allowed us to travel around South Wales for a week. We stayed with Jo in Swansea, and with some other alt.poly people in Cardiff, and in a dodgy B&B in Merthyr Tydfil in between the two. It was one of the most educational trips in my life, and I could expand upon it at length, though it would make me cry - since I am a person who cries with most strong emotions. I should do so sometime, when I have spare time for writing.

Today I am Ill. It's nothing serious, only period pain. It will pass with time and hormone levels. But right now, I can't get out of bed. It's partly my fault - yesterday, I lost my stash of painkillers and opted to continue with our plans rather than run around looking for a pharmacy. After shopping for tools and a printer and TV for Richard's work, we went to the Jardin Botanique and looked at many strange and wonderful plants in greenhouses. Then I completely lost my temper because of pain and had to be placated with Maple Toffee Popcorn (like normal toffee popcorn only made with maple syrup, and amazingly without animal content), and ended up spending an hour sitting in a Second Cup watching curling on the TV because I was too ill to move, waiting for my painkillers to kick in. I still do not understand why the yellow team was throwing the red stones and vice-versa, nor why Alberta was playing "Canada". If it was Team Canada from the Winter Olympics, why aren't they in Sochi? Very confused about that.

I wrote all of the stuff above before Richard's laptop decided it was out of battery, hours ago, and now I hurt too much to carry on. More tomorrow, when I will hopefully hurt less.

Ah, fuck. About an hour ago, Richard pointed out that I might be horribly weirdly depressed because of the new medication I just started taking. Given that (a) it interacts with all the antidepressants and mood stabilisers I'm on and (b) it is also an antiepileptic drug, this does not seem unlikely. Given that (a) it does not seem to be doing me any good yet and (b) I'm on a low enough dose to just stop taking it, we are thinking that perhaps I should do that. Frankly, if a medication makes me want to be dead, I don't want to take it. Though I'm prepared to risk starting up again when I'm not in luteal phase when my moods are always wobbliest. Will consult doctor on this.

I have to say that provoking gender dysphoria in someone who is happy with "human female" 90% of the time is one of the weirder side-effects I've ever seen, but I suppose it comes under "abnormal thinking". Not that gender dysphoria itself is abnormal, just that it's not normal if you're usually able to cope with your body not quite fitting your internal gender. (TMI comments removed for the benefit of any gentler reader).

I have been downstairs to make chocolate crunchies, which consist of melted chocolate plus golden syrup plus corn flakes, stuck in the fridge for half an hour until they set, and eaten two of them. I also *somehow* found the energy to unload and reload the dishwasher, so it's running now.

So, today I've been having period pain so bad I felt as though the entire left side of my abdomen was going to explode, making it Opiates or Death time. Blargh.

Possibly as a result of this, I did something I swore I was Never Going To Do Again, and booted up the very terrible Sims Medieval. Much ranting on irc occurred, since I couldn't remember anything about how it works. The camera mode is greatly restricted compared to Sims 3, and while the Medieval sims look like Sims 3 sims, they aren't - if you take a sim created in one game and put it in the other, you get HORRIBLE MUTANTS. I didn't even remember that Medieval is the world's stupidest version of The Sims, since you can't actually build anything, which is the Fun Part. Also, while I've long known suck at making characters who look like real people, I'd have thought that making a character from one game in another game would be easier. Not even SLIGHTLY!

Anyway, thanks to Tailon on PokeCharms, who has a *very* good eye for attention to detail, this happened:


He's still not perfect: in particular his nose is too long and mouth are too wide, since apparently Medieval Create-A-Sim lies, but that's very recognisably Martin Septim.

( Utterly lovely pics of pixel men )

Today I am emo as hell. My stupid hormones decided that last night should be "Stay up reading slash fiction and weeping" night, and as a result I feel emotionally wrung-out. There's a whole load of things I should be doing today, including Important Paperwork about my Disabled Students Allowance, filling in my lab notebook before I go in tomorrow, and washing my hair which has reached that "ready to crawl off my head" stage of vileness; and all I feel like doing is lying on the sofa eating chocolate. It really doesn't help that my period started early, so I'm having the depression and mood swings at the same time as the physical pain and bleeding.

Ugh, hormones. We hates them, precious.

Back at home, doing last-minute wedding preparations. Things that have annoyed me today:

1) The booklet on how to get married provided by Hammersmith & Fulham Council specifically says "If you would like a particular piece of music that may be 'special' to the two of you, please bring it along to the register office before the day of your marriage." The booklet on weddings, which I don't have right in front of me to quote, even says that music must be approved in advance by the Senior Registrar! So why, when I turned up with a CD today, was I told that I could have just brought it tomorrow?

2) Whole Foods in Kensington were being sucky. Last Tuesday or Wednesday, I went there to enquire about how to order cakes. I wanted to place an order for 2 x 7" vegan chocolate fudge cakes. I was told by the Bakery assistant that not only was there not a form to fill in, but they always make several of those cakes fresh every day so there is no need to order them. Well, today I went, and there was all of ONE 7" vegan chocolate fudge cake. As a result, there is Not Enough cake. Grrr.

3) Richard forgot to buy (or tell me to buy) a pocket watch. So now he's complaining that he can't fit his wristwatch under the strange sleeves of his wedding outfit, and it's too late to do anything about it. I tried looking for pocket watches online, and the cheapest ones available in shops which exist in Kingston were £150 (and quite ugly). I only know two people who might have one to borrow, and one of them lives too far away to be any help.

For people who want to know why anyone needs a watch at a wedding, Richard always needs a watch. It's a Richard-thing. He feels undressed without one and indeed, often walks around the house wearing only underpants, a watch and his ring.

4) Our menu, which looked so good on A4 paper, looks awful on A5 paper. A5 is half the size of A4 - I've gone from formatting it as a flat, double-sided sheet to a four-sided booklet. But it just looks ugly. I have to figure that out before I can go to bed.

5) I have period pain. Gah.\

12 hours to go...

Today at 2.10 pm I have an appointment at Kingston Hospital ( slight TMI ) to try to find out whether I have an ovarian cyst, or what. I am hoping for something obvious and not scary. Best wishes would be appreciated.

nitoda is coming with me. I am glad that someone is, since I am still somewhat phobic of the hospital.

I'm trying to work. My possible ovarian cyst is hurting like holy hell again. Why is it such a git? Haven't received any letters about it yet, so no sign of when I'm going to get a scan done. And, to add further insult, the cervical smear test I had done was "unreadable" and I have to go again in January. ARGH!

I seriously think the number of women I know who have problems at some point during menstruation and/or reproduction far exceeds the number of women I know whose girly bits do everything they should & nothing they shouldn't for forty years. (Honestly, I think I know one woman who has no pain at all during periods, had a comfortable pregnancy, and gave birth easily. I'm sure that everyone else I know has had problems with at least one of those three).

I swear the whole female reproductive system is badly designed.