helen-louise's journal

I haven't been feeling very successful in my life lately. I came back from Canada and collapsed in a heap of exhaustion and/or depression. No idea which. Possibly both. The thing is, I have an overwhelming feeling that it's depression due to physical health problems rather than my mental health screwing up.

I didn't mention this earlier, but I had my thyroxine dose increased just before I went away. My TSH level was 4.something (I wrote it down, but I've no idea where I put the piece of paper - 4.7, perhaps?). It was high enough to be in the range where even the NHS would advise another test in 6 months if I wasn't already on thyroxine. In this situation it was a clear indicator that my thyroxine dose wasn't high enough any more. Still, I was only on 25 mg, which is nothing.

I have a feeling that when my thyroid is working less awfully, I will feel better in all sorts of ways. Not sleeping for more than 12 hours a day would be nice. I've had a few days where I've slept for 10 hours, woken up, eaten something and taken meds, and then gone back to sleep for another 6 hours. I've had a few more days where I've slept for 4 hours and then woken up wide awake and been entirely unable to get back to sleep.

I have done NOTHING with regards to College work. I have done NO WRITING for pleasure since 6th January, except that today I managed to produce 900 words, of which about 700 are good. I owe BiCon an Access Report and am actually rather grateful that Jennifer has been on my back about it, because it shows that the BiCon team takes access seriously.

I haven't read any books in weeks. I've read some fanfiction online, and also some short fiction by Sarah Monette, who is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors. And also this by Elizabeth Bear (which made me cry my eyes out) and this by Marissa Lingen, courtesy of elisem who makes necklaces which people write about.

About all I've done constructively lately is play Animal Crossing: New Leaf. And, this weekend, I took part in the beta of The Elder Scrolls: Online, which was actually about 100 x more fun than it should have been considering it's (a) an MMO with a monthly fee and (b) messing up some of the established Lore of the universe. Today I did a small amount of posting of information to the UESP wiki. But in general, life has been relentlessly awful and exhausting, even though nothing much has happened.

I swear I'm becoming a more boring person every day. Currently I am able to do three "big" things a day. These include:
* having a bath
* washing my hair
* doing laundry
* making dinner
* making a cake
* doing the washing up (all the pots and pans that are too big to go in the dishwasher)
* going shopping for food
* going to the library

I get to choose three of those things to do each day, since that's all the physical energy and brainpower that I get given for the day. Other than that, all I'm doing is sitting round the house reading books, playing video games, and chatting to people online. Not much of an existence.

I ran out of the high strength vitamin D capsules a couple of weeks ago. This was intentional - "you're only supposed to take that much vitamin D for a short period of time", according to the new doctor, who is very nice, but doesn't know me (and doesn't quite believe my theory of why my vitamin D level was so low). Maybe it's psychosomatic, but I really do feel like I'm sinking back into the old brainfog that I had a few months ago. This is no good - I want to get better enough to go back to college and do academic work! I'm supposed to be having another blood test soon - I guess I should phone the doctor and find out when. That would take effort, though.

When you're suffering from chronic fatigue it's hard to figure out which parts of feeling bad and having no energy are the illness itself, and which are depression. I feel okay as long as I keep myself busy doing things like reading books and playing video games, but wouldn't that also be true if I were depressed? It's hard to know.

Things I should write about:
* my birthday, which was good
* the books I've been reading lately
* Sonisphere music festival
* the many links that are cluttering up my computer
* the cognitive behavioural therapy I'm having for sleep difficulties, which was promising at first but now seems pretty useless

I'll try to do that over the next few days. I keep saying that without managing to summon up the energy to do anything about it - it's ridiculous that it's July and there are still entries from March on the front page of my journal! But mostly all I want to do is moan, and no one needs to read endless entries of something whining about their health.

Especially as my health isn't even all that bad compared to some people. Nothing that I have is going to kill me, and there's no reason why I shouldn't live for another fifty years. I'm just sick of knowing that I have the brain to be a really useful and productive member of society, and not being able to do that because I'm too fucking tired :/

Thank you all for nice comments on my last post, especially leback who wrote the best part of a complaint letter. Haven't managed to turn that into an actual complaint & send it yet, due to a severe shortage of spoons.

Am coping a bit better but have had a cold for the past week. So that's been a chest infection, a sinus infection and a cold, all one after the other. Seriously, what is wrong with my immune system? I'd be concerned if it wasn't for the fact that I've been like this my whole life, and nothing makes me more likely to catch a virus than going out with a bacterial infection, and vice versa. I have been using my taxi allowance to get to and from college, which makes me feel pretty weird - guilty, even. I feel bad about fossil fuels being used to transport just me. But I honestly haven't been capable of doing the extra walking needed to take the Tube or buses :/

Brighton BiFest last Saturday was fun and it was good to see various people, such as barakta, mattp, a_musing_amazon and anarchist_nomad. Didn't make it down until the evening, so I missed all the workshops, and the_kumquat, conflux & adjectivemarcus... well, hopefully will see them in London soon. The games room was awesome, though playing giant Connect 4 against topbit is a waste of time because he'll win. My ability at most of the common board-type games is way below my intelligence level because I'm an only child and never had anyone to play them with :/ Mind you, I did beat Richard at Connect 4, but only because he lost concentration for a second and put his piece in the wrong place. Hmm.

Wow, there's a lot of tags on this post!

Last night I slept appallingly badly, and so am spending today wandering round like a zombie who hasn't had enough brains. For some reason, I had an excessively dry mouth all night, but nothing helped. It's amazing how unable to function one night of insomnia+interrupted sleep makes me, but this is possibly because I tend to run underslept at the best of times.

flippac is staying here because she has a conference in London. Not sure how much socialising with us she's going to do relative to socialising with conference-people, but it's nice to have met her.

I'm too tired to write anything more interesting. Bah. Will try to get offline and get something useful done.

A Public Service Announcement to note that I'm even more behind with livejournal than usual. I'm very busy and experiencing lots of stress. I'm coping with the stress, but at the expense of losing most of my spoons for interacting with other people. I've been too tired in the evenings for much apart from Guitar Hero III (which we've finally fixed to not be annoyingly out-of-sync - now the notes are only slightly out-of-sync with the music, except for Welcome to the Jungle, which remains completely fubar).

The number of posts I'm planning to make but haven't got round to yet is now up to 13, or possibly 14. Life keeps happening and there aren't enough hours in the day to write about it as well. I'm writing this on a train, in an attempt to get a bit more caught up; but I doubt it'll help.

BiCon was awesome, but now I'm at home with a bag full of dirty clothes that I can't wash as our washing machine is still broken, and a slight temperature which I'm hoping isn't the start of BiCon lurgy. The clothing situation is getting rather desperate, as Richard & I are going away on Friday and it's not as if my mum has a functioning washing machine either. (She'd been using ours, which Richard insists is the reason it broke - "you let your mother touch it, so it got her Curse Of Domestic Appliances!"). The wuzzie claims he is now 75% sure what's wrong with it and has ordered the part which may fix it, but it's going to take "3 to 5 days" to arrive, and even then it might not work.

I tried phoning hatter to see if I could take our clothes round there to wash (as they live the closest to us of all our friends), but apparently he & bfo are going away on Wednesday and need to get all of their clothes washed before that. Going to the laundrette isn't really a viable option as I'm allergic to "everything" (e.g. other people's detergents, washing powders, drying "sheets"); and while I contemplated doing a 90 degree wash to clean a machine out followed by my usual 40 degree wash, the fact exists that we live in a relatively posh area and laundrettes just don't exist round here anymore. Going to use the washing machines of other London friends gets progressively more silly as I consider where they live; and none of them are at home during the daytime, meaning I'd have to go round there, put my laundry in their machine, then sit and annoy them for the rest of the evening while I waited for it to be washed and dried (as laundry weighs twice as much when wet). Just not terribly practical, y'know?

On the way home from BiCon I tidied up some of the posts I wrote while away in Canada, and have posted them as backdated entries:
Toronto Zoo and dinner with BC & Siobhan.
Shopping strangeness in Toronto.
The European experience of the drive-through cinema.

If you want to read all of my Canada posts in order, this is the first entry, then use Next. Here's the list of what I/we did each day, so you can see what I still need to write about (the wedding, possibly Niagara Falls, and Canada's Paramount Wonderland).

Today, Richard & I have mostly been doing battle with entropy. We sorted out & took four large bags of junk to the charity shops that were open on a Sunday (Oxfam and the Romanian Orphan shop), and have put an enormous bag of stuff outside for the Heart Foundation people to collect tomorrow; and have put tons of junk mail in the recycling and shredded three binbags-full of old paperwork. The house is still a freaking mess though :/

We have tons of stuff to Freecycle too. If you know anyone who'd like a load of Education in Science journals, secondary school teaching materials, many many Jiffy bags & other useful eBay-selling packaging materials, and, eventually, an Ikea wooden-framed single loft bed and matching wardrobe that fits underneath, point them in my direction. I also have a woman's framed Duke of Edinburgh's Award-style rucksack, which is either 50 or 60 litres - the woman's framing means it is designed for a shorter person and the straps are in slightly different places to account for a female-bodied centre of gravity. I think it cost something like £80 or £100 when I bought it 15 years ago for D of E, and I've used it maybe four times on my Bronze and Silver expeditions, and it's no good at all to me now with my back.

I think we're going to buy a new vacuum cleaner tomorrow. Woo. The excitement of my domestic life!