helen-louise's journal

My last couple of posts were interesting for me, since quite a few people commented who don't usually say anything here. Indeed, I didn't even know some of them still read my journal. It's nice to know people are still reading, even if they don't have the energy to comment very often. Hi! *waves*

Long-term readers of this journal will remember that I used to have an evil gall bladder. Now I have a mostly quiescent gall bladder, except in three cases:
1) If I eat too much fat.
2) At certain times of the month.
3) If I take codeine.

(1) is easy enough to deal with - it's hardly the end of the world to avoid fat, especially since the amount I'm able to eat these days is enough for me not to feel hard done by. (2) and (3) are more of a problem. I can't stop having menstrual cycles (not without aggravating other health issues), and gall bladders are known to be affected by oestrogen. That's one of the reasons why it's mostly women and "fat people" who get gallstones - oestrogen is fat-soluble. And of course, the main time I take codeine is when I have period pain.

So last night was epic "fun" - trying to make sure I took enough codeine to deal with my evil uterus without simultaneously aggravating my evil gall bladder. Paracetamol alone was no use: it was wearing off in 2.5 hours, and you can only safely take it every 4 hours. (And only 4 doses in a day, which is "great" when you wake up with pain in the middle of the night). I can't take NSAIDs because I have an anaphylaxic-type reaction to aspirin and ibuprofen - severe wheezing and throat closing up. So opiates are my only option. Literally. I'm not even sure that I can use a TENS machine right now with the weird back/leg neurological thing I have. Not until the doctor from the pain management clinic stops being shite and actually gets back to me with a new appointment :/

Ahh, bodies. Especially bodies that are broken in multiple ways.

Ergh. I feel really ill. Not only are my back, legs and uterus all being evil, but my dear old gall bladder's decided to get in on the action as well. I have spent the weekend eating painkillers.

Today I went to college and threw up thanks to the gall bladder, who is evil uterus's best friend. (When one hurts, so does the other). Have now eaten a couple of oranges and drunk some fruit tea (no fat!) and am sitting in the British Library trying to work. Will consider it a good day if I don't pass out or throw up again.

Had a fairly meh weekend due to my entire body crapping out on me on Saturday. I'd wanted to go to Birmingham BiFest but with my back, legs, right hip and left ankle all hurting, I wasn't going to manage 4 hours on trains. Even my gall bladder decided to get in on the action! I haven't had gallstone pain that bad in years. Instead I spent 15 hours asleep. Woo.

Yesterday was much more interesting. Richard & I went to see Ghost Forest in Trafalgar Square. It's an exhibition of tree stumps from rainforest trees in Ghana. Some of the trees had been felled sustainably (every tree in the rainforest there is numbered, and you can only take a certain quota of trees from a particular area in a 40 year period), others had fallen naturally. It was particularly useful to have the exhibition there because Nelson's Column is a similar height to the mature trees, so you had an immediate reference for the size of them when living. Also the plaque alongside each tree had a simple graphic comparing it to Nelson's Column (like when blue whales are compared to London buses, or in a video game info screen where you see size of monster compared to your character). Richard took lots of photos and I shall prod him until they go online.

Today the exhibition was being taken down, and sometime this week the trees are going to Copenhagen for the climate change summit. I don't know if there is a comparable building to be a size reference there.

I like the story about the Denya tree not wanting to leave the ground.

There's nothing quite like having a killer attack uterus and a gallstone trying to emerge at the same time to make you feel ambushed by your own internal organs. Yesterday involved 165 mg of dihydrocodeine (equivalent to 330 mg of codeine, supposedly), which according to Wikipedia, should have been enough to make me away with the fairies. Me being me, it just made me slightly dizzy. The day also involved nowhere near enough sleep followed by several hours of lying in bed curled around my belly followed by vomiting followed by finally getting some sleep. I don't like pain.

But I dragged myself out of bed to go to the Wildhearts' 15th Anniversary of "Earth Vs the Wildhearts" show, which was awesome. I've always liked Shepherds' Bush Empire as a venue - something about the incongruity of being in such an old theatre to see a rock band. It also has plenty of seats with a good view of the stage, so you don't feel like you're missing out if you do have to sit down for most of the show. The band were on top form - Ginger was being nice to the audience (!), while he & CJ seem to be actual friends again these days. And the concept of playing the whole of Earth Vs in order would have been great, if they'd managed it... somehow, they skipped from "Miles Away Girl" to "News of the World" and "Drinking About Life" and had to come back to "My Baby Is a Headfuck" and "Suckerpunch". Oops. Then there was a break, for people to smoke or buy beer or go to the toilet - how civilised! followed by all of the B-sides from the Earth Vs era. I was surprised how many of the fellow 30-something fans knew all the words to the songs on Earth Vs but didn't know any of the B-sides. Personally, I was delighted to have "Girlfriend Clothes" and "Two-Way Idiot Mirror" in a setlist. And so civilised - to be able to see a band and breathe all the way through. It was being filmed for a DVD. Guess I'll be buying that, then :)

And then I went home and made & ate tomato rice and slept for 12 hours, interrupted only by the need to take pills throughout the night. Today, the uterus is less evil but the gallstone is still making itself felt. Think I'll be on the special ultra-low-fat-with-painkillers gallstone diet for a while :/

Or anyone else on a low fat diet.

I had a craving for instant noodles, but the noodles I have here (Sainsbury's vegetable instant noodles, suitable for vegans) are so high in fat that one packet gives you a staggering 26.6 grams of fat! I can't *eat* food that fatty without getting really ill. So I took the flavour packet from the noodles & made it up with normal spaghetti, broken into small pieces. It was good! Would've been even better if the flavour packet was fresh and not expired in 2006 (not a problem from the health point of view, because there isn't enough FOOD in those flavour packets to go off) ;). The original noodles, however, would've been inedible because they're all full of palm oil, which like all vegetable oils goes rancid after a couple of years.

YAY DELICIOUS JUNK FOODS!

It's been a long few days. Let's do this in the Yay and Boo style that other people favour.

Saturday:
- 4.5 hours of work starting at 11.30am.
+ Saw Tim & Peter.
+ Peter is my personal computer fairy, bringing me a "new" laptop for Ludy plus an official Microsoft Office 97 install disc. Don't ask what I need it for (will explain later).
+ Went out for dinner at the nice Italian that's not open on Sundays.
- Wanted to go to sleep before Tim & Peter had even left (impressive, considering that they are morning people and I'm not!).
- It took me/us 5 hours or so to reinstall Windows & put all the new software onto Ludy's "new" computer. Got to bed far too late.
+ It was kinda fun to put music I like & think she'll like and photos of us/things meaningful to us on the computer for her. I get why people like to be computer fairies now!

( Sunday, Monday & Tuesday )

Blargh. My gall bladder hurts :/ I just had to go & find pills that I don't normally need to take :/ I have eaten entirely usual food today - in fact, towards the lower end of the fat scale. So it's "probably" hormones.

Now, it is normal for my gall bladder to play up at this stage in my menstrual cycle, and it's even within the realms of "normal for me" for it to hurt this much at this time. However, the last time it was freakin' hot and throbby to this extent was the Brighton BiFest I missed because I was eating lots of opioids and lying in bed watching the wibblefairies. I'd rather like to not have that happen this weekend, thankyouvermuch.

Prayers to $deity_of_choice for continued gall bladder health gratefully accepted.

Dear metabolism,

When the hell are you going to get with the program and realise you need to work harder to keep me warm? The non-consensual weight loss thing happened last year and I froze my arse off in clothes that were too big all of last winter. I did think you'd have figured out by now what size our body is and how much natural insulation we have, but obviously not. It'd be really nice if you could speed up, or whatever, so I don't have to sit here in a centrally-heated room wearing underwear, a vest, long-sleeved t-shirt. two jumpers, leggings, a thick cordruoy skirt, socks, slippers, a blanket and a hat just to stop myself from actively shivering. Mammals are supposed to be warm-blooded, damnit.

No love,
h-l.

There are lots of kinds of physical beauty. Modern Western society has decided to focus on a particular type that, for female-bodied people, is tall, slim and willowy. This idea of beauty is a comparatively new thing. If you look at portraits painted at various times over the past few centuries, you'll see that curves were most definitely in fashion for a lot of that time. Victorian women wore bustles to try to make their bottoms look bigger. Georgian women have soft, plump features like babies. In Rubens' time, zaftig was most definitely in.

According to a Cosmopolitan magazine in my doctor's surgery, in some modern African societies, women go on a diet before they get married. But rather than going on a diet to lose weight, they diet to gain weight. For, in a land where famine is common, fat is prized. Being fatter increases your chance of surviving if food becomes scarce, so increases your desirability as a breeding partner - which is, apparently, what our brains are subconsciously looking for even if you're childfree by choice. Makes no sense to me, but that's biology for you. (I wonder whether anyone has done research into what people look for in a same-sex partner?).

( It's about 'fat' and 'beauty' and their lack of mutual exclusiveness - it _shouldn't_ be triggery, but I don't know where your buttons are. )

The rest of the Belgium photos will be posted when I acquire sufficient spoons to do so. Sometime, we need to buy the non-free version of Photoshop, so it has macros, as it's quite tedious to have to resize a whole camera-worth of photos myself. (Granted, there are always some I'd want to resize manually, like if I want to refocus on part of the photo - but those are usually only 1/3 of the total, if that.)

Some of you are going to get random parcels from me over the next few days/weeks. hoopycat & veryfineredwine are getting the Belgian chocolate they "ordered". lindsical is getting the football papers I said I'd send. ailbhe is getting some dairy-free chocolate with vanilla cream filling that I found plus a newspaper article about homeschooling.

Tomorrow I have an ultrasound to find out what the current state of my gall bladder is. It's a little under a year since the last one, and I'm terrified. I know I'm much less ill than I was, and I've introduced a lot more fat into my diet without ill consequence (still doing low fat, but not ultra low fat - I'm eating about 20-30g of fat a day, rather than less than 10g. As a comparison, the guideline daily amount for "sustainable weight loss" in the UK is 50g for women. However, my weight has been stable since I changed to this amount.). But there is the possibility that the gallstones have gone "quiet", which means they're still there but just not hurting much - in which case, I could end up with acute cholecystitis again in the future and have the whole hospital thing to deal with.

We're going to Paris at the weekend! Richard decided the only way he was going to get some paintball "business" sorted out was to go and speak to the person about it, and he asked if I wanted to tag along. So I have to amuse myself on Saturday, then we're going to Aquaboulevard on Sunday. Suggestions of museums I might want to go to welcome. I "did" the main attractions (Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, Sacre Coeur) when I was a teenager. I like science & modern art, and I don't much like Old Masters at all unless they're weird like Hieronymous Bosch.