Tonsils

What was a mildly sore throat on Monday - hardly noticeable - became a really quite sore throat (and swollen tonsils) by Tuesday evening, and this morning when I got up, it really hurt to swallow and my sinuses had decided to join in. So I admitted defeat, called in sick and went back to bed, where I had a rather feverish type of dream in which I dreamt that my feet had developed several extra toes without my noticing.

This is definitely not true - I checked - but for a few moments after I woke up I really thought it was. It must be Weird Dream Week in my family (my grandmother has apparently been having dreams in which she worries about the end of the world and mountains turning into volcanoes).

I hope I'm going to feel better soon because I keep thinking about all the things I need to do at work...

Turmoil

April has been a pretty rough month. I have been putting off posting until things evened out a bit, because I don't like to write a big dollop of self-pity - especially when so many other people are going through trying times as well...

At the start of April, J's grandfather died. He had been unwell a few times recently, but had only just been told that he couldn't go on living alone because of his Parkinson's. He'd agreed to this, then took ill, was taken to hospital and died a couple of days afterwards.

So the news wasn't totally unexpected, but we hadn't realised he was as ill as that (I'm not sure if anyone did). We have been bearing in mind that this was a reasonably merciful way to go - Gramps really didn't want to move out of his house, and in the event he didn't have to, and he wasn't confused or demented and he didn't linger on suffering. But it's still sad.

We went down for the funeral and spent some time with J's family, who are, as ever, lovely.

That was the first week of April. About a week after we got back, we noticed that Pumpkin, one of our guinea pigs, was making a noise and looking uncomfortable when urinating. J had noticed this a few weeks earlier, but I hadn't been able to catch her in the act and was rather inclined to put it down to his OCD - he does get very worried about things, often without much cause.

However, we could now clearly see that Pumpkin was in pain, and thought it was likely to be bladder stones, which are common in guinea pigs. They're caused by a diet too high in calcium, which some guinea pigs have difficulty excreting (it's genetically linked). The stones can be fatal - two friends of mine have recently lost guinea pigs to them. We took Pumpkin to the vet, who thought this was a likely diagnosis and admitted her for ultrasound scanning to confirm it, then possibly surgery to remove the stones. Pumpkin is a little tiny thing, so we were quite upset at this prospect; but the alternative would be putting her down, which we couldn't bring ourselves to face.

We returned home. That evening, Brownie started showing the same symptoms as Pumpkin.

So we took her to the vet too, and spent the rest of the evening wondering if we were going to be down to a single pig, and feeling that it was all our fault for feeding them the wrong things. All this was complicated quite a lot by the fact that we don't have a car and were obliged to rely on Mum for lifts to the vet - which she nobly provided. In the midst of this, my great-aunt fell and broke her hip and was hospitalised, and my grandmother hasn't been too well, which put yet more pressure on poor Mum.

As it happened, Pumpkin did have stones, but they were relatively small and she passed them on her own before she was due to have surgery - when she was scanned again, they'd gone. Brownie didn't appear to have stones, but she had calcium buildup which is a precursor, and she had it flushed out (as did Pumpkin). Both of them came home a week ago, and although Pumpkin has been a bit subdued, she's beginning to perk up. Brownie seems to be completely recovered.

All this was very stressful. We love our animals, but hadn't previously come up against the moral dilemmas of having a seriously ill pet. A lot of people would find it silly to go to so much trouble over a little rodent, and I can hardly blame them - but I don't think we could have decided not to.

This week has mostly been taken up with squirting antibiotics and vitamins into the pigs' tiny little mouths, letting them lick slimy drippy invalid food off my fingers, and making sure our well pig didn't chase the others and make them panic. Training for parenthood, maybe?

Things are starting to calm down now. The pigs seem to be recovering on course (the vet said it may take them six weeks to return to normal, but they improve every day). My aunt has had her hip pinned together and seems to be doing OK.

I think we might take a while to recover completely, though.

More about knitting and guinea pigs

This is great. The way this is going, I can spend the entire month just answering the comments... well, maybe not. But the snag about starting this in a week when I was recovering from being ill is that I haven't done very much other than knit.

Answers!

Anna wants to know if guinea pigs go to sleep on you (presumably while you're knitting) or move about.

Guinea pigs are weird animals - most of them don't sleep very much at all. They alternate between twenty minutes of moving about and twenty minutes of sitting still - but looking perfectly alert - all day and all night. How they get by on so little sleep is a mystery as yet unsolved by science. It's thought that they take micro-naps but never sleep deeply at all.

I've known some guinea pigs for years without ever seeing them close their eyes. We do see Pumpkin and Cupcake catnapping, but Brownie is pretty much always alert. Cupcake is the sleepiest pig I've ever known, but even she has only gone to sleep outside her cage once (when she was a baby).

They do sit fairly still when they're on our laps, though. A restless pig is usually a pig that needs a toilet break.

Loth, I'm sorry that I can't show them knitting. Can I offer you an intelligent mouse instead?



Meanwhile, I have finished knitting the mitts for my sister. They were a commission rather than a surprise, so I feel I can show you photos without any trouble:





You can see the lacy bit better in the second photo, but I thought I'd better put the first one up just to prove I did knit two! The other knitted thing is a hat, not knitted by me, from which I copied the lace pattern.

The lurgy of Damocles?

Unfortunately, I am still feeling a bit tired and headachy - well, achy in general, in fact. Perhaps I am incubating the bug everyone else seems to have. If so, it's somewhat irritating, since it seems only a couple of weeks since I recovered from the last time I was ill (actually, it was mid-October). My ears seem a little blocked up and my head feels a bit... heavy... although I don't have any cold-type symptoms.

The head wasn't helped a great deal by the office being extremely hot today. Apparently, it was freezing in there yesterday, and they got someone to come and turn all the radiators up. Well, it worked - possibly too well. It's an old building and the room has several cold spots, all of which seem to affect my colleagues and not me, so I don't feel I can ask them to open a window and freeze for my sake.

Anyway, when I came home, J made the tea and I sat on the sofa and knitted (I've got half my scarf done now) and then watched Heroes, which was very exciting, of course.

The TV switched itself off several times during what was evidently a silent montage of various of the characters watching the eclipse (a Meaningful Moment) which perhaps wasn't terribly helpful of it. We're quite used to this quirk it has, and we've got cable, so if we route the sound through J's hi-fi setup the sound doesn't vanish when the picture does. University Challenge works OK as radio, but Heroes definitely suffers a bit. Perhaps we need to bite the bullet and find a new TV.

Right now, however, I'm going to bed. Night night.

Cough cough

Well, I've been to the doctor. The cough was diagnosed as probably a virus which has been complicated by asthma - the virus itself has run its course by now, but my lungs are now irritated by all the coughing. Which means that I keep coughing and irritate them further, and so on. She says I may just have lungs which are easily irritated.

She's given me a preventative inhaler (which I 've never had before) and told me to rest. Which sounds good.

At first I was a little incredulous, since my asthma is generally triggered only by allergens and very cold dry air, and often I don't pick up my inhaler for months at a time. But now that I think about it, this happened to me on a lesser scale when I was 20: I had mild bronchitis, but the cough lingered on through most of a university term, causing me to miss a lot of football practice. And according to Mum, my little brother used to have similar problems.

The new inhaler does seem to have improved matters a little already; I'm still coughing, but not so breathless. I'm still quite sore, though. I don't think I'll be going running just yet. Maybe next week.

You know how I just had a cold?

I seem to have last posted on the 22nd, eleven days ago. At which point I was moaning about my sinuses.

The cold had gone by Monday, but I continued to feel tired and rather chilly and achy. When I'm tired, I have a tendency to comfort-eat (I was also PMSing, which didn't help a lot). At one point the scales were reading 187, which is not a number I really wanted to see again. On Wednesday, I came home from work, sat down, wrapped a blanket round myself and basically did nothing of any utility all evening. This probably ought to have told me something.

On Thursday, I woke up feeling sort of sick, decided I would feel better once I had had breakfast, had it, went to work and lasted an hour and a half before coming home. Some kind of feverish gastric bug.

What is wrong with me at the moment? Normally I am rarely ill, but this is the third virus of some kind I've had this year (counting the one I started the year with). My immune system must need a boost. Possibly it is stress.*

Fortunately the vomiting was limited to one day, and I've been out of bed and moving around since Saturday (also fortunate, since my brother-in-law was staying with us for the weekend), but I'm still feeling somewhat nauseous if I eat anything too exciting, such as a normal-size meal, as I foolishly tried to do on Sunday. So I'm sort of sticking to the odd bit of dry toast and so forth.

This probably amounts to one of those crash diets you are advised against. I appear to have lost five pounds since Thursday - and I can see the difference, which is really weird. Usually I lose so slowly that I don't notice a thing. It can't all be water, because I've been rehydrating religiously.

I'm a bit worried that if I don't start eating normally soon, my metabolism will go into famine mode, and that when I do go back to normal my body will store everything just in case. But equally I don't want to push my digestion further than it wants to go, since what with all the ailments I've hardly done any MLitt work since pre-cold, and I really do not want to get any further behind.

We'll see what happens... At least I don't have to go back to work until Wednesday.

*J has been having some pretty rough times with his depression lately, which deserve an entry of their own. Several entries, even. That's why posts have been a bit sparse lately, indeed - I wanted to wait to write about it until the situation became a bit clearer. Which it has. I think. Watch this space.

Colds are not good for the soul

I have a cold. Everyone else in Edinburgh either has it, has just had it, or (I'd guess) is incubating it.

Mine is mostly sitting in my sinuses, throbbing quietly.

There will be no triumphant tales of exercise exploits this week, because I am just too tired. Normally I'm a night owl, but I've been in bed well before 10pm twice this week, and am about to go there now.

*whoosh*sniff*whoosh*

Night-night.

Health. Again. And stuff.

I have no idea whether any guys read this dubious excuse for a blog, but - dear reader, if you're male, you have permission not to read this entry.

The older I get, the more I become aware of... my Cycle.

No, not the kind with two wheels. (I am hoping to acquire a new one of those soon, since my current one is fifteen years old and extremely heavy. But I haven't got around to it yet.)

The one I mean, of course, is the kind that poleaxes you once a month, if you're female. Mine's been doing that to me for about the last seventeen years, although it seems longer. Much longer. This is genetic; there's nothing much to be done about it (except take NSAIDs and keep warm) and I'm used to dealing with it.

Lately, though, the Cycle has taken to making me suffer before the main event as well.

I've noticed for a few years now that I get unreasonably weepy when premenstrual. Now I seem to get tired, digestively uncomfortable, and bloated as well. Oh, and hungry.

Most of the time, now, my eating habits are pretty healthy. We always eat balanced meals, with some protein, and avoid simple carbs; we eat tons of green vegetables. We don't keep snack foods in the house. However, there's a reason for that: I have no self-restraint whatsoever.

If you give me a box of sweets (for example), I will eat them much quicker than I intend to. This is not something I like about myself, but I've tried to change it, and it doesn't work*. I've got to the point where I can avoid buying unhealthy food, and that is progress: when I was at university, I was terribly prone to buy food when I was out and eat it, thinking to myself that it would be OK because I would eat less in the evening. And then I would forget to eat less in the evening. I'm fairly lucky in that I don't seem to put weight on as quickly as some people do, but over the course of time, that was basically why I needed to lose weight in the first place.

I might have no self-restraint when food is in front of me, but I have slowly trained myself to eat less by avoiding food when I'm not hungry. I don't think I could, physically, eat as much as I used to at college. And I don't usually eat any snacks at all these days.

Apart from last week, that is. I ate quite a few bits of toast and bananas and random pieces of cheese when I wasn't really that hungry, and if we had had more exciting instant food I would have eaten that. I don't really know what the trigger is; whether it's the tiredness, or feeling squishy and bloated (feeling fat has been a trigger in the past - yes, it's stupid, but it has) or what.

I'm not pleased with myself.

Oh, I know it's not that big a deal. Today the main event started, and the desire to eat things has gone. Vanished. (Probably because, as usual, I feel rather sick. I would love to think this was just my body's way of preparing for not eating very much for a few days, but I doubt my body is that intelligent.)

I just seriously dislike using my hormones as an excuse. And it's taken me so long to train myself out of bad habits that I really, really don't want to pick them up again, no matter whether there's a reason for it.

I happened to be in the doctor's office today and saw a handy self-help booklet on the very subject of PMS, however. Although a lot of it was fairly well-known stuff, it did reassure me that this stupidity most likely is PMS, rather than just me being pathetic. One tip that it suggests that I'm not doing already is to take vitamin B6 tablets, starting a few days before you expect symptoms to start. Which might take a little working out, but I'll give it a try.

Another thing you're supposed to do is exercise. Which, yes, did make me feel better for a while yesterday. All I can really do for the moment is walk and cycle, because my foot isn't exactly back to normal yet, which is a little frustrating - I think it's coming up for three weeks since I bashed it. It doesn't mind being walked on, but running puts too much pressure on the toes and it hurts. Might be time to consider taking it to a physio, but I keep hoping it'll just get better.

What other news? I've been mostly buried under a pile of job applications lately, or that's what it feels like. But! I have finally got a job interview. It's next Thursday, and I really like the sound of the job, so cross your fingers for me.

Travelling backwards through time, the weekend of my birthday (which was the 9th) I finally met up with Shauna, the illustrious Dietgirl! This coincided with a reunion with Rosemary Grace, whom I had met via Shauna's comments, only later realising that although she lives in California, we had gone to nursery school together when we were four. We met up in a coffee shop and talked of many things, including learning to drive, flats, writing, jobs and pets, but not really touching much on fitness that I recall. It was lovely to meet up with them - Shauna and I have been vaguely planning to meet for, oh, three years or so, but we've never managed to bring it off until now. I hope to see her again before too long, though. She is lovely.

Matt, Rosie's husband, took a picture of the three of us, but as far as I know this has yet to make it online. And Rosie gave me a fantastic early birthday present - a book by Lois McMaster Bujold. I am addicted to these, and it's all her fault, because she got me on to them in the first place...

I saw Rosie again pretty soon - the next day, in fact, because she asked my mum and me to coffee (Shauna had a prior engagement with a mountain). We had a very nice time, and I got to meet her parents and their cat. It is a pity Rosie lives halfway round the world, but next time she comes over Mum and I will return the invitation.

So I'm finally managing to get over my shyness about meeting other bloggers! Well, I meet my mum every week, but I'm not sure that counts...

(*There are exceptions to this. I'm quite good at resisting food that I have cooked myself, which is the only reason I let myself bake things. I do not know why food that others have cooked, or that's bought from a shop, should have so much more of an allure, but it does. So I can make cake or whatever for J and not eat it myself.)

Four reasons why...

I haven't posted very much in the last week or so:

These two little chaps have come to stay with us for a couple of months. Their names are Snowy and Snuggles, and we’re babysitting them while their owners are abroad. We’ve been talking about getting pets for ages, and of the animals I have lived with before, guinea-pigs seemed the most suitable option: they don’t make me sneeze, they don’t seem to mind living in a hutch too much, and they don’t need taking for walks. Also they’re cuddly.

Although he’s very fond of animals J has never had a pet of any kind, so this seemed a good way to find whether we really have the time to care for guinea-pigs, and whether he’s allergic to them. So far, the pigs have been a joy. They’re young and lively and chirp away to us entertainingly when we pick them up, as well as mowing the lawn for us (well, when it’s not been pouring with rain). And just to add to the excitement, my brother suddenly phoned me up last Saturday and made mewing noises down the phone. This almost counts as normal behaviour for my siblings, so I wasn’t too surprised. Then he announced that his cat campaign, which he’s been carrying out ever since I moved out, had suddenly succeeded when he least expected it: my parents were adopting two nine-week-old black kittens.

Here they are, trying to ooze out of the box in which my parents were taking them home. They are very cute indeed, but also extremely lively. The boy is called Sirius (because he’s black, obviously) and the girl is Cassiopeia, Cassie for short. Or Puss. Or Trouble. They’ve only been home a week and it’s already clear who rules the house.

I have not been exercising terribly strenuously, though, mostly because I have a cough – the kind which makes it hard to draw a deep breath. Although I’m hardly ever ill, I’ve had various little health problems over the last few months, mostly infections. Not major, just annoying: I’d like not to go to the doctor in July, if possible. The last thing was an infected insect-bite on my arm the week before last, for which I had to take strongish antibiotics (and was threatened with an IV if they didn’t work – scary biscuits!) That cleared up fine, but I have reason to suspect the pills killed off all my friendly bacteria as well as the unfriendly ones. I’m alternately eating live yoghurt and vitamin-C-containing foods and hoping to feel better soon...