The new edition of Shiny is out! – but you probably already know this, as we went live last Thursday and I am only now managing to produce a blog post.
And why is this, I hear you cry? Well, let me give you the details.
Casualties so far in 2016
Mr Litlove
Trapped nerve in shoulder.
Throat infection.
Monster cold from family party at Easter.
Litlove
Uveitis in eye followed by WEEKS of chronic eye strain.
Cystitis once.
Cystitis twice.
Yeast infection from antibiotics.
Mr Litlove’s cold – though I caught this mildly and it is negligible in the scheme of things.
Abscess in tooth, resulting in more antibiotics and the prospect of an unpleasant trip to the dentist.
This last one was the worst. I came home and wailed that this was AWFUL. I’d barely got past the last batch of antibiotics and now I had another and the supremely dreadful choice between root canal work or extraction.
‘But this is great!’ said Mr Litlove. ‘You’ve got something definite and it has a name and they know how to fix it.’
Well, I’ve had a good run at health issues with names so far this year and frankly, you can keep them. I’ll take my nebulous chronic fatigue any day, which usually leaves me safe in my own home and without the need for medical intervention. Ten to one I’ll have the tooth extracted, as it’s been nothing but trouble since I concussed the nerve and the root canal work may well not be entirely successful. My mother assured me most comfortingly that an extraction is the sort of thing that’s worse in anticipation than in actuality and it ought at least to be quick. The dentist did warn me I wouldn’t be able to chew so well on that side of my mouth, but I pointed out I hadn’t chewed on it for the past two and a half years anyway. So. Now I just have to hope the antibiotics work (they are working, just more slowly than I’d hoped) and that I can avoid a second yeast infection. Sigh.
It’s been kind of Mr Litlove to keep me company in ill health. We were sitting on the sofa, staring at the walls not that long ago and he said: ‘We ought to be living the dream. We have an idyllic lifestyle and all we’ve done so far this year is be ill.’ ‘Tell me about it!’ I said. We are as usual oddly opposite. Mr Litlove is someone who can’t be ill quietly; there is never any need to ask him what the matter is. Whereas I get more still and more silent the worse I feel. He said he found himself wondering at one point if he’d caught chronic fatigue from me (I thought it was a bit late in the day for contagion) or whether we should have the house checked for poisonous gasses. I can understand Mr Litlove’s chain of events easily – he’s in the middle of a huge life change after all, which is tiring, and he got the throat bug from going back and forth to the doctors for me, and then his cold from a family party where it was rampant. He thinks that my run of illnesses have been provoked by fighting off this abscess for a while, and the dentist did warn me the swelling probably wouldn’t go down completely because of the scar tissue, since it had been there some time. I don’t know. I like it as a theory and wish it were true, which means I distrust it. What if this is just all about my heading-towards-fifty-hormones? What if this is the new reality?
On a more positive note, I have recently been able to read a bit again – up to two hours a day if I take plenty of breaks to rest my eyes. Which was absolute bliss after such a long, long drought. Before that I’d been forced to entertain myself with Woody Allen-esque scenarios in which I imagined travelling around the different departments of my body. So I might visit my brain to find the operatives bored and cranky, complaining there’s not enough to do. To which I would point out that the place is in a mess, half the cooling fans have burnt out, there’s litter everywhere, a good clean would make a lot of difference, etc. But they tell me that it’s no use, they can’t get any help from Maintenance. So I then visit Maintenance, where they suck in air through their teeth and say it’s a difficult time and what with all the recent problems, resources are low, maybe if they could get more supplies…? So I go to Accounts and Distribution, who are up in arms; they really need more nutrient income but they keep being ram-raided by that criminal, Stress, who makes off with all the good stuff the moment it’s delivered… And just recently I had a little fun with antibiotic ninjas storming the besieged Northern Gum Territories.
Well, you have to find amusement wherever you can.
This is true more than usual this week as Mr Litlove, now pretty much fully recovered from his cold, has gone away to Devon for a chair-making course. We’d agreed much earlier in the year that he’d go alone as a five-hour car trip is well outside my comfort zone at the moment, and normally I don’t mind a week on my own to watch what I like on telly and eat chicken risotto every night. But he’s only been gone an hour and I am missing him dreadfully. I think I’m a little lower in spirits than usual, what with this run of illnesses. But hey, I’ve hardly read any of the reviews in this edition of Shiny – and I must mention the kindness and understanding of the other eds, which has stretched beyond the pale this year! – and I’ve been feeling too rough even to look at what’s going on in the blogworld lately, so I could catch up. And I can make myself chicken risotto and watch an old movie I’ve watched so many times that I don’t need to strain my eyes on it (and I prefer rewatching movies to seeing them for the first time). And I have Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Solitary Summer by my side to read a few pages at a time, because there was a woman who really knew how to make the most of time alone. So I will do my very best to avoid a pity party.
If you happen to stop by, tell me what you are doing this week. I’d love to know!
Tales from the Reading Room 