how to hurt a tiny bit less

Bubbly relief, my head has been still for three days after forty difficult ones. Life with the ability to move my eyes is very sweet. I can eat a whole meal because I'm not swaying from fork movement, and nicest of all, I can bend down my head to kiss Aurelia with ease at any time. My flighty little creature was nigh impossible to cheerfully care for when each movement was torture to me.
The hundred eye movements that occur in a few seconds were leaving me giddily exhausted and really thoroughly miserable, but now I am grounded again. For now at least.

The last month of vertigo and the onset of cold weather has forced me to open my pain management tool kit.

When I became an adult, the variety who is ill most of the time, I didn't have any tools, bar going for a walk when I wanted to scream. I had not the foggiest idea of how to deal with discomfort or live with compassion towards my body. I felt compelled to push through, and not deviate away from an impeccable attendance record and relentless work ethic. Sometimes I couldn't sit through dinner without feeling anxious and struggling to breathe, because I needed to get back to practice. Relaxing was a foreign concept to me; how did one even go about this? And how would one quiet the barrage of accusatory thoughts of "this is time wasting indulgence" anyway?

When you endure pain for many years in a row, it corrodes your desire and ability to push through. Short term, much can be tolerated, but long term it wears you down. Sometimes even two days into suffering you don't feel so able to deal with it, and you start googling with ferocity to find an idea for relief. There is nothing gung ho left in me now days, and every fibre of my being craves soft gentle ways of living. Once I would have viewed taking a hot bath daily as indulgent, now it belongs in my toolbox of how to manage pain, lethargy, and associated sadness. 
These are my most used tools:

1. Sparkling Mineral Water
Drinking this is not like drinking water. The prickly bubbles feel so good on never ending sore throats. I feel slightly more effervescent after drinking it every single time, and wish I could afford to drink it constantly*. It's fun watching it bubble over when you open it, and not worrying that it will stain your clothes. Energy giving. Tonic.

*If soda stream produced the super prickly wake-you-up kind that I like, I would get one.

2. Kombucha
Enlivening like mineral water, but with great taste and a sense of drinking alcohol - good for people who find alcohol makes their muscles droop into the earth, and their heads spin (even more). Also good for people who are avoiding intoxicating their young.

3. Spiky ball
$2 Kmart purchase, worth far more. I use it regularly on my back and neck, and it saves me going to the physio 10x a week. Best used after heat, and followed with a heat cream.

4. Bath
Obviously this is not good if your blood pressure is low and baths make you pass out. But if you can hack them, oh that hot water relieves not only muscle pains but emotional too. Sometimes I use a guided meditation on my phone so that I will relax fully from toe to scalp and breathe deeply - especially when I feel I can't cope with all the sickness.

5. 90% Lindt
Low in sugar and highly satisfying. One square each evening with tea (tea is such an obvious tool that I won't give it a number, but it is my most used in winter). Work up to it if seems bitter.
 
6. Chewing gum
Unhealthy sweeteners, probably carcinogenic like everything else in life, but very helpful if you have zilch in the tank and really need to drive somewhere or walk. Gives a little energetic boost.

7. Flight mode on
Resting with a phone is more stimulating than it appears. It's lights, colours, mental chatter, and multitasking. It promises to distract you, and it truly does, but it distracts from peace too. Flight mode on, phone away, eyes closed takes self discipline but revives me better than scrolling.

8. Night sky
Sometimes before I go to bed I sneak out the back door and stare at the stars and the beautiful moon, and almost every time I get a wave of perspective. The celestial vastness exclaims to me that tomorrow could be better, that there is something to be thankful for, that the Creator of both the sky and myself can be trusted.

9. Text pals
Friends, in similarly leaky boats and less leaky ones, who are happy for most of the friendship to be conducted via messages of honesty and empathy. A friend who doesn't expect replies within 5 seconds and doesn't expect 'good vibes only!' Then be friends forever more.

If you have more magical methods for managing discomfort, please share them with me because each of these is a survival treasure, and I'm collecting.

on vertigo and not socialising

I’ve never been blasé about the merits of being able to touch type. Ten years ago on MSN, it facilitated high velocity MSN conversations, and today it allows me to write this blog with my eyes closed on account of the vertigo.

Today in my appointment, which my mum had driven me to, I found myself feeling increasingly unwell. My thoughts began to flit from the conversation, at first missing only a word here or there, and then missing whole chunks. Where am I going to throw up? My mind obsessively probed the room. Aurelia was out of her car seat, and I was bobbing her up and down on my knee to keep her from crying, the motion intensifying my nausea. For some sick reason, my mind saw the bowl-like shape of the car seat and seriously considered it as an option, before spying a bin under the desk. While trying to produce the right amount of ‘Mmm, yes, yep’ sounds, which I can only assume were not being dispensed at appropriate moments in the conversation, I was fixating on that bin. I could grab it easily, it was perfectly nearly empty, the beauty of a morning appointment. It would be faster than trying to get a plastic bag out of the nappy bag, although the plastic bag belonged to me, and the bin did not. I was beginning to perspire, thighs stuck to the chair; it is so hard not to hurl when you need to. At last I managed to interrupt, “I’m sorry, this is a bit off topic, but I’m not feeling very well and was just wondering where I should go if I need to throw up?” And as I had hoped, she immediately offered the bin and placed it closer to me.

It has been eight weeks since I shuffled into Emergency holding onto Ben. The nurse who called me from the waiting room looked at the notes, and then the pint sized baby. She said, “So, she’s 24.....” and she was about to say ‘days’, but knew couldn’t be right based on the size of the baby. Then it clicked that I was the one with the problem, the new mum, and no, it wasn’t a haemorrhage as she suspected. I performed like a drunk when asked to walk and tiptoe, and as my world swooped around, I was grateful for the testing and the validation that yes, I had vertigo. Why, I asked? Is this a common post partum experience? The doctors said that sleep deprivation can have unusual manifestations in those with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and they thought it was one of them. Common? No.

But of course!

Some days I feel well, almost vibrant. But if I have a bad night, this combined with the last seventy nights {that is a lot of nights}, brings on the swaying, as does leaving the house. I stagger to the toilet holding onto door ways. I am nauseous, with lack of sensation in my hands. There is no cleaning, driving, crafting, or walking. But there is a trail of guilt. Guilt that family members haven’t seen much of Aurelia, because of me. Guilt that I am always an apology at events, always delaying catch ups, always needing a lift, always spending money to get help, always perceiving an obligation to share my beautiful baby and needing to keep her in my arms at home.

‘Stuff people,’ says my husband, who is the antipathy of a people pleaser and unchanged in fatherhood. It’s the nicest thing to say to a new mum with vertigo.

A new chapter has began. 

The one where I have to re-learn how to live not only as a woman, but as a mother, in a society designed for the busy. Like that mother and baby group I’ve been put in, which meets at 1.30 in the afternoon.  Are you actually telling me that mothers are awake at that time? And the maternal and child health nurse genuinely thinks that my three month old needs the socialisation? Because I kind of think we could all do with toning it down, and sitting in peace in the sunshine, and not doing from time to time. Maybe in some painful way it is good that I still can’t run on the western conveyer belt, so that I can show my daughter what it is to just be, and to be at peace with being not performing*. If she hops on, she might struggle to ever hop off. And who said the conveyer belt is even headed in the right direction? 

* If I can ever grasp the concept for more than a week.