A positive start

Well it's two weeks into the year, halfway through the first month, in fact. I have sailed past a couple of shops in the sale, acquired a handbag that I've wanted for a very long time (and that's made me quite happy, materialistic moo that I am), but am keen to grab a hold on things again.

The start to 2011 has been a quiet one. What I refer to as my winter sinus has struck, but although I've been stuck in bed for a few days here and there, not as badly as in the past overall. The worst result has been that I lost my place in my diary, and with Galloping Christmas, another winter affliction, it's taken me a while to get a grip again. I don't mean the holiday itself, that's lovely; I mean the torturing myself for a fortnight that I haven't done any activities/baking/ enough tidying/dusting/entertaining - nor have I flown to the moon this week, but so what. Alas such logic is driven out by Galloping Christmas, aka Raving Madwoman Syndrome. It does pass.

So I've spent the last two weeks in a kind of hazy panic that I'm missing an important appointment or forgetting to do something vital that will stop the world's head falling off, which is alleviated by a frantic consultation of all the diaries / scraps of paper / phone date manager thing / dustbin. The realization that all these sources of reassurance are actually all complete AND in sync with each other lasts for all of 5 minutes before my short-term-memory-of-a-goldfish strikes and hey presto half an hour later I'm in the same hazy franticity. Again, I know that not only I but both males of the house know where all the diaries are and that they are to be updated all at the same time, so I have to learn to trust myself more.

But there have been two outstanding positives to report, if only outstanding from my particular viewpoint. I managed to go swimming all by myself, something that wouldn't have been possible without the support of HTS and my swim-buddy, and am actually now looking forward to more solo swims; something I've never ever wanted or felt confident enough to do in the past. Not even when I was a confident worker.

And after struggling to lose a pound a week at the start of my diet, when I was weighing and worrying over every mouthful, I've managed to lose a stone over about a 6 week period which included the holiday fortnight. So far that makes 22 lbs / 10 kilos. I don't look or feel it, particularly as it's been a while since the gym exercises wore off and everything started heading south again; but that will be rectified after tomorrow's induction at the gym, I sincerely hope.

And I've had my last counselling session. It was quite funny - having had the morning and early part of the afternoon chasing around a half-demolished and utterly unrecognizable hospital for a chronic eye problem, by the time I got to therapy I was a complete gibbering wreck, quite literally. I couldn't stop laughing because I couldn't actually see anything - the eye drops converted everything into the kind of soft focus you get when the cameraman has overdone the vaseline on the lens. And I made approximately no sense at all because fibro-mouth kicked in - that's where your mouth flaps open and utters vague, incongruous, and incomprehensible non-sequitors, while your brain, equally flappy, dances the congo in and out your ears. Hysterically funny when (a) you know what's happening and that you haven't actually got Alzheimers and (b) you're doing it at someone who's never experienced it before. I think I'm rather thankful that I couldn't see his face, poor lamb.

I can laugh about my fear of Alzheimers now. I don't need to write about what a dreadful awful thing it is, and how it felt to suspect that I had it. To say that I couldn't remember what a "cat" was when someone referred to one in a phone conversation. To think that I was slowly losing my mind because I couldn't remember so much, even forgetting what word is actually in my mouth when I'm trying to talk. Thankfully I have such a good and wonderful family and set of friends who take the pee out of me mercilessly, so I know I'm ok. Heaven help me when they start being nice to me :-DDD. The rheumatology consult asked me why I was crying when he finally gave me a diagnosis of fibromyalgia. "I tell people they are dying of cancer" he said "and they don't cry." My answer to him is, I hope it never happens to you because you have forgotten, if you ever knew, what it is like to be a human being.

Oooo that got all serious there. Where was I? Ah yes. Today Great White Chief, on spying me trying to trap myself in the washing machine with sundry undies, reports that my bottom appears considerably smaller than usual. Good-ho.