blog post
I had a terrible day today. The police screwed up big time and Sophie Williams can’t read English. That was a merry dance.
No wonder some people call the police pigs.
I have cried. I deal with discrimination every day then I get the idiot police.
On top of that I opened a letter where SWAST covers up it’s ‘mistake on 03 03 21.
I’m done. I quit. I’m checking out of here.
About five years ago I was diagnosed with an asthma-like condition. It was treated with Salbutamol. This was not really effective but my problem was not serious at that time.
About three years ago, a friend lent me his pink inhaler Fostair. It was far more efficacious so I asked for Salbutamol to be removed from my prescription.
Soon after this I began needing paramedics to make interventions due to seemingly asthma attacks — when the respiratory system tightens and air cannot get in. These were fairly few but mainly in damp, cold, weather. This year I have needed more interventions than I can count.
All these vapors going through my mouth and throat mean I must drink after using my inhalers and after nebulizing by paramedics.
Now, I use so many inhalers that my sense of taste is almost gone. In May I was diagnosed as A Carbon Dioxide Retainer . This means I do not exhale all the carbon dioxide my body converts from oxygen. It is very dangerous.
I retain not just carbon dioxide but fluids. There is fluid on my heart and other organs. My blood oxygen hovers around 90, but may drop to 83 or be a high as 97. These are percentages. A healthy person’s blood oxygen is 100.
I have started buying sour sweets. The kind that are chewy and jelly like. They make my mouth water and I can taste them. Brushing my teeth with toothpaste does not help, so I use salt, or a flavorful leaf on my toothbrush.
I eat honey by the spoonful. It soothes my throat which is always sore. Honey soothes the skin of my throat as well as my mouth.
I am now Living With Hypoxia as a result of respiratory failure. It means my home needs prompts to remind me to do things and I keep my everyday things in the same place — my glasses, for example.
All this means I can make mistakes without realising. It also means I could go into a coma or die at anytime. I am very vulnerable. I am 5 on the New Scale, and sometimes 6 but I refuse to go hospital.
The police only term “vulnerable”, which is 3 on the New Scale. I find that shocking.
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Published in Coffee Times
I miss my daughter. She is in Oxford with her job. I hope she is as happy as she claims.
I miss watching videos in my bed, laughing with the dog as she roughhoused with him. I miss her news every day. God, I miss just setting eyes on her.
I called out paramedics in the wee hours yesterday. I was suffocating. No position relieved it. They came surprisingly quickly considering how busy they are, but the crew had been at the local hospital when they were dispatched.
They used ipratropium only which they are not meant to do, but it fixed me. I couldn’t believe the difference. I still feel better now. I wonder how long before yesterday ipratropium would have benefited me. And I would not have needed to feel I was suffocating so many times when I got myself into the recovery position to make it stop.
I am dying. There is no doubt. It is a long slow death. I enjoy my life mostly. I miss my daughter. It would be so much easier if she were here to smile at me every day.
I am loving my wanderings around the harbour. Finding the ancient woodland. I find healing.
When I had a consulting room, I often saw a couple or one of a couple saying that sex had gone out the window after, say, fifteen years of being together.
I always found this sad as the best sex is when you really get each other, when you are friends. Not when you are starry eyed first in love. That is when we explore and say we are pleased when maybe we are not.
So you made it as a couple for years but if you are not touching each other as you pass in the kitchen, cuddle as you watch TV, can’t wait to share your day with your partner, then sex becomes infrequent and eventually non existent. Don’t let this happen.
The secret to whether your sex will last is if you cuddle after sex says Emily Nagoski, Sex Educator at Smith College. If you cuddle intimacy is sustained and you will look forward to your next sexual communication.
A healthy sex life long down the road is about the pleasure of each other’s skin touching. It is emotional presence for each other. Being fully present, attentive, communicating.
Hurt feelings and resentments prevent good sex. Deal with minor conflicts quickly. Keep short accounts with each other. Don’t go to bed angry at one another. We can’t last with make up sex.
If you are a serial monogamist or divorcee, examine how you approach sex and intimacy. No one dreams of being a third or fourth wife/husband. It happens, but something is missing.
Beware of casual misogyny; ‘life’s a bitch’, life is like a BWA — a beautiful woman with attitude.
Such sayings have no place in the mouth of a good man.
Women, you need a Good Man.
So much depends on men. How they are raised, who they hang out with, whether they watch porn. No teenager learned anything good from pornography.
Don’t watch it together. It has no place in your sex life.
So the secret to lasting sex lives is skin touching skin. No resentments and no misogyny. Here’s to your good sex life.
Published in Shelter Me part of The Good Men Project
Some evenings ago I lit a candle on my window ledge.This was something new to me. I light candles a lot, but never before by an open window.
The light danced. It flickered and guttered whimsically. It was so peaceful. I turned out my light and my bedroom was filled with wavering shadows, seductive light moving with the air.
I relaxed, I slept, and in the morning I was greeted by the still flowing light. I rose at once and put out the candle so I could be mesmerised once more in the coming night.
Many religions celebrate light as we lose it, but the Christian calendar does not until Christmas. Then we are plunged in darkness but begin to look forward to the second by second increase of light.
Jesus told me he is the Light of the world. I celebrate light in all its forms. The candle at my window is a new ritual for me.
I shall keep it going.
Published by Grab A Slice
In 1972, May Sarton wrote,
It is raining. I look out on the maple, where a few leaves have turned yellow, and listen to Punch, the parrot, talking to himself and to the rain ticking gently against the windows. I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange — that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone…
Three days later in the grip of depression, she wrote,
The value of solitude — one of its values — is, of course, that there is nothing to cushion against attacks from within, just as there is nothing to help balance at times of particular stress or depression. A few moments of desultory conversation … may calm an inner storm. But the storm, painful as it is, might have had some truth in it. So sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.
It could be Albert Camus was right in his iteration that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” but this seems a truth hard to swallow when one is made tongueless by depression.
In a diary entry from October 6, still clawing her way out of the pit of darkness, Sarton considers the only cure for despair she knows:
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
“An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion,” Joni Mitchell once told an interviewer. Alas, the history of the arts is the history of the complex relationship between creativity and mental illness. But while psychologists have found that a low dose of melancholy enhances creativity, its clinical extreme in depression can be creatively debilitating.
Few artists have walked that fine line with more tenacity and self-awareness than the great Russian composer Tchaikovsky (May 7, 1840–November 6, 1893). Frequently throughout his correspondence with family and friends, collected in The Life and Letters of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (public library; public domain) — the source of his enduring ideas on work ethic vs. inspiration, the paradox of client work, and why you should never allow interruptions in your creative process — Tchaikovsky notes his cyclical lapses into depression, undergirded by a dogged dedication to looking for beauty and meaning amid the spiritual wreckage. This intimate tango of sadness and radiance is ultimately what gives his music its timeless edge in penetrating the soul.
Those of us who know despair also know the mountaintops. Our creativity is built on both.
Published in PsychologicallyI
A flat down the length of the Quay always has it’s curtains drawn. So why live there? If you don’t want the view live somewhere with no view. OK, the view there is not great, but why live there and draw the curtains?
They could ask for film which blocks glare to be fitted, or mirror film. So many solutions.
So dumb the tenants.
Light is fading now, nights draw in
But I’ve walked on paths of gold
Sun’s warmth is now failing us
Given to leaves that turn and fall
To adorn the ground we tread
What artist can paint these hues
How is this designed
Sad to feel the summer cool
Afraid to face the Fall
Children’s Poem
The pretty butterfly that catches your eye
began life crawling as a caterpillar
It changed in a chrysalis, a bit like a sack
Nature has tricks and that is no lie
Watch on the ground as well as the air
creatures help make food for you and me
Bees won’t harm you just see them drift
from flower to flower because they are there
Nature is magical, all have their place
Trees are breathing to give us clean air
Tell all your friends that you know this secret
ask them to plant a flower in a pot or someplace
It’s been a tough week. My employee is ill and was unable to come and clean and change my linen.
It’s meant my bin in the kitchen was not emptied. Pots in my garden not put in place. My clothes not laundered.
I have socialised with friends, explored Holes Bay, and walked with a friend and her Ridgeback. He is gorgeous.
Tonight I made dinner for a friend who is staying the night. It feels odd to be a hostess again. He will help me make a butterfly 🦋 garden in the raised bed behind my garden wall. All it has are weeds.
My inhalers no longer work. It is a demarcation line.
On Monday I was interviewed about my resignation from SWAST. What a toxic woman. I cried. Who makes me cry? Only my daughter is close enough to cause me to have tears.
I am so tired. Very tired.
We ask why? of God
But I think he asks why of us
Why have we destroyed forests
Put poison on the ground
Made war and slaughtered many
Why do we traffic people
Make slavery of them
And continue to sell armory
Why have we corrupted ourselves
We need to ask ourselves why?
Published in The Lark
I just planted a lime mint. It’s tiny but has roots. It has a good-sized pot to grow and fill. I never heard of lime mint before. Just mint.
I’m in the process of planting wild geranium. I say that, as it is in a pot, but not yet fully filled with soil. It was well-watered.
I do love it when a friend brings a plant. Bonding a deeper friendship over the scent of soil each time. I get renewed through plants and my garden in general. In my garden, it’s peaceful and secluded. With a friend or on my own, I have my own little woodland area and flowers all around. When I hear anger or gossip, which I detest, I go into my garden. Or like yesterday, exposed to cruel words which were none of the tellers business, I went to our huge park. So green, so wooded.
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