Sunday. Bloody #^%+?! Sunday.

I'm a bad Canadian.  "Why?" you ask? Because I cannot bring myself to give one thousandth of a fuck about this Canada vs. Sweden game.  And it's hockey, so it's pretty much akin to treason to not care. Social media this Sunday morning has become a vast wasteland of play-by-play updates.

Oh, well.

I am grouchy.  My body has decided to play an elaborate joke on me, which culminated in a trip to the emergency room yesterday with a laundry list of symptoms dating back to last Tuesday.

I'll give you a brief timeline:

Tuesday: headache

Wednesday: headache, brief dizzy spells, coated tongue

Thursday: body aches, fever, chills, coated tongue

Friday: fever, chills, body aches, rash covering neck, shoulders, chest.

Saturday: ridiculously bad indigestion (7 on pain scale, enough to inducing sobbing) and severe, sudden onset full-body muscle pain, more rash covering most of my arms, trunk etc.

So the Well-Travelled One and I make the trip to Emerg, because why wouldn't I want to spend a Saturday afternoon at the local hospital? Most of the ER doctors are tolerable, however the one I got insisted on cutting me off and talking over me, as I listed off the symptoms above, and noted that I am a recovering cancer patient lacking a colon and that I had just (on Monday) gotten off a 21 day run of corticosteroid based anti-inflammatory enemas.

Yeah, you read that right.  21 days of enemas. That's a fun tale for another day.  Or perhaps a medically-themed Christmas carol.

"Oh, yeah.  We've been seeing a lot of this," the doctor tells me.

"What? You've been seeing a lot of people with fever, chills, headaches, rashes, stomache pains, full body aches and coated tongues?"

"Yeah."

"At the same time?"

Jesus.  So, Dr. Interrupto tells me it is viral and to treat the symptoms until the virus runs its course.  Amazing. I'm not sure I'm convinced.  My love who, sometimes to his own detriment, lives to research the shit out of stuff, thinks some of it could be a withdrawal from the anti-inflammatories.  The rash, which inexplicably comes and goes, feels like an allergic reaction. It's not out of the realm of possibility that I could be suffering an allergic reaction, a withdrawal, and some sort of virus at the same time because let's face it, this is ME we're talking about.

All of the symptoms come and go.  Yesterday, the body aches showed up whenever the indigestion subsided.  Then, when the indigestion came back, the body aches would go.  Then, when both of them subsided, that's when the rash came back with a vengeance.  

And I tell you, I am the worst at not scratching.  This is what I managed to do to my tender inner-upper arm flesh yesterday:

I know, that's pretty hot, right?  Sexxaaaaay.

So, today I am sitting at mildly achy, a little itchy and crazy-lethargic.  That could be Sunday talking, however.  I'm hoping whatever this is runs its course soon, and that no one else catches it, as I would not wish this on my worst enemy.

Anxiety and other monsters under my bed

It's been a while.  

I've fallen into that blogging trap of going weeks without posting and as a result, all my posts begin with the requisite apologies for not posting in forever.

And so it goes.

I've been struggling.

This winter has been a tough one and I have found myself in an almost constant state of anxiety dating back to the cancer and the floods, a state of waiting for the other shoe to drop, a sense of looming disaster at every turn.  

When I was younger, I was very anxious.  I worried about change, about risk and what if? It's one of the things I am sure helped contribute to the destruction of my marriage.  Incidentally, that destruction helped quell those thoughts for a long time.  After the initial separation, I felt as though if I could get through that, anything else was a piece of cake.

I learned to roll with the punches.  That things were never as bad as they seemed, they could always be worse.  I'm trying to get that back, because anxiety is a huge asshole that robs you of your ability to enjoy your peace as you are always looking around the corner for the next sign of impending doom.  It leaves you with pain from walking with your shoulders at your ears.  Everything is a fight and everyday decisions become fraught.  Everything that goes wrong becomes a sighing, eye-rolling case of "What the hell else?"

Anxiety has been eating at me, these long winter months, and it's affected my relationship, my children, my work.  I've been neglecting friends and hobbies (hi, blog) because being on guard, it's so fucking exhausting that at the end of the day it's easier to zone out and watch episodes of M.A.S.H or surf the Internet than actually try and socialize, which ends up being another source of worry... Either worry about co-ordinating efforts or worry about if you're a horrible person if you just bow out, one more time.

I'm fighting, though.  Bit by bit, I'm trying to relax.  Breathing.  

Out with the jive, in with the love.

Slowly, but surely, I feel like I may be able to pull myself out of this darkness and enjoy the light once again.  It's going to take some self-care and taking some time to fix the things I can, but each day I'm feeling a little more hopeful.