Not Doing So Great in Scottish Meanderings

Okay I'm not sure what's going on but I think I may have had a relapse and I thought maybe if I attempted to write things out they might become clearer in my mind.

I've been picking up what seemed to be every bug going around since before Christmas and taking ages to get rid of them and I was beginning to worry that I'd taken on too much doing the course. I certainly felt very stressed when I was doing the assignment we had to get in by the 14th December and was coping with yet another bug in the weeks just before it was due. However I got a good rest over Christmas and New Year so thought I was back on track when I returned to University.

On our first day back we were told there were a few deferments from the assignments but there was a glitch in the IT system so we wouldn't know who had failed until the following Monday. That meant we had to wait a whole 6 days before any of us could find out how we'd done which was grossly unfair. On the Monday morning I discovered I was one of them which quite shocked me - not because I thought I'd done particularly well but purely because I thought my concept had been enough to let me scrape through. I had checked the results on my phone at first and, unbeknown to me, you can't see marks on the phone, so the way the feedback was laid out, I actually thought I'd got nothing at all! Hence the shock!

Anyway as luck would have it on the Wednesday at Uni, one of the girls who was about to start a placement and becoming a bit jittery about it, asked our Supervision Group Tutor for a pseudo counselling session in our supervision group so I offered to be the 'client'. It was only 15 minutes but it turned out to be very cathartic and let me get over the upset part of it and see how much it was tapping into the fear of the illness coming back and - in effect - 'winning'. Once I'd got that out of the way I was able to look at the whole thing a bit more rationally and go back over the feedback properly. I also did that on my pc instead of my phone and discovered I had actually got a mark of 8 and had in fact only marginally failed. Another half mark would have got me through. Although frustrating, at the same time I welcomed the chance to find out where I'd gone wrong and arranged for some one to one feedback from the tutor who marked it. That was useful and I went away clearer about what I had to do in order to resubmit and pass although a tad worried about when it was all going to get done.

And then I got another bug. This one was quite a humdinger and had me in bed the entire weekend but while I was lying there, weak as a kitten, I realised Willow really wasn't well either and hadn't eaten a thing all weekend. He looked absolutely miserable and just lay in his bed hardly moving so I arranged to get him to the vet on Monday morning. I still wasn't well but as luck would have it, Ian & Margaret (oldest brother & his wife) were through visiting their son so Ian came over to take me there. I really should have been in bed and it took all my energy just to stay upright but we got him over and they decided to keep him in to run some tests on him. The vet phoned later and fired a whole heap of info over the phone at me none of which made any sense but the upshot seemed to be that he was terribly anaemic and they weren't sure why.

They wanted to run further tests on him and the word cancer was mentioned at which point I pretty much fell apart. It just seemed to be a re-run of when I had taken Jamie in years ago - he had also been unwell and had gone in for tests - they'd opened him up - found cancer - and told me it would be kinder to put him to sleep while he was under anaesthetic. It had just been a dreadful time and I knew I couldn't go through that again. However the second phone call a couple of hours later was more encouraging - there was no sign of any mass anywhere - but the anaemia was still a mystery.

They kept him in overnight to try and hydrate him and also get some food in him via syringe and on Tuesday he was doing a bit better. Ian stayed an extra night but they kept him in until evening so, as I was feeling a little better myself and had managed to get up, I said just to go home and I picked him up myself later on. He still wasn't eating though and I felt terribly stressed and unable to cope - basically I felt I was watching him die.

Things were no better on Wednesday although he managed a little bit of ham and licked the juice off some tuna chunks and I could feel myself struggling to keep going. I couldn't concentrate on Uni and flew home in my lunch hour to find Nikki at the house - she had said she'd pop in at some point - so that helped to share the worry a bit and we tried some convalescent food the vet had given for him but he wasn't interested in anything. By the end of the day I was literally struggling to physically put one foot in front of the other and had to take an extra tablet just to get me back to where I'd parked the car. I went straight to bed when I got in and only got up to try getting some food inside him, greatly cheered when he finally ate a few tiny bits of ham.

On Thursday morning he looked a bit brighter and tried to eat some of his normal biscuits so I felt he'd turned a corner and at the same time, I felt the massive physical stress beginning to decrease a bit. However I also felt a bit 'spaced out' and panicky but decided to keep going. I thought if I could just get through my 2 counselling clients I could then come home and flake out in bed and stay there for the rest of the night. I had one client at 12.30 and one at 2.30 and in the middle of the 12.30 one, I suddenly felt my heart begin to hammer, felt terribly hot and like I was going to pass out. I was just at the point of thinking I was going to have to say something and get up but shoogled around on the seat instead, had a drink of water, changed positions and I felt it pass.

I got through the rest of the session okay but it threw me a bit. However I thought it was probably my body coming down from the stress it had been under and I just hadn't quite caught up yet. I went off to a nearby café to down a sandwich and a cup of sweet tea in the intervening hour hoping that would do the trick.

It didn't.

I felt increasingly worse and worse and when I went to the loo just before leaving I again thought I was going to pass out so gritted my teeth and walked the 5 minute walk back to the Agency praying I would manage to get there before my client did. I virtually collapsed into a chair in the office when I got in and immediately got a drink of water placed in my hand and got taken to a room which wasn't being used for a couple of hours. My client arrived and was told what had happened so he went off again which made me feel like shit then I spent the rest of the afternoon in the room trying to calm down and get my breathing under control.

I managed to get hold of Nikki who came in and picked me up and her friend, who was coming in to the cinema later that evening, very kindly phoned the Council to explain what had happened so that my car wouldn't get a ticket (although I can pay for 3 hours via my phone so had extended the parking to 5.45) then got her boyfriend to take her to it when they came out of the pictures and she drove it home for me.

I completely crashed when I came home for 2 hours, got up to feed the cats and put them to bed, then fell asleep again until half past 8 the next morning. Spent all day Friday in bed in abject terror because my anxiety was spiking to levels it had been at when I first got this illness and I couldn't get it to go down. It was just awful. Ironically I had an appointment at a Clinic in the afternoon to get support with the fatigue and drug reduction but was in no fit state to get there so had to cancel. However I managed to get to sleep that night but woke up on Saturday feeling even worse.

I was really scared now.

I forced myself up to feed the cats and when I got back to bed, realised the anxiety had decreased a bit and I was feeling a lot calmer. I then realised I was completely and utterly exhausted and slept most of the morning. I normally go out to Nikki's on a Saturday so asked if she could come in with the girls for an hour in the afternoon instead which fitted in fine with her as she had an ASDA click 'n' collect shop between 4 and 6 so they all came in at 3 and I managed to get up okay for that. It was exhausting playing with them but I hadn't seen them properly for a couple of weeks so was desperate for some interaction. They went off around 5 and after tidying up I went up to bed and crashed out again.

Today it was an extraordinary effort to wake up and an even worse one to get up and I've been in bed all day dozing off and on but feeling terrible. I forced myself up at 5 to try and eat something and managed to get a sandwich down but I think that's going to be it for the day for food by the looks of it. I thought I'd try and do an entry here and answer some e-mails but I don't think it's going to be long before I'm back in bed again.

So like I say I'm not sure what's going on. I'm still coughing a bit but it seems disproportionate to the way I feel so I don't think it's just a bug. But if it's not then that throws up all sorts of awful stuff which I don't think I can deal with right now. I suppose all I can do is see what I'm like tomorrow and take it from there.

Willow's still not back to normal but is a lot brighter. He's attempting his usual biscuits so I'm not trying him with anything else at the moment apart from little bits of ham at night but he's not doing much during the day and sticks pretty close to me much of the time. I can't get his antibiotics into him but the vet has said as long as he's eating something and moving about it might be possible for him to recover without having them. He does seem to be going out to do the toilet and can get up and down the stairs and over the fence okay but seems quite anxious if he can't get anywhere near me. I hate shutting him in downstairs at night and am really worried it's too cold for him (do cats feel the cold?) but his bed, litter box, cat flap & food are all down there and if I leave the sitting room door open it means there's the potential for all sorts of wildlife to be brought upstairs as Snarf does his hunting at night. At least with the sitting room door closed, all 'presents' (and hopefully dead ones!) are contained downstairs! I'm trying to leave the heating on as long as I can in the evening but it's always much hotter upstairs so I'm sweating away like nobody's business here. I can't switch off the radiator in the bedroom though because I need the heat in the morning.

I just wish I felt a bit stronger to be able to deal with whatever's coming. I have absolutely no idea what to do about the course. The way I feel right now I don't think I would survive a whole day on Wednesday anyway so that might solve that problem for this week but I have no clue what to do about Thursday. If I thought it was just another bug I'd hang on but I just have a nasty sneaking suspicion it's more than that and that thought terrifies me for its implications.

I really really don't want to go back to that living nightmare again.