I’ve struggled to write these past few weeks. I never have the time and when I do have the time I don’t have the energy or brain capacity to string a sentence together never mind a full post.

My foot is getting better. I managed to walk for 90 minutes around Calderglen Country Park yesterday without the support on it. My foot was strapped up as best as my hiking boots could manage though and I’m paying for it today. I managed it though without any real discomfort. I’m looking good for my date with a mountain at the end of March.

Calderglen Country Park

Vonnie had it confirmed last night that her contract will not be getting extended so come the end of March we will both be ‘out of work’. By out of work I obviously mean working for ourselves as we should hopefully take over the shop we’re leasing a few weeks beforehand.

Talking of the shop things are progressing. It’s going slowly as every time we think we’ve managed to get over the last hurdle another three or four appear. The latest one involves bank accounts and proof of ID. Basically a lot of the things we need to get sorted NOW require proof of the business address which we can’t do until the lease is signed and in some cases until we get our first utility bill in. I think we’re going to have to get inventive to get past this one.

I breathed new life into my photoblog a few weeks ago but I’m not entirely sure folk know it exists. Trying to work out some way to display the updates on here to catch a few more readers. And yes I did actually take that photo up there!

The short version:-

I’ve sort of broke my foot.

sergiok @ Flickr

The long version:-

On friday night I stood on one of the kids wooden building blocks. I didn’t think much of it at the time as I basically went straight to bed afterwards but when I woke up the next morning it was a wee bit nippy. As the day wore on it gradually got sorer and sorer and about the only time I wasn’t in pain was when I was lying/sitting down or when I was standing still. Any movement in the food just caused me to wince in pain and hobble about. I thought it was a sprain or bruised tendon or something so I wasn’t that worried by it.

By the time Saturday night came along I managed to hobble from the carpark right outside Tesco at Silverburn to Wagamama but I could feel something grinding inside my foot. It wasn’t sore as such but it is the strangest feeling. Imagine two slightly deflated balloons or two blocks of polystyrene rubbing together. That’s the feeling inside my foot. It’s weird. I basically decided that unless it was greatly improved on Sunday morning I was going to head to the hospital to get it checked out. I managed to get Vonnie’s anniversary present before I couldn’t walk anymore which was a bonus but I must have spent about three and a half hours in A&E getting my foot seen to. I felt a bit of a fraud as the boy in front of me came in with a broken ankle and the girl behind me with a broken leg. The fact I could hobble from the exam room to the X-Ray room had me convinced there was nothing wrong. Vonnie turned up not long after I’d been X-Rayed and it turns out I’ve got a stress fracture of my fourth metatarsal or something like that. I’ve to go to see an orthopaedic doctor at 8.30am.

Considering I’m watching the Superbowl at the moment and it’s after midnight already I’m going to be in hell when I wake up.

One of the reasons I haven’t been active on any of my blogs these last few weeks is that I’ve been sick. The other reasons are World of Warcraft and a messy house but I won’t go into those here. Basically I only go near Twitter at work as I’m always in front of a PC there and at home I never really get the chance to veg for 8 hours straight at a computer. Almost all my blog writing is done over lunch breaks which is also something I don’t generally get at home.

ortismj12 @ Flickr

I’ve now been ill for three weeks and I’ve a doctors line for another week at least. So what’s been wrong with me? Well the first week I was suffering from migraines. I wasn’t right at the Shaw’s wedding. I couldn’t quite place it but by the Monday morning I was suffering and that’s when I reached for the migraine medication. Before I took it though I reread the instructions and apparently your not supposed to take any triptans if you’ve had heart problems in the past which made me remember that any time I take the better of the two tablets I get chest tightenings and pains. The other kind of pill doesn’t have that problem but it doesn’t work anywhere near as well on the pain. A quick trip to the doctor later and he confirmed that I shouldn’t be taking them and should make do with paracetamol and ibuprofen until I get checked out and go for a treadmill test. The big problem with that is with my liver problems i can’t take paracetamol and ibuprofen doesn’t even begin to help with migraines.

Anyway… The migraine left after the fifth day and everything was fine. That is everything was fine until I woke up the next day and had the worst stomach upset I’ve had in years. Ever since then I’ve been on a toast and water/flat coke diet. That’s three weeks now. Every so often I try a proper meal to see if I’m any better and it all comes flooding back. For the first week I suffered really bad stomach cramps but I was given an anti-spasmodic which has meant I actually get to sleep at night now. My stomach now feels as though it’s constantly on edge though. I can’t relax and usually can’t get to sleep until I physically can’t stay awake anymore. It’s fun and games in our house. I also have an almost constant fatigue. I have no energy and really struggle to get any get up and go during the day.

To top it all off I have an appointment with the Liver doc on Wednesday to get the results back from his tests from three months ago. His initial diagnosis was a probable layer of fat that had built up around my liver which was throwing off all the blood test results which could be fixed with a diet but I’ve had another doctor suggest it might be Gilbert’s Syndrome which actually covers more of the ’symptoms’ I have so we’ll need to see what happens.

I’m getting really bored with this now. Aside from my problems at work and the upcoming voluntary redundancy scheme that has just been put in place I must be nearing the 6 months full pay limit for sick leave. They should tell me when I get close to the limit but there has been problems in the past with it not happing to some people and overpayments occurring and I’ll be damned if I make things easy for them if that was to ever happen seeing as everything was supposed to be fixed so it didn’t happen again.

It’s way past my bedtime though so I’ll sign off and hope that I’m tired enough to sleep when I hit the pillow.

My doctor has signed me off as well enough to return to work on the basis that its a phased return. My work seem really supportive of the phased return idea so we’ll see how things go.

I was signed off as fit so that I can start work on Monday but as my boss isnt back in the office until Monday I’ve been given an extra day off to allow them to work out a return to plan for me.

I’m still suffering a little but its rare that I don’t manage to stop it before it gets to bad. I’m feeling 500% better these days and I’ve got my echocardiogram scheduled for Thursday so hopefully that will return a healthy verdict and that theres no long term damage.

I don’t have any today. My mind keeps flitting between things and bright lights are distracting me all to easily. I could be sitting in the middle of something important and I’ll get up to get a drink of water and an hour later I’ll remember what it was I was doing and have to go back and try and find where I left off.

Not so good when you’ve got wet paint around the house :S

The date for my echo came through as a month earlier than expected and I’ve got a meeting at work tomorrow to dicuss my phased return which will probably start on Monday. This is going to be weird.

So yeah, my heart. I’m feeling better every day and my stamina is fast coming back. In fact I feel great. That is until I stretch myself and then I hit a wall. The chest pains come back and I get anxious and have trouble breathing normally. My problem is as long as I’m careful and make sure I’ve got the time to rest I can walk all round Glasgow with almost no problems and thats when my confidance takes a great leap forward. Then something like this morning happens.

I walked to the bus stop to get to the doctors this morning and the buses were running late. Thats fine as theres that many that go past the house it’s never usually a problem. Then I check my watch and my appointments in 10 minutes and I’m still only a few hundred yards from the house. The bus turns up, I get on, it drops me off at the bus station with a couple of seconds to spare. It’s at this point tht I forget I’m still ill so I start off at a brisk walk. For those that don’t know my home town the doctors is about 300 yards form the bus stop past the fire and police stations. I made it to the fire station and my chest decided it was time to start playing up. I started hyperventilating and the muscles in my chest felt like they were made of stone and as usually happens when this starts I started to get really anxious as well. I’m now feeling like shit again and that was five hours ago!

I had my appointment with my normal* doctor who seemed a little perplexed that I hadn’t had an echo done before now if not one at the hospital and sent of the request for one as the previous doctor I’d seen had suggested. This is where it got a little weird. My doctor was willing to sign me off for the entire two months it will take until I get the echo performed. Normally I might have jumped at this chance but for two reasons. The first one is, as I’ve previously mentioned, I’m going a little nuts here at home by myself for half the week and the rather more important one I only get six months sick leave on full pay. I think I’m getting very close to that at the moment and two more months would take me right up to the limit if not over it. I’ve got my occupational health interview again on wednesday after it had been pushed back a week. I’ve to talk with them about a phased return to work and if they come up with something that my docs happy about then I’ll get to go back to work sooner rather than later. Considering I was preparing myself to go back on Monday it’s a bit of a knock.

Maybe I should slip a knob gag in to these posts to make them a little lighter to read?

*Due to waiting times to get seen by a doctor I’ve had to take the first GP available and thankfully, until recently, it’s been the same doctor every time. Unfortunately it wasn’t my normal doctor.

So yeah…my health.

For the last month I’ve been battling a cold/chesty cough/chest infection and at the beginning of last week I finished my course of antibiotics and most of it cleared up leaving me with an occasional dry cough that felt more like I’d cut my throat and the healing was itchy and causing the cough rather than the remnants of the infection.I felt that good that on Monday night we went for a cycle to my parents and on Tuesday I cycled to and from work. At no point did I feel I’d over done it and actually felt really good about it all.

Then I lay down to go to bed on Tuesday night. It hurt to lay down. It hurt to sit up. When I wasn’t lying down it felt like someone was trying to crush my throat and when I was on my back it was if someone was sitting on my chest. It didn’t hurt that much to be honest it was more the tightness that worried me. What did hurt though was when I breathed in and out. It was fine until a certain point then it became unbearable. Vonnie said I was being a drama queen and I sort of believed her but at teh back of my mind was the thought that if it didn’t get any better by 4am I’d go to A&E there and then. I finally managed to get some sleep after finding some painkillers but if I moved from the one position I found that was comfy then I’d wake up in pain again.

I’d told Vonnie I’d go to A&E if it didn’t get any better by lunchtime but when I got off the bus its was just as bad as it was during the night. A quick text to Vonnie to say I was going earlier than expected and instead of walking across the road to work I walked into A&E instead. Sometimes it’s quite handy having the local hospital across the road from your office! I went in expecting them to say I had pulled a muscle and I’d be back in work within the hour. I got to the desk and told then of my chest pains and my difficulty breathing only to see the 4 kids that came in behind me with strained joints get taken first. It took me a few hours to realise they were being taken into the room we normally go into when the kids have to go to A&E and they were waiting for space to come up in the treatment rooms for me. I’d walked in of my own accord so those that came in via the ambulance got in ahead of me. I didn’t thing like that at the time… Vonnie also found out that they refer to the room I was eventually taken into as Resus which certainly didn’t worry her when she asked where I was…

I was taken in, prodded, questioned and hooked up to a monitor. An IV thingie was stuck in the back of my hand so I could get morphine injected and I was given O2 as well as a couple of ECG’s. Just as the morphine kicked in my mum turned up and before I was whisked away for a chest X-ray I was told by a nurse that Vonnie had called. At this point I’d been told it was probably pericarditis and that I might need to stay over night depending on what the X-ray showed. What Vonnie was told however was that my ECG showed signs of a mild heart attack and that I was definitely staying overnight. Nice of them to a)give incorrect info to loved ones and b)to give that sort of info out over the phone in the first place. Anyway by now the morphine felt very good and I’d had my xray and didn’t even question how my brother had got to the hospital never mind how he’d managed to get from Hamilton in about 3 minutes flat. Vonnie turned up to find me with tubes and wires and all sorts stuck to me and despite my smiles looked really worried. She was much relieved to find out that despite the place being called Resus I wasn’t in need of any and that I hadn’t actually had a heart attack.

After several hours of trying to find me a bed, the hospital had about 2 spare at this point, I was moved up to the ward. It just so happened the 2 spare where in the same room and they the other was soon filled up. I shared that room with a guy that just sat stairing at the wall all day or sleeping and a guy that had had a stroke and spent the day pissing into bottles or shitting in a bag. Not long after I got there the other spare bed was filled by a wee guy with a huge O2 mask on that I was convinced wasn’t going to see it through the night. I’d been hyperventilating when I came in thanks to the pain when I took deep breaths but this guy was something else. He was up at 50-60 breaths per minute, his BP topped out at 240/168 and they could only find one place they could both draw blood from and put an IV into as his arms and legs were that swollen. He was really struggling and his alarms were going off all night. They also had a couple of floor fans on him trying to keep his temp down. So between my pain/discomfort I also had the fans, the alarms, the guys breathing and the stroke guys toilet habits keeping me awake almost all night.

One thing I’ll say though is they like to keep you fed. From the moment I got ont he ward until I left just before noon I think they must have gave me four meals! And thats not including tea and biscuits.

So anyway here I am now trying to find things that I can do that won’t wind up Vonnie or kill me. I’ll likely be off work for at least a week and depending on how I do at my GP’s on tuesday I may be off for another week as well. Just going to the shops knackers me out thanks to my breathing!