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.

So I’ve been ill. Turns out my fatigue at the weekend wasn’t just the dark mornings messing with my sleep patterns. Going on the doctors views I’ve been hit with a virus as well as my migraines playing up and because of my heart problems I’ve had to give several vails of blood so they can run a full battery of tests just in case theres anything that might act up later on.

Add to this my doc has changed my migraine medication. Part of the symptoms of my normal run of the mill migraine is that I get nausous and lose my appetite and the pills I’ve been on doing well with getting rid of the pain but they’ve been making my stomach problems worse. I’m now on Maxalt which is a gel form pill that melts in your mouth and actually works better if your stomachs empty. As with all these kinds of medication you get the drowsy warning and usually they do make me sleepy. I took one of the new pills this morning and it felt like the world was closing in. It got rid of the migraine almost straight away and everything else seems normal but 30  minutes after taking the pill I started getting tunnel vision. I also started to lose coordination. I’m not the least clumsy person normally but this morning i’ve been misjuging distances left right and centre.

Im sore and tired and I’m going to sleep.

Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

The past couple of days have been weird. On the way home from work on tuesday I had real trouble keeping my eyes open. I thought I was shattered and my eyes were just giving up on me. I was tired though but when I got home I seemed fine.

Yesterday had me stressed to the high heavens with work but by the time I went home I was feeling the same except I’d completely lost my appetite at work so had no lunch and was very slightly disorientated. You know the way you get when you just a little to drunk and you move your head and it takes a second for your brain to catch up? Thats how I’ve been. Add into that a blinding headache, sore jaws and kidneys, an inability to either keep warm or stay cool and I’m generally not a happy chappy.

It’s always the same. I get a migraine and its either someone trying to put an icepick through one of my eyes for 10 minutes or its 3 days of feeling like I’m drunk and really hungover at the same time. It’s only been today that I’ve actually read up on migraines and it seems almost all of my symptoms from my mysterious stomach bug I keep getting can be attributed to my migraines. About the only one I can think of thats not quite in line is the length of time my stomach plays up for during my bouts of illness.

This wouldn’t actually be all that bad except becuase of my sick record this year I’m having to work through most of the times I’d normally call in sick. Today for example I’d usually take 2 co-codamol and let that knock me for six so that I’m not bothered by the pain or discomfort. As is I’m having to take one pill and work through it all whilst my head swims and home I don;t conk out at my desk fast asleep. I have to say though I’ve done not to bad today as anytime I’ve felt as though I was about to drop off I went for a walk and the cold in the central stairwells woke me right back up again.

So yeah, I’ve got a docs appointment tomorrow to see if they can work out whats going on. I’m trying really hard not to read symptoms and automatically assume thats what I have. I did that once with diabetes and it turned out I just drank to much irn bru. The caffiene was keeping me awake giving me sore eyes and keeping me thirsty and the more I drank the more I went to the toilet. Simple answer when you think about it.

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday in work was hell but I wont go into it. Suffice it to say I got a migraine by 10am and I’d ran out of painkillers by 10:01am.

Left work at the back of four and headed out with Vonnie and the kids for a drive. We were supposed to head out to a place near Stewarton and Vonnie had got the directions from the AA routefinder. We hit Stewarton and one of the next instructiosn was “Entering Kilmarnock” so when sitting at a junction that had no street names or road signs worth anything we followed the sign for Kilmarnock. We ended up in the arse end of nowhere. And the worst of it is that were we had stopped at that junction was literally a 5 minutes drive from where we were going.

I then proceeeded to get us lost as I wanted to come back over the moors road from the Fenwick Hotel but coul we find the bloody thing from the M77. Eventually we did find it though and made it back to EK in time to pick up some nappies for Nairn and to head down to Cambuslang to go for dinner at Fratelli’s. As always the food is amazing and the service was great. It seems Erica is following in Nairns footsteps and can make friends with almost anyone! It was a late night getting back home but it was worth it

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

Today my brain has been frazzled. I’m inundated with with work just now that its tedious and time consuming and to be honest it gives me a migraine before I even start to think about it never mind sit down and do it. So in order to help alleviate the pain involved I’m been trying to excercise my brain a little. Every time I take a break away from my computer creen I’ve been trying to get my head around some photography basics that have eluded me.

I think I’ve got my head around exposure and shutter speed as well as understanding iso ratings. What I havent quite got my head around is focal lengths and crop factors. I won’t go into the shpeal I posted up on AltNation but suffice it to say I’m a bit miffed that my camera can’t realise that I want to know what the apparent focal length is in my exif data rather than the actual focal length. Basically my 70-300mm lens when used with my camera with a 1.6 crop factor sensor actually works out as a 112-480mm lens but it puts the focal length into the exif as if it was still a 70-300mm lens. I’m even more miffed that my EF-S lens which is made specifically for a certain section of Canon digital lenses and can’t be used with any other camera still has this problem ie my 18-55mm EF-S lens works out as a 28-88mm lens but it doesnt say that anywhere on the damn thing. I understand that technically its still correct as it is the focal length of the actual lens but it means feck all to me when I try and compare it with other photographs that have been taken on a full frame camera. I can work it out if need be but to do that I need to know what kind of sensor the camera has in the first place and not everyone gives you this information in thier photoblogs.

And don’t get me started on the specifics of depth of field!

I’d also decided to do a ‘day in the life of’ style post to my photoblog today but I’ve been that busy at work that a photo of my washing being hung out this rmorning, my bus ride to work and a picture of my works front door don’t quite give me enough of a choice from the day so far to make a photo from photos type thing. Buggeration I say.

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Originally published at The Apochrypha. Please leave any comments there.

I think I’m going to die. I know I’m not really but I’ve got this nagging feeling that after lunch today it may just happen.

Combine the fear of frozen paella with almost no sleep and being jacked up on caffiene from cheap energy drinks and you’ve got me right now. My eyes hurt and I’ve got a migraine coming, im dizzy and I don’t know if my stomach is tightening up because of all the above, because I’m nervous or because I ate an incorrectly reheated mussel.

I suppose thats what I get for buying the

Those were my words to my boss on tuesday morning. I’d been up all night unable to sleep and the previous two days my eyes had been yellow and bloodshot so I thought a visit to the doctors was called for. Turns out I have a suspected kidney infection and because thats messing mwith my eyes they are really sensative and giving me migraines if I spend to long at the PC or in front of the TV. I cant even sit comfortably or without being in pain thanks to my kidneys either. I think the only time im comfortable is when im lying on my back or standing up and when im standing its only for the first few minutes until the pain kicks back in. Anyway I’m doped up on painkillers which has dulled it enough to deal with but my god its annoying. I cant sit at work and do anything and I cant relax at home either. In fact about the only thing I can do is lie down and read.

Add in to this Vonnies pelvis is really giving her problemsand Finn banging his head almost daily and the house is like doctors waiting room.

For the record its taken me almost a week to write up the previous entry and last night and this morning to do this one thanks to the sore back and fucked eyes

What is it with this weather? Guarenteed the moment the sun comes out and the air gets hot i get a migraine. Well not so much a migraine as a cluster headache. You’ve probably heard me moan about them before because they can be a complete bastard. They are worse than migraines but thankfully they dont last anywhere near as long. The only problem is in this weather I can get 3-4 of them in a day where as I’d usually only maybe get 1 every 2 months normally.

I keep getting asked how a cluster headache feels and I never seem to work it out. Imagine if you can stubbing your toe hard on a doorframe whilst wearing only sock and doing it repeatedly for about an hour. Now if you were to condense that into maybe 5 minutes and condense the pain at the same time you might start to come close. Add into that the feeling that one of your eyeballs is about to explode due to it expanding inside your skull and someones trying to pop it with a sharp knife at the back of the eye. The only way I can deal with them is to walk up and down the office or the hall at home. The only problem with this just now is whenever I’ve been getting them I’ve been that busy that I cant step away from my desk for teh few minutes it would take to get over it.

I never started getting them until I hit about 19 years of age and I only ever really got them when I was on holiday so I alwasy just put it down to a really bad hangover, bright sunshine and to much ice cold Sprite drank too quickly to cure the hangover. Now I know different but it doesnt make it any easier to handle

Phoned in sick to work today. Have a migraine thats been coming and going for the last few days…think its the weather thats causing it
No decent sleep for me for the last few nights anyway so hopefully I’ll be able to get some today.

Since Vonnie got her car from her Nana we’ve been forking out a shedload to pay for it and run it. We’ve..or should I say Vonnie has…been looking for a decent car for a wee while now to get the payments down. This last week Vonnie’s been working in Arnold Clark along the road from her flat and seen a Picasso that seems to be going for a song. The insides haven’t really been looked after that well but there doesn’t seem to be that much wrong with it and outside it looks great. With it being the last day of the month and the fact she’s working there we got a good deal on it and all in we’re paying a lot less each month for a bigger car that we actually want

Hopefully everything will go through OK and we should get it at the weekend or early next week.

I spent yesterday getting angry about the slightest things and I don’t know why. I ended up with a migraine at one point during the day but thankfully it disappeared by the time I left work.

Vonnie was heading out to Renfrew after work and as I have no key to hers anymore I organised to go to the pub to draw up some of the characters for the roleplay we’re going to run soon. The battery on my phone was almost dead so after I got to the flat in EK I charged it for the length of time it took me to find the WOD books…about 10 minutes. This meant I had to have my phone turned off for most of the night.

Couldnt be arsed sitting about the flat so I went to the chippie and got some food and headed down to the pub to read some of my book and get a head start on the characters. Paid for my first pint and the woman tried to shortchange me…wasn’t happy. Eight oclock came and went and I started to worry but Mark and Willie are usually fashionably late anyway so I switched on my phone to check the time..20:20. Then a text from mark arrived saying that he couldnt make it. I asked him to let Wilbur know it was cancelled and I’d head for the bus. I drained the pint in front of me and headed out to teh car park only to find Wilbur had already arrived. We sat and talked for a bit about tattoos, vikings and the flat before getting stuck into his character. I really like the idea he’s got and I hope it works out in game.

Got a lift down to my work from Willie where Vonnie was going to pick me up. I’d just sat down and started to finish off my book when she showed up so there was no waiting about. Headed home and slept like a log.

I still feel like a disagreeable bar today mind you.