Month: September 2010

Broken

Not enough sleep. Out of bed, showered, dressed, collapsed.

Nothing new here then.

Sitting here at my desk, feeling the weight of crushing fatigue literally forcing me down on to my desk. My brain in a weird state where I can’t think properly, can’t complete half of my thoughts, can’t finish spoken sentences and yet I can type my thoughts here at only a slightly reduced pace. I am not coherent enough for proper work, yet can still sit here fiddling with WordPress. Am I achieving something? Who knows. Perhaps I should be compared to a drunken programmer on a Friday night, typing rubbish yet thinking it perfect.

I should go back to bed but in this state I won’t sleep, merely toss and turn.

So I sit here at my computer, too zoned out to engage with the world. No concentration. Too broken to work, too broken to sleep.

M.E. and CFS

Fucking up my world since 2000.

All my pain is good

Today I was grossly offended by a hymn that we sang at church. The hymn in question is titled “Happy are they, they that love God” and was written by Charles Coffin in 1736. The line that offended me was “Then shall they know, they that love him, how all their pain is good.” I was singing this song along with the rest of the congregation, but as we started to sing that line I stopped. I couldn’t sing it. All my pain is good? How could anyone write that?

I should explain at this point, that I suffer from M.E. and from chronic migraines. As such I have near constant pain that takes a great deal of effort to control so that I can live my life. I have no pretensions here; many many people suffer far more pain than I do and may be completely crippled by it. My pain is minor compared to those people, but is still greater than that of normal healthy people.

This bold statement that all my pain is good made me angry. More than that though, it led me to some serious thinking. How is pain good? Can any possible good resulting from pain cancel out the bad, to the point that I can say it was all good?

Continue reading “All my pain is good”

There’s a hole in my ****

Readers of a sensitive disposition should not read this!

A friend of mine had a hernia recently. In the spirit of having holes in things, and so as not to be left out, an old anal fissure of mine decided to reopen. (An anal fissure is a hole in the side of the anus.) One fissure wasn’t good enough though. No, this time I had to have two, one front and one back. That wasn’t good enough either, so one of the fissures got infected and formed a perianal abscess. The abscess formed a large swelling which made it painful to sit or walk. It was under control using antibiotics at first, and in fact went down so much that I felt ok to go to Greenbelt festival.

Greenbelt was lots of fun but while I was there I started to feel more and more pain, until Sunday night where I had an immensely painful time walking back to my tent. The abscess had returned with a vengeance and was twice the size that it had been. By early Monday morning I was in so much pain that I was screaming out loud and scaring the rest of the campers.

Continue reading “There’s a hole in my ****”