Well its been a while….

And frankly I thought I’d got a better handle on things since my last post….. but I was wrong…

I’ve played an awful lot of ‘hidden treasure’ puzzles on my phone in that time. In hindsight, it’s been distraction therapy. Head down, absorbed in something other than my own feelings. The world battering along around me and me looking up occasionally to give the impression I’m present, but everyone knowing I’m really not.

The phone game thing has been interesting. It started because I began to really worry that I was losing my mental acuity. I had had a fall while hubby and I were out walking the dog. I took quite a knock on some very hard bedrock and suffered concussion. It was quite an adventure. Ambulance, special rescue team ( I was only 50 or so yards from the footpath but apparently they had to call them to get me to the ambulance . That 50 yards was apparently so challenging that I felt like they were trying to recover a tranquillised bull elephant.Cheers for that! It took so long to arrange, and I felt so ill and I got so cold that I decided I couldn’t wait and insisted I walk myself to the ambulance with a bit of upright support. Job done.)

When we got to the hospital they made a few of the usual checks, and then left me, head spinning around like Kylie Minogue on acid. And then the sickness started, all over the A&E floor. Several times. That got everyone’s attention. A quick whisk down to the scanner. A very bored radiologist ambivalently processed me and then all of a sudden showed some amazing concern and compassion, telling me how brave I was being. I was rattled. Turns out he thought he saw a brain bleed. He thought I was soon to be whisked off to theatre for brain surgery and possible death. In fact what he saw was calcification of the brain.

CALCIFICATION OF THE BRAIN. Fucking hell!

‘Nothing to worry about’, they said.

‘But what IS it?’, I said.

‘We don’t really know ‘, they said.

FFS.

‘You’ll have to hang around here for 6 hours just to make sure that your condition doesn’t change but we should be able to discharge you tonight.’

6 hours is a long time…

I started to google brain calcification. I really wish I hadn’t. Google shared stories of rare genetic disorders and irreversible damage causing loss of memory and brain function.

Fucking hell!!!!

Anyhow….. After 12 months of some quite detailed investigations, thanks to the attentiveness of a very lovely locum at our drs surgery, the conclusion was that my brain function was amazing ( I thank you) and I was too embarrassed to drain the resources of the NHS any longer trying to answer what calcification was, why I had it and what I could do to stop it developing further. Apparently these answers weren’t necessary as I had my fair share of smarts.

But it still worried me … a lot. So I embarked on a set of activities using the ubiquitous iPhone, that would maintain my brain health and keep me in tip top condition. I decided to ignore the fact that the copious amounts of Pinot I was consuming were probably doing way more damage to my brain than my daily bouts of Wordscape and Lumosity were compensating for.

So ever since then I’ve grown an attachment, bordering on obsession, to my daily iPhone game session. It’s safe in that little gaming bubble. No worrying about the future, no sorting out other peoples problems, no organising everyones lives, no finding that pair of pants; socks; shorts; rugby kit; parental consent form for school. No wonder todays kids like it so much too.

The truth is, I find my life very stressful.

In hindsight I've always felt the stress but, like my iPhone gaming obsession, have found ways of burying it, pretending it wasn’t there and that I was a ‘coper’ , a resilient person. That lovely swan I mentioned in my first post.

But it turns out I’m not a swan. Nowhere near as elegant sadly. I’m a massive ostrich. Burying my head deeper and deeper into the sand. Can’t see, can’t hear …..oops… can’t breath…..

I no longer have any resilience to stressful situations. I literally feel like my heart is stuck in my throat the moment I’m needed to engage in any form of personal challenge. And we have a lot of those around here. I don’t really know whether this is a result of the menopause and a hormonal imbalance or a form of PTSD to be honest. Most days I feel like I’m staggering through a war zone. or its aftermath.

Oops - steady..... I’m in danger of acknowledging my feelings. Er.... Better find my phone. Um....Oh - and another glass of pinot would be nice…

What was I saying? Oh, nothing important...... 45 secs to find 8 objects...easy ...!

Cheers everyone!

#distraction #menopause #brain